Blizzard Watch Weekly: Get in losers, we’re going to Pandaria

Everything’s coming up pandas this week as the World of Warcraft team announces plans to send us — us as in retail WoW players — back to Mists of Pandaria for an alt-leveling, transmog-collecting, achievement-hunting extravaganza. There may have been a few other things happening this week, and more coming next week, but everything has been overshadowed by pandas.

And, as always, Blizzard Watch is your source for news on Mists of Pandaria, so look for more info on the event soon. (With many thanks to you old-timers who get that joke.) For now, however, let’s run down everything that happened this past week and what’s coming up this week.

New this week

• WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria is what everyone is talking about this week: a limited time event for the PVE crowd that takes us back to Pandaria with an accelerated leveling experience and new powers to play with. You’ll be playing this old content with retail WoW classes, and collect a pile of new mounts, pets, and transmogs along the way. When the event ends, your character will remain on retail servers for The War Within (or anything else you’d like to do). The PTR for ReMists, as we’re calling it, is now live.
• Cataclysm Classic just got a release date: May 20. If you aren’t excited to head into Mists with retail characters, you’ll soon have the opportunity to head into Cataclysm with Classic characters. Truly, WoW is well on is way to becoming a dozen different games in a trench coat.
• Diablo 3 Season 31 is now live. This season revives the Season 20 theme that lets you mix and match Kanai’s Cube powers however you see fit (we like to call it Kanai’s Cube-o-Rama). If you didn’t jump in when it launched — perhaps you, like me, were binging the Fallout TV series — there’s plenty of time to jump into the D3 action, because the season should last through July.
• For everybody still trying to get Taivan, we have some guides on how to finish a couple of frustrating achievements, including how to take A Legendary Album of photographs (at least when the right world quests finally spawn) and how to complete Into The Storm, which tasks you with killing some 3200 elementally empowered monsters across the Dragon Isles. (It’s not as bad as it sounds, but it’s still not great.)
• NetEase, Blizzard, and Microsoft came to an agreement to bring Blizzard games back to China this summer. All of Blizzard’s games went dark in the country after NetEase and Blizzard had what amounted to a bad breakup in which NetEase staffers apparently smashed the Gorehowl statue outside their office. I imagine Microsoft did a lot to smooth things over, as NetEase titles will also be coming to Xbox.
• Fallout 4 gets the next-gen treatment on April 25. I admit, with the new TV series I’ve been going a little Fallout crazy, so here we are, talking about Fallout. You’ll finally be able to experience the horrors of the wasteland in stunning 4K resolution this month with a free Fallout 4 update that upgrades graphics and adds new content — including quests introducing the Enclave.

Coming soon

• April 16: Hearthstone Battlegrounds Season 7 is nearly here, with its new two-player Battlegrounds mode. has been announced, with the addition of Battlegrounds Duos, a new two-player version of the Hearthstone autobattler. This one should be a lot of fun, and I recommend checking it out even if you don’t usually play Hearthstone: Battlegrounds is completely free to play, won’t nag you about microtransactions, and has no cards to collect or decks to build, so you can jump right in.
• April 16: Overwatch 2 Season 10 launches with new hero Venture. You’ll get this new hero up-front, without having to pay for the premium battle pass (or level through the free one), so very soon you’ll be drilling your way across the map to surprise your enemies.
• April 17: Warcraft Rumble Season 5 begins next week, bringing the mischievous Faerie Dragon to the game — though I have to say, it’s pretty cute, but it’s no Brightwing. The season will also add the Darkmoon Faire, which lets you complete challenges for prize tickets which you can, of course, turn in for sweet rewards that will help you level your minis and progress through the game.

This week’s podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: The crushing weight of too much content
• Lore Watch Podcast: What happens when a World Soul is killed?
• Tavern Watch Plays Daggerheart 00: Let the TTRPG character creation chaos begin! If you want more Daggerheart, we’ll be posting a one-shot this coming week and we also have an article on our impressions of the game.

What to play this weekend

Have I mentioned we’re a little obsessed with Fallout right now? Because Fallout is definitely on our list of games to play this weekend: Fallout 76 free to play on most major platforms (at least for a few more days) and you’ll find most of the series on sale on your platform of choice right now — Steam, in particular, offers a bundle of every game for $55. That’s a lot of Fallout.

However, most of our game recommendations this week are more chill, including botany and lo-fi beats (unfortunately not in the same game, but still).