Blizzard’s BlizzCon convention returns this weekend after two years’ absence, and I’ll be covering the news and announcements from today’s opening ceremony live, here in this article. The show begins 6.30pm BST (UK time).
Regional timing can be found on the official BlizzCon website (it’s cleverly transposed depending on the region you’re viewing from), and the expected runtime for the opening ceremony is one hour and 15 minutes.
I’m expecting a full show today. The headline act is presumed to be the much-rumoured StarCraft shooter Blizzard has been working on for a while now – the one led by former FarCry boss Dan Hay. The suggestion is it’ll be a co-op shooter like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, rather than something fundamentally multiplayer and online like Destiny. But who exactly is making it? Nexon’s name has been thrown around a bit, and would it make sense for a foundationally multiplayer company like Blizzard to make something that was only co-op?
There’s also the much-rumoured World of Warcraft “Classic Plus”, which is a Classic version of World of Warcraft that aims to take the original game in a new direction, evolving it with brand new updates. We saw Blizzard do this with Diablo 2 earlier this year, when introducing a new Warlock class to the old game, which is something it intends to be the start of a new evolutional direction for that game. We expect to finally get confirmation – and perhaps a shadow-drop – of a Switch 2 version of Diablo 4, too.
Besides those things, we’re expecting to hear about new expansions for Overwatch and Diablo 4, as both games have adopted a sort of annual expansion timetable now. Diablo 4’s most recent expansion, Lord of Hatred, arrived in April, and Overwatch’s expansion-like Reign of Talon relaunch happened in February. It’s about time to hear what’s next, for Overwatch, certainly.
The backdrop to BlizzCon 2026 is the wide-ranging cuts announced by owner Microsoft earlier this year. Blizzard seems to have been relatively unscathed by this, but it’ll be interesting to hear whether there’s any protest activity in or around the convention as the weekend unfolds, especially in light of the historic union recognition vote a couple of days ago.
Let’s see what Blizzard has got.
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