Blizzard started developing the project, which was only semi-officially announced, long before Bobby Kotick and his team agreed to Microsoft’s takeover bid.

Blizzard has cautiously announced a new game. It will be a brand new fantasy-themed IP with survival-oriented gameplay. The announcement wasn’t strictly for us, though, as the team has many job offers and are now looking for people to help with development. Although it’s early in development, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra has already said he’s spent several hours on it… so it can’t be that early for the unnamed project.

However, it has popped up on PCGamer, which project lead Craig Amai has listed on his LinkedIn. There he wrote that he started working on this game back in July 2017, which means (presumably with breaks) he’s had the concept for four and a half years and spent a lot of time in the pre-production phase of development, so you can underline the “not as early as Blizzard makes it out to be” line of thinking. And on Twitter, many developers working at Blizzard have expressed their excitement. Still, we won’t link to many examples here, just one from Janice Chu, who is responsible for the user interface, and as someone responsible for the UX is now part of the team, she sees no complaints about this aspect of the game.

Camille Sanford, the producer responsible for the concept and art direction for the three-dimensional characters, confirmed on Twitter that it will be a survival game in a new universe, with an interior view, which she believes will be at the top of the genre. She thinks it will be a dream come true. Of course, there could also be external-view gameplay (we’ve seen examples of alternating between the two). Blizzard’s idea could be successful because there has been no real AAA development in the genre (the more successful titles have been either indie or more AA games), and they could fill that gap.

So even within Blizzard, they are pretty optimistic about the future. There is no way Microsoft will sweep the plans off the table: they have the option of giving any of their studios a blank cheque to develop through Microsoft, Office, Azure trio…

Source: WCCFTech