I wish you all a beautiful Wednesday. It is the first Whine Wednesday after BlizzCon, and who would I be if I didn’t take the opportunity to vent a bit about what I didn’t like about the BlizzCon 2016?
All in all, one must say that BlizzCon was a relatively solid event. The cool (albeit predictable) announcement of Sombra, some content for Diablo, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm.
The biggest “losers” were probably the fans of Diablo. Speculation had already begun before BlizzCon about what major announcement would be made. After all, this was not only the 10th BlizzCon, but also the 20th anniversary of Diablo – a double anniversary! However, neither a “Diablo 4” nor a new expansion was announced, only a paid DLC and the implementation of the “classic” Diablo in Diablo 3. Oh, and the Necromancer was also mentioned. But one shouldn’t be too excited about that, as it won’t be available until 2017 – sometime in the second half of the year. And as one knows Blizzard, that basically means “December”.
It was totally incomprehensible to me why the innovations for World of Warcraft were not presented in the opening ceremony. With all the blockbuster announcements later revealed in the “small” panels (Tomb of Sargeras, Argus, class mounts, new artifact skins), this would probably have gone over much better than this Google announcement to develop new AI programs. This is certainly also a very important step and a cool cooperation – but simply not material for the opening ceremony of one of the most popular game developers.
Equally disappointing is that there will be no remake of Warcraft 1 and 2. The games were originally intended to be made available at least in the Battle.net launcher and to make them suitable for current PCs, but it was concluded that the games “just aren’t as much fun by today’s standards as they were back then,” and thus – at least for now – there will be no polished version of the classics.
All in all, these are again complaints about minor details. Or did you have any particularly big disappointments from BlizzCon that will haunt you for years?
Oh, and Metzen’s opening speech is missing. I miss his “Geek is” speeches. Without him, BlizzCon just isn’t the same anymore.
