The stage is set, the lights are up, and its time for Blizzcon, blizzards nexus for news and e-sports tournaments. It all starts with the opening ceremonies.
We open this year with a video about Starcraft, lots of talk from developers about how much they love the series, and how it spawned a e-sport around it. This is really a love story to Legacy of the Void, showing us that the community and the devs made the game it is today. The video wraps up in a neat presentation all about how much everyone loves the Blizzcon and how it all comes here, to this convention. It’s the nexus of all of Blizzards E-sports and all of their news and game dev and its all coming to this stage.
Mike Morhaime (president and a co-founder of BlizzardEntertainment) comes up on stage, and he’s here to talk about how much Blizzard also loves Blizzcon. People attend from everywhere, around the world, and millions buy the stream pass to watch this live. Blizzard is 25 this year, even scarier 20 years since WarCraft II tides of darkness (my first blizzard title I feel old). We get a cute bit about how people have met their spouses here, how people love blizzard, how much it is great company and how much they love the fans.
The first big annoucnment is Brightpaw, a manna kitty, this years charity pet! Its a cute pink cat, who if you purchase your money will go to charity.
Next we got a new trailer for the end of our Star Craft journey. Jim Reynors voice tells us “we just gotta finish what we begun” This trailer gave me literal goosebumps, I couldn’t believe it. it’s a cinematic love story to the SC world, we see the Protoss fighting Aemon, and hear a bit about how the Protoss will be fighting in this the last Star Craft expansion. This is a much expanded trailer from what we have seen so far, but its not really giving us much story. Unfortunately this seems to have been an internal video and I cant find it anywhere that’s shareable.
Our next announcements are Archon Mode, and Co-op missions. They will be non 1v1 modes that are co-operative, and will cater to more casual players, who may not want to ladder.