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BlizzCon 2026: Diablo 5, StarCraft Returns and WoW Goes Realmless
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Blizzard had not held BlizzCon in two years. The company spent 2026 absorbing studio-wide staff reductions as part of the Xbox Reset in July, and the mood going into Saturday was somewhere between hopeful and braced. Seventy-five minutes later the Opening Ceremony had announced Diablo 5, a new StarCraft, an entire third version of World of Warcraft and a new Warcraft III campaign that shipped the same day.
Nobody had that on their card. Most predictions had The Last Titan getting a 2028 date and a StarCraft shooter maybe existing. What we got was heavier than that.
Then Sunday's deep dives filled in the detail, and one of them landed harder than anything in the ceremony.
Here is everything from both days, in rough order of how much it matters if you play these games.
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Diablo 5 is real, and Sanctuary already lost
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Diablo 5 is in development for Spring 2029. Blizzard framed it around a single premise: Sanctuary has fallen and Diablo has won. The question the team put on stage was what you have to become when the world is already lost.
That is an unusual starting position for this series. Diablo has always opened with a world worth saving and the player arriving to save it. Starting after the loss, with Diablo established as the winner rather than the final boss, is a structural change rather than a tonal one, and it is the first thing in years that has made me curious about where this franchise goes rather than what it drops.
The Forging the Next Era panel filled in more than I expected for something three years out. You play the Heir to Westmarch, travelling a Sanctuary that Diablo is actively reshaping, accompanied by a growing caravan of survivors. Diablo rules from the throne of Westmarch and uses Sanctuary's people and souls as weapons in the Eternal Conflict, and he is present from the opening rather than waiting at the end of the campaign.
The world itself is not stable, and that is a mechanic rather than a story note. Terrain, points of interest, monsters and rewards can change when you return to a place. Procedural overworlds are back.
Three classes were shown. Demon Hunter and Monk return, and the new one is the Plague Knight: heavily armoured, spreading disease across the battlefield and consuming it for power. Blizzard says Diablo 5 launches with more classes than any previous game in the series.
The itemisation section is the part that will decide whether this lands. The stated goals are depth, clarity and identity, with item tiers that start simple and grow with you, multi-slot items in the Diablo 2 sense, the return of Gear Sets, runewords coming back and experiments with stat requirements on gear. That is a lot of Diablo 2 vocabulary in one paragraph, and it is deliberate.
Blizzard said outright that the announcement is early because they want community feedback through development, with regular updates along the way. Given how Diablo 4's launch itemisation went, asking three years ahead of time is the right instinct.
Spring 2029 is still three years out, and no gameplay was shown. Treat the date accordingly.
Diablo 4 got its 30th anniversary season on September 15
The Season 15 reveal everyone was waiting on finally landed. It is called Season of Hell's Legacy, it launched on September 15 and it is built around Diablo's 30th anniversary.
Deckard Cain leads the season. All three Prime Evils return, including the Lord of Terror himself, and beating them awards special rewards. There is anniversary gear inspired by every era of the franchise, and Moophisto is back for anyone who remembers the cow level with the fondness it deserves.
The systems underneath were already known from the 3.2.0 PTR: eight Soul Splinters socketing into jewellery, ten Legacy Uniques returning permanently from Diablo, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3, a Horadric Cube recipe that upgrades an item directly into its Mythic version while keeping affixes and Masterworking, and Rebirth for converting an Eternal character into a seasonal one. What BlizzCon supplied was the wrapper, and the wrapper is a better one than most seasons get.
Season of Hell's Legacy is live now. If you want to be at endgame while week one is still deciding the season, our Diablo 4 Season 15 boost and powerlevelling will get you there.
The Amazon is coming, and the javazon is alive
Diablo 4's first class pack arrives in the first half of 2027 with the Amazon. It works like the Necromancer pack in Diablo 3 rather than an expansion.
She comes from Skovos, which Lord of Hatred already took us to, and that is the stated reason for the timing. We walked her homeland alongside her people without being able to play as one. Blizzard also said community feedback drove the decision.
The javelin returns as an entirely new weapon type in Diablo 4, and the Amazon is the only class that can use it. Sunday's What's Next panel broke the class into four archetypes, and they are more distinct than I expected:
- Champion is the gladiator. A frontline melee fighter with sword and shield, augmenting herself and her allies with cold magic and built around leading a charge
- Skirmisher is the modern javazon. Highly mobile hit-and-run combat, javelin in hand, leveraging lightning and poison
- Ranger is the bowazon, and the framing Blizzard used is precision rather than volume. Where the Rogue sends up a rain of arrows, the Ranger is an Olympic-level sniper firing magically enhanced piercing shots, with ballistae for artillery
- Commander summons phalanxes of Valkyries and controls the battlefield
Two design notes worth repeating. Her magic is explicitly not innate the way a Sorcerer's is, it comes from her ancestors and her sisterhood, which is a nice way to keep her a soldier rather than a caster. And she is gender locked female, the first gender locked class in Diablo 4, which Blizzard tied to the lore of the Amazon people.
Pricing, early access windows and the rest of the commercial detail are all explicitly later. In the meantime the current roster is where the work is, and our Diablo 4 build service covers getting one of the eight working properly.
Also on September 15, Diablo 4 arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 as the Age of Hatred Collection, bundling the base game with Vessel of Hatred and Lord of Hatred.
And in the department of things nobody predicted, Blizzard is making an animated Diablo series with Netflix. No date. Blizzard's president also said Diablo is only the beginning and that discussions are happening for Overwatch and Warcraft.
StarCraft comes back as an open-world shooter
Sixteen years after StarCraft 2, StarCraft is returning. Not as an RTS.
It is an open-world shooter, you play a grunt soldier of the Dominion fighting the returning swarm, and it is due Spring 2030. Dan Hay is leading it, which is the detail that makes this interesting rather than alarming. Hay was creative director and executive producer on Far Cry, which means the open-world part is not a marketing word attached to a Blizzard project by people learning the genre.
The announce cinematic was excellent and showed zero gameplay. Four years out, that is what you get.
I have complicated feelings here and I suspect most StarCraft players do. A decade and a half of asking for StarCraft 3 answered with a shooter is not the answer anyone requested. It is also the first new StarCraft anything since 2010, and Blizzard put it on the main stage with the line "it's about damn time," which suggests they know exactly what they are doing to that particular room.
World of Warcraft: Forever is the boldest thing announced all day
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Classic Plus is real. It is called World of Warcraft: Forever, it launches November 4, 2026, and the beta starts September 17.
Forever is a third World of Warcraft running alongside Modern and Classic rather than replacing either. It is set inside Year One of Vanilla and it stays there. You remain level 60 indefinitely. Blizzard's stated intent is to find progression that does not require pushing the level cap, specifically so the population stays together rather than stratifying by expansion.
The content list is not small. Sunday's deep dive named four regions rather than the three announced at the ceremony: Mount Hyjal as an endgame levelling zone, Zephras Isle as a new level 1 to 12 starting zone, plus Riverglades and Shen'Dralas. Over 1,000 new quests. Nine new dungeons. Two new raids at 10 and 20 player sizes, named as Hyjal Summit and Barrow Deeps, alongside a large outdoor dungeon called Krol'dok Stronghold. A new playable race, the Skyborne. New skills, talents and class combinations, plus new professions, reputations, items and a visual overhaul.
Holly Longdale called it "a new beginning that never ends." I have been playing this game since the actual Year One and the idea of new Vanilla-era zones, built now, with everything the team has learned in twenty years, is the announcement I have wanted for a decade and had stopped expecting.
Beta opens on September 17, which is a tight turnaround on a game announced that weekend. Levelling a Forever character from scratch is the same Vanilla levelling everyone remembers, and our powerlevelling covers it if nostalgia wears off around Stranglethorn.
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Midnight continues with Eclipse, and The Last Titan lands in 2027
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Ion Hazzikostas confirmed the next major Midnight patch is Eclipse, patch 12.2, with Xal'atath moving closer to claiming Azeroth's Worldsoul. His words for the pace from here were all gas, no brakes.
The Worldsoul Saga concludes with The Last Titan, and GamesRadar reports Hazzikostas gave it a 2027 launch. Blizzard's own recap stops short of a year and says more information comes early next year, once the team is clear of Eclipse. Hazzikostas described it as the culmination of over two decades of World of Warcraft and said it lays the groundwork for whatever follows.
For anyone playing Season 2 right now, the practical takeaway is that Venomous Abyss has a defined shelf life. Ahead of the Curve: Ula'tek disappears when the tier rotates, and Eclipse is what rotates it. If Ahead of the Curve is still on your list, our Venomous Abyss raid carries will handle it before Eclipse arrives, and our Mythic+ runs cover the rating side of the season.
Warcraft III Reforged got a new campaign and you can play it today
This was the surprise of the weekend for me. Twenty-three years after Warcraft III, there is a new campaign.
Forsaken Kingdom covers the fall of Lordaeron and its transformation into the Undercity, runs over 30 hours, and adds a new neutral hero in the Forsaken Paladin. It ships alongside the 3.0 update, which brings a major graphics pass, a revamped World Editor and 24-unit selection.
It went live during the show. After the reception Reforged got in 2020, doing real work on it rather than quietly retiring it is not what I expected from this company in 2026.
Overwatch turns 10 and Sombra becomes a Support
Season 5 brings Doctrine, a vampire-inspired Support hero with bat-like drones and an ability called Infuse that transforms his next ability.
The reworks are the bigger story. Sombra is being converted into a Support hero, which is one of the most requested changes in the game's history, and Roadhog is getting an overhaul that Blizzard openly described as making him less annoying to play against. New map Watchpoint: Grimsvötn joins the rotation, and Season 5 closes out The Reign of Talon, the first year-long narrative arc Overwatch has attempted. Another hero follows in Season 6, and the next Overwatch Spotlight is set for February 2027.
Hearthstone gets its first new class in six years
Reign of the Black Empire arrives October 20, taking Hearthstone back to ancient Azeroth at the height of Old God power. The new keyword is Assemble, merging two cards into a new one, which is the kind of mechanic that either produces the best Hearthstone year in ages or breaks the format in week two.
Battlegrounds gets a new minion type called Aberrations on September 22. A 2v2 mode is coming. The Journal is being overhauled into a narrative wrapper that ties quests, achievements and events across expansions into one place.
And the Monk arrives in March 2027 as the first new playable class in six years.
Heroes of the Storm is not dead
Xal'atath joins Heroes of the Storm on September 28, having hit the PTR on September 14. Johanna Faries thanked the community for caring about the game and teased another hero in the near future.
For a game everyone wrote off years ago, getting a new hero and a sequel tease at BlizzCon is more than most expected.
Day two: WoW Forever is realmless, and that is the biggest change of all
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Sunday's Forever deep dive went well past what the ceremony showed, and the headline is structural. Forever has no realms. You do not pick a server. You pick a gameplay style, and the options are Normal, PvP, Roleplay and Hardcore. Blizzard says its server infrastructure can now hold far more players in a single realm than before, which is what makes it possible.
Faction restrictions survive, so no cross-faction dungeon or raid groups. Hardcore is a separate ecosystem, and a Hardcore character that dies can transfer into one of the other styles rather than being finished.
The feature I did not expect is camping. Placing a campfire creates a campsite where players rest, repair, place vendors and gain buffs by sitting at the fire. Professions extend it: Blacksmiths place a Sharpening Wheel for Strength, Tailors place a Faction Banner for Spirit and Herbalists place an Incense Candle for Intellect. That is a social system built around stopping in the world rather than moving through it, which is the most Vanilla design idea in the entire announcement.
Appearances get handled without a transmog system. Any bind on pickup uncommon or rare item grants its appearance to every eligible looter when it drops, so nobody has to fight over a green. Epics grant the appearance only to the player who loots it. The team's framing is that you can play as though transmog does not exist.
There is a new progression tree with a Resourcefulness line, including a Reagent Economy node removing reagent requirements for class abilities and tier 1 camping. Points are capped at 16 at launch, deliberately, so players do not feel pressured to chase them. A Legacy reward track offers cosmetics only and no competitive advantage, and Blizzard says new challenges, rewards and trees arrive each patch.
Forever launches November 4 at 3:00 p.m., with beta opening September 17.
The Skyborne are behind a paywall, and players noticed
The one sour note of the weekend. Beta access and the new Skyborne race come through the Skyborne Epic Pack, and the reaction was immediate enough that coverage is already calling them cash elves.
I understand the business logic and I also think Blizzard misread the room. Forever's entire pitch is a return to the version of the game people are nostalgic for, and gating its one new playable race behind a purchase is the opposite of that feeling. It is the kind of decision that colours the first month of discourse regardless of how good the rest of it is.
Day two: Diablo 4 is done with expansions
This is the one that matters most if Diablo 4 is your game. Blizzard confirmed at the Diablo panels that Diablo 4 will not receive any further expansions, with development effort moving to Diablo 5.
Seasons continue. Season of Hell's Legacy launched on September 15 and the Amazon class pack still arrives in the first half of 2027. What ends is the expansion cadence that gave us Vessel of Hatred and Lord of Hatred. Whatever the class roster looks like after the Amazon is close to what Diablo 4 finishes with.
That reframes the Amazon considerably. It is no longer the next step in a growing game, it is a final addition to one moving into maintenance while the studio builds its successor.
The Diablo 5 panel went deeper on the world in ruin premise, previewing mechanics and classes. The Lord of Terror himself features, which is worth saying plainly: Diablo was absent from Diablo 4 entirely, a game that told Lilith's story and then Mephisto's. The series is finally bringing back the character it is named after.
What BlizzCon told us
Four release windows across four years: Season of Hell's Legacy now live, WoW Forever in November, The Last Titan and the Amazon in 2027, Diablo 5 in 2029, StarCraft in 2030.
That is a company laying out a decade after a year of layoffs, which is either confidence or a very deliberate performance of it. The tells that it is the former: Warcraft III Reforged shipped a real campaign the same day, Heroes of the Storm got a hero, plus WoW Forever is a whole additional product rather than a rerun. None of those are things a studio does when it is just buying goodwill.
Sunday complicated that reading in one direction and confirmed it in another. Diablo 4 closing its expansion cycle is a studio concentrating resources rather than expanding them. WoW Forever going realmless, with camping, a new progression tree and four regions, is a studio spending heavily on something that did not need to exist.
Both things are true at once, and that is usually what a company looks like when it is choosing what to bet on.
Two things matter right now for anyone playing. Season of Hell's Legacy went live on September 15, and Eclipse is coming for the current WoW tier, which takes Ahead of the Curve: Ula'tek with it. If you are planning to play both rather than catch up on both, our Diablo 4 Season 15 services and WoW raid carries will get you level with them.
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