As news of Xbox’s latest round of layoffs continues to trickle, it seems that Zenimax Online Studios planned MMORPG has been cancelled.
Internally referred to as Project Blackbird, the project was never formally revealed to the public but has reportedly been in development since 2018 and was going to be Zenimax Online Studios first release since The Elder Scrolls Online.
However, according to Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, the project has been scrapped as part of the layoffs, alongside Rare’s Everwild.
With The Elder Scrolls Online launching in 2014, it has now been over a decade since Zenimax Online Studios has put out anything that was not directly related to it.
It seems Zenimax Online Studios staff have also fallen foul of the layoffs, albeit in a chaotic way. While reporting on the cancellation of Blackbird, Schreier also stated that Zenimax Online Studios staff discovered they had been locked out of their Slack accounts, despite no officially confirmation of termination.
“As one illustration of just how sloppy and chaotic today’s mass Xbox layoff has been, some employees at Zenimax Online Studios are now watching their Slack accounts abruptly get locked out, ” said Schreier. ” No message from HR, no word on whether they still have a job, just an ominous Slack deactivation”