So, last year's BlizzCon finally happened.
Or perhaps I should say that BlizzcOnline happened, since that was the awkward portmanteau du jour. After a solid year of virtual CES, E3, Game Awards, and Directs (or equivalents) by AMD, NVidia, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, I was almost convinced that events like this were an irrelevant thing of the past, but BlizzcOnline may changed my mind. Changing press events into virtual presentations is a definite improvement, but trying to stage a fan event, but without the fans, felt really, really weird.
Blizzard didn't have all that much to announce, either, which was super not helpful in building hype. They spent some time celebrating their 30-year anniversary, of course, which was fine, but after that, it was just normal content releases for HearthStone and World of WarCraft, a collection of their very oldest games that I'd never played and have no nostalgia about, and relatively modest hints about the two actual sequels (Diablo IV and Overwatch 2) that are in the works.
Not that any of it was bad, exactly, but none of it really needed to be announced at an event of this scale. The over effect was just really, really... meh.
RIP StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm, by the way, players of which got absolutely nothing. Not a surprise, I guess, since both of these games were maintained by Blizzard's Team 1, which was broken up after the debacle of WarCraft: Reforged, but still... ouch.
Press F to pay your respects.
Which left Diablo as the main event of the whole show. And, yes, they did waste time on Diablo: Immortal, which looks pretty good for a mobile version of Diablo III, and which nobody cares about. The Rogue class they're adding to Diablo IV looks... fine, I guess, but a lot will depend on what the rest of the game is like; one class does not a game make, and Diablo III's issues weren't specifically related to the concepts behind the design of the game's classes.
And then, there was Diablo II: Resurrected.