Blizzcon 2018 thoughts

I didn’t have a virtual ticket (or the serious cash to fly from the UK to California), but I’ve kept an eye on the coverage on blogs and news sites coming out of Anaheim. As Wilhelm notes these days Blizzcon is rather diluted by the number of properties on offer, it’s not the World of Warcraft feast it used to be. The coverage is also further split by games news and e-sports, the latter holds no interest for me at all.

Of the World of Warcraft announcements that were made in the WoW What’s Next panel. The upcoming patches are:

8.1 is Tides of Vengeance coming on December 11th. The next stuff to come is still Alliance vs Horde centric, with the raid on Dazar’alor as the set piece; although if the current raid tier is anything to go by I’ll not even get around to trying on LFR. There’ll be the Dark Shore warfront content as well, which I’ll do once to see it on both sides, but doubt I’ll bother with afterwards.

8.2 is Rise of Azshara and will be a Naga-heavy content drop set in the under-water Nazjatar zones – new zones are definitely more exciting to me. The amount of swimming involved is yet to be confirmed, will this be a Vashj’ir revamp or more like the Nightmare Tide content in Rift where a lot of the zones were actually ‘dry’.

Underwater zones, not so wet though…

The other ‘out of left-field’ surprise for 8.2 will be the Mechagon mega-dungeon themed on cyborg gnomes. That’s kind of weird, though I like the idea of another mega-dungeon (like the revamped Karazhan) as we mostly do 5-person group content in WoW so that’s firmly in our comfort zone content-wise.

I’ve not bothered with the WoW Classic coverage, past reading that it’s due in ‘Summer 2019’, since that could mean even September next year I can safely park that topic for a good few months.

Other big news items are a lot less on my radar. Even Diablo 4 wouldn’t be that interesting to me, so naturally a mobile version of Diablo 3 that I have already played is not for me. I agree with the many voices that this was particularly badly pitched to an audience expecting something aimed at them as paying attendees – bad PR moves all round.

Otherwise the new Overwatch cinematic/hero reveal was interesting, but maybe get back to me when Overwatch is either a) given a full PVE coop campaign mode or b) turned into a proper MMORPG. So much wasted story potential on a instanced shooter…