[UPDATE #2 - April 29, 2026] Matt Firor has now talked in greater detail about Project Blackbird, claiming it was a missed opportunity for Xbox and gaming as a whole, not just ZeniMax Online.
[UPDATE #1] The official X account of ZeniMax Online Studios announced that studio founder and current studio head Matt Firor is leaving the company. The new studio head will be Jo Burba, who was previously Live Service Director. Executive Producer Susan Kath and Game Director Rich Lambert will remain at their current roles.
[ORIGINAL STORY] It's pretty much confirmed now that even ZeniMax Online's second MMORPG has been canceled amidst Microsoft's massive layoffs. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier wrote about it on BlueSky, adding that the project had the codename 'Blackbird'.
ZeniMax Online is the developer behind the highly successful MMORPG Elder Scrolls Online. While continuing to update that game (which just received a major update), though, they had also been building a separate team to create a new project. We reported on it in November 2022, when this team had already worked for four and a half years and had swelled to over 200 developers.
The Creative Director was Ben Jones, who once revealed a few very high-level details about the project:
This is a considerable investment and a very large scope project. We're creating a new IP, so a lot of that started with a background for a world, a vision for a high-level world that we were going to create, and to a degree, a story that we wanted to tell. The biggest beats of that existed before my time here. My job was to take those components and to really put flesh on the bone, to create a core team that understood what my bosses were seeking to create.
The first two hires that we had on the team were a Lead Writer and what we call a Loremaster, someone who is responsible for the core tenants of the IP and all of the mythology that goes into the game. We work together along with our core creative team to establish what those core tenants are. We iterated on that. Our main story has changed 10 times in the last four and a half years as we evolve what the product is.
Jones has now posted his first thoughts on LinkedIn, calling Project Blackbird the 'most exciting and ambitious' one he had worked on in his career. He is credited with having previously worked on Day of Defeat, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, several Battlefield 4 expansions, the space survival simulation game Into the Stars, and H1Z1: Just Survive.
Now, Windows Central has added a few tidbits on the developing story from their sources. The game would have been set in a fantasy world, they said, featuring dialogue branches not unlike Star Wars: The Old Republic or ZeniMax Online's own Elder Scrolls Online. The goal was to eventually make it the studio's primary focus as ESO wound down in time, but with its cancellation, the full attention of ZeniMax Online is undoubtedly back on that game.
Windows Central also says that Perfect Dark might be affected as well, although that's not yet confirmed.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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