Diablo 4, Overwatch 2 and more announced at BlizzCon 2019

The long-awaited event is here, and the new announcements have not disappointed with the reveal of pleasant surprises for Blizzard fans including new sequels of Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2, with new content on the way for Hearthstone and World of Warcraft

Blizzard began its annual conference this year with an apology for how it handled the controversial BlitzChung case, with company president J. Allen Brack taking the stage to apologize for his company failing to better communicate with fans and players and promised that the mistakes will not be repeated.

Diablo IV

The conference officially kicked off with a long-awaited announcement for Diablo fans: the unveiling of the next major sequel of the series with Diablo 4, which will be returning to roots again. We are talking here about a Diablo experience that is in line with Diablo 2 and 1 rather than Diablo 3, including more violence, gore and darker themes, which is something we’ve seen with a stunning cinematic video of the game story followed by another trailer to show us the gameplay. The game will be released for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (fortunately no smartphones this time). No release date yet.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands

This was followed by the announcement of the upcoming expansion of the new World of Warcraft expansion called Shadowlands. The MOBA’s eighth expansion story revolves around Sylvanas Windrunner’s obsession with death that brought the destruction of Lich King, releasing the Shadowlands, a shadow copy of the real world.

The new expansion will carry an increase in the level cap for players, adding a number of special abilities, offering more dungeons, Raids and new areas such as Revendreth, Ardenweald, Maldraxxus and Bastion. Although no launch date has been disclosed, we got a trailler that you can see below:

Hearthstone: Decent of Dragons & Battlegrounds

The famous card game got a new expansion called Decent of Dragons, which follows the story presented by the previous expansions of Rise of Shadows and Saviors of Uldum, where they explore the interwoven adventures of two characters sets: League of EVIL and League of Explorers in a war on the safety of one of the secrets of  Azeroth. As for the gameplay features, the expansion will come with a set of cards called Invoke as well as the Galakrond Champion Card, which will affect the cards in your hand or on the field.

This wasn’t the only surprise for fans, as Blizzard also unveiled a new gameplay mode called Battlegrounds following the footsteps of Autobattler games we recently saw in League of Legends TFT and Dota Auto Chess, where the new mode is played by eight players against each other until only one of them is left standing, and it presents 23 playable champions.

Overwatch 2

One of the most important announcements for this evening was the unveiling of the sequel of Overwatch, a competitive shooting game released in 2016. Although we had already learned that the second part was on the way thanks to the numerous leaks, we got a complete look here with a cinematic trailer of the heroes giving us a glimpse of the all-new story mode, as well as gameplay featuring major new additions including collaborative PvE (Player Against AI) modes and a new exclusive PUSH mode for the new game.

It is worth mentioning that the new game will allow the original Overwatch users to play together with the owners of the sequel, where the two games share many multiplayer modes, in addition to the ability to move your Skins from the first part to the second game and continue to play as usual. Although the new version may seem really strange as it introduces the same game with a few new additions like Push and Story Mode, it’s good to see that Blizzard hasn’t given up on the first game, which will also get two new heroes Echo and Sojourn we saw in the trailers below. We still don’t know the release date, but we will learn more in the coming weeks.

This was the highlight of BlizzCon 2019 tonight, but the event is still going on with several tournaments in several games, most notably the Overwatch World Cup and more information about new announcements later this weekend.