Blizzard’s developers are running out of games that can be remastered. Therefore, a lot of new content is likely to come.
The big new highlight at BlizzCon 2021 was absent. It is surprising that the main attraction is the remaster of a game that is already 20 years old – Diablo II: Resurrected. However, after the remaster, Blizzard is essentially done with its modernization. Now, new things must come.
Everything that could be remastered has been: Looking back at the last few years at Blizzard, the developer studio has actually re-released all major hits with a remaster.
- StarCraft 1 was modernized along with the expansion Broodwar. The graphics were enhanced, and the resolution significantly improved.
- Warcraft III, the centerpiece of the Warcraft universe, also received a remaster with “Reforged”. Although it was a huge flop and not what fans were promised, it still counts in the remaster series. Nowadays, it’s barely mentioned.
- Diablo II: Resurrected revives Diablo 2 along with the expansion “Lord of Destruction” once again. For many players, Diablo 2 is the progenitor of the “hack ‘n slash” genre and was groundbreaking for all subsequent games of this type.
- With the arcade collection, Blizzard has dusted off its very old games. The Lost Vikings, Rock ‘n Roll Racing, and Blackthorne come from a time when Blizzard wasn’t even called Blizzard yet.
Other games are hardly suitable for a remaster. For Warcraft I and Warcraft II, that decision has already been made. The gameplay has simply aged too poorly; too many changes would need to be made to bring the game up to modern standards. Similar reasons likely apply to Diablo I.
So what is Blizzard going to do now that remasters are running out? The answer is quite simple: new games.
There will be “more games than ever before”
In an interview with Cnet, Blizzard CEO J. Allen Brack and Vice President Allen Adham talked about the previous remasters, Blizzard’s future, and thus new games. The way games are developed and maintained has drastically changed. Adham explained:
In the past, we released a game and might have patched it once or twice before moving on to the next game. Now we are in this new “always online” world with live games… that means that development cycles are longer and the need to support our ongoing, successful games is greater – it takes longer to release “the next thing”.
Finally, Adham added:
But just to be crystal clear, our development pipeline today is richer than ever before. And we have new teams working on new games and new game types.
More is coming – just when? Even though BlizzConline 2021 revealed little new information, most will understand that the developers are currently working behind the scenes on a lot of games. Just in the last earnings call, it was confirmed that currently “multiple mobile titles” for Warcraft are in advanced stages of development. So, we can at least expect an announcement within the next year.
When we will finally see the first fruits of this work is still uncertain. But as long as Blizzard has been talking about its many games in development, it shouldn’t be too long now…
