DeKALB – Activison-Blizzard announced several video games at their annual Blizzcon convention Nov. 1 and 2 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. 

Blizzard was celebrating a few milestones this year because it’s the 25th and 15th anniversaries for the games “Warcraft” and “World of Warcraft,” respectively. 

One game announcement was “World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.” “Shadowlands” is the eighth expansion for the massive multiplayer role-playing game. 

Blizzard announced the expansion with a trailer showing a major character, The Lich King Bolvar Fordragon, defeated and revealing a whole new realm. 

The expansion will include new lands to explore, factions, dungeons and raids. It will also include iconic characters, because the Shadowlands is Warcraft’s version of the afterlife. 

Blizzard also announced “Diablo 4” by showing a computer-generated trailer and a gameplay trailer. “Diablo 4” is a top-down cooperative role-playing dungeon crawler. “Diablo 4” announced the new Druid class, which was absent from “Diablo 3.” The trailer also showed the new villain, Lillith. 

Blizzcon 2018 included the announcement of “Diablo: Immortals,” a mobile phone game. Fans were expecting a “Diablo 4” announcement but got Immortals instead. The launch trailer received over 275,000 dislikes on YouTube.

Another major announcement was “Overwatch 2,” a sequel to 2016’s game of the year winner from the Game of The Year Awards. The sequel introduces a cooperative campaign and several new characters. 

“Hearthstone,” a digital trading card game, also got an expansion called “Descent of Dragons,” adding new cards, campaigns and characters.

Last year’s announcement of “Warcraft 3: Reforged,” a “Warcraft 3” remaster, got new details, and the beta was live for players to try out before launch. The remaster updated all character models. 

Prefacing the new content was an apology regarding the banned Esports player, Blitzchung, who spoke out for Hong Kong’s freedom.

“Blizzard had the opportunity to bring the world together in a tough ‘Hearthstone’ Esports moment a month ago, and we did not,” J. Allen Brack, president of Blizzard Entertainment, said. “We moved too quickly in our decision-making, and to make matters worse we were too slow to talk to all of you.”

The player still did not receive his winnings back or get unbanned. There were protests outside the Anaheim Convention Center in response to the event a month ago, according to PC Gamer. 

Between the controversy and number of announcements coming out of Blizzcon, it had a big enough impact to be covered by organizations like the Washington Post and CBS.