Among the games cancelled this week as part of the Microsoft layoffs, Blackbird is one of the most surprising. It was the next MMORPG from ZeniMax Online Studios, creators of The Elder Scrolls Online.
In a new article published on Bloomberg, Jason Schreier reports that Xbox executives were "blown away" by the title during an internal presentation last March. So much so, in fact, that Matt Booty, President of Xbox Game Studios, had to put the controller away to stop playing the game, so that the meeting could continue.
While the MMO still had a few technical issues and had been in development for a very long time (2018), the company was pretty positive about it. Production was also progressing at a satisfactory pace. Employees said they were "stunned" to be impacted by Microsoft’s budget cuts.
