Blizzcon 2018 announcements!

Today was the first day of Blizzcon (gaming convention hosted by Blizzard in California) that is usually the highlight of the year for us Blizzard fans. These conventions include news about upcoming content for current Blizzard games, announcements for new game releases and massive E-sports finals for WoW, Overwatch and Starcraft 2.

Since I spent a few hours watching the stream before SC2 tournament started, I thought it would be nice to share what happened and my thoughts on the topics.

First of all, DESTINY 2 IS FREE until November 18th! That means if you get Battle.net app you should see it claimable in the gift box. Personally I have really wanted to play the game since it looks a lot like Mass Effect. I'm not a huge fan of shooting games so paying 50€ for Destiny felt a bit too much. That being said, it has been downloading for past 5 hours now (90 gigs take quite a while..)

I'm speechless. The time for WoW classic release was finally announced after years of private servers being hosted and shut down left and right. This game has a special place in my heart and it has done so many things right in MMORPG genre that it's something everyone should experience at least once. There is massive amount of discussion going around how it's all nostalgia but having experienced it now twice myself I can say that if there is one thing to look towards in 2018 summer it's WoW Classic. The game will be playable with WoW subscription so everyone who pays the sub gets access to current WoW and the Classic content.

Another super exciting announcement. Warcraft 3 is a game where I spent waaay too many hours just going through all the custom maps people created and witnessed many very impressive creations. Some of those custom maps actually became their own games on later date (looking at you DotA 2). Recently Blizzard created remastered edition of Starcraft 1 that let players who own either the old game or the remaster play together. If they manage to pull the same with WC3 and let us play all the old custom games, this is like the dream come true. Currently WC3 is a ghost town so it's pretty much impossible to find players to play with so seeing the game gain popularity again would be amazing.

With all the other exciting stuff coming out, we just had to have something that disappointed everyone. Diablo is one of the most successful PC game series that initially got me to gaming 20 or so years ago. Diablo 3 has had a massive content drought lately (no real updates for last 3 years) so everyone was waiting for something new from the franchise. Then Blizzard at the end of this presentation came up with the M bomb: Diablo on mobile. I have never seen that disappointed crowd in this kind of conventions, there was no clapping and people could have been heard booing. The trailers for the game are massively down voted in YouTube and the Diablo community is going crazy on social media. Having no news for the whole franchise and coming up with outsourced mobile game for established PC series is just a disgrace.

There were some other smaller announcements like new heroes in Overwatch and Starcraft 2, Hearthstone expansion and teaser for WoW BfA content but since those aren't really major things I won't cover them here. Overall next year looks really really good to me.