BlizzCon is a fortnight away! What do you hope to see?

We are only two weeks away from the first in-person BlizzCon since 2019, and I am getting really hyped. We’ve had our first accidental leak of a new Hearthstone title — which admittedly was likely going to be announced this week anyway — and the various fansites are flooded with leaks of which probably none will end up true, but you never know. There was a leak for Dragonflight that ended up being 90% correct. Even if you’re not paying attention to the rumors, there’s a lot to get hyped for around BlizzCon 2023.

We’ll start with Hearthstone and its new expansion announcement. I find this exceedingly peculiar as I don’t recall another time when the November expansion was announced before BlizzCon. Perhaps there’s going to be something new on the Hearthstone front this year so they wanted to get the new expansion announcement completed early? Or maybe there’s so much else going on they asked the team to start the reveals now so to have more time for the other franchises. We do know one thing for a fact: We’re getting an expansion cinematic at BlizzCon, and the Hearthstone team always does a great job with those.

The expectation is that Diablo 4 will be getting its first expansion announced at BlizzCon. We don’t know anything about where the expansion will take us (although we do have some ideas), but we think it’s very likely there will be a new class as part of it. The fact that expansions are planned to be yearly also means we don’t have a sense of the planned scale for the releases; they could each be roughly equivalent to Reaper of Souls, or they could be smaller in scope. At least after the announcement of the first one we’ll have a better sense of what to expect going forward.

World of Warcraft remains my main gaming franchise so that’s what I’m most interested in seeing. While an expansion announcement is a given, the where and what are always fun to learn about. There’s another aspect of this year’s announcement that has me scouring the rumors for details — will we get a patch 10.3? The development team was able to meet their ambitious patching plan for 2023 in remarkable fashion, so I could see them having the wherewithal to slip an extra raid tier for Dragonflight in 2024. It’s not just group content that’s impacted, as Iridikron remains active and could make a return at any time.

Finally there’s the Upcoming unannounced survival game which, as far as we know, is still in development. Could this be the year it gets a title and release date? There’s no true evidence it may happen, but I do find it odd that Overwatch 2 has an entire hall to itself this BlizzCon. (Tinfoil hat time?)

What do you hope to see? Are you interested in seeing Warcraft Rumble in action? Who do you think the new Overwatch 2 tank hero is? And do you expect any major surprises this year?