BlizzCon 2026 review
Wow, what a BlizzCon! I have a lot of thoughts and feelings to express, so here goes!
In recent years, especially last BlizzCon, Blizzard had seemingly taken a stance against showing how the sausage is made. That, combined with the mess that was their Gamescom coverage, didn't fill me with hope going into this BlizzCon that it would be my kind of BlizzCon. Back in November, I openly pleaded for the return of the virtual ticket, them streaming all the panels and a housing/world building panel. So, did they deliver?
Panels
I wanted to make sure I covered everything, at least in terms of reactions/thoughts, so I'm going to list every thing I watched!
Opening Ceremony
Johanna Faries's speech was good, she was clearly nervous (no shit). I didn't particularly for most of the announcements, but I'm glad that everyone seems to have gotten something. Now, for the Warcraft stuff. First off, Holly's outfit was AMAZING. Knocked it out of the park. The announcements for Retail were pretty tame. I hope Ion's "it's all gas no brakes from now on" is something they're going to stick to. The Worldcore looks amazing and from an art perspective the team has once again done an amazing job. I'm not too invested in the story right now, but since we're building towards Northrend which is probably the continent I have the most fond memories of exploring I have no doubt that the story will grab me again as we head into the Last Titan.
Speaking of The Last Titan, what a teaser! One thing I noticed during the teaser is that all the sounds for the big guy (who also has friends?!) sounded very similar to a large amount of unused sounds that appeared back in 12.1 data, so I'm guessing this was largely an in-game cutscene, which makes it all the more amazing. It is also our first look at updated Northrend, I initially thought it was current Northrend with a bajillion effects on top of it, but the geometry for Wyrmrest Temple, Icecrown as well as surrounding terrain and terrain in the distance looks pretty different! Were most of the effects in the trailer overlays like they ones they demonstrated in the cutscene panel later, or were the a lot of these effects in-engine? Hmm! I guess we'll have to find out early next year when the full expansion reveal happens.
The Warcraft III Reforged expansion was something we already kinda knew was coming based on the new major version that was being tested, but I didn't know it was going to be THAT big. I hope to be able to check out the campaign at some point when I magically find more time.
WoW: Forever. The cinematic team never fails to deliver. So much hype. Unfortunately, Forever wasn't as big of a surprise as it could have been due to some things leaking beforehand, but there were still some solid surprises, even for me. The extent of the rendering updates wasn't something I knew about, there's obviously been bits and pieces of the tech that have we've seen leak through in the Retail client, in particular the water/lighting changes both had pointers they were coming, but the extent was greater than expected. More on that hopefully later on when I have a better grasp on the changes. Maybe together with an update zone design post? Hmm!
WoW Forever: What's Next
Good introduction to the stuff they're adding/changing in WoW: Forever, not much to say otherwise. Looking forward to exploring new zones and stories, I probably still won't partake in group content as that's not my thing, but I will be exploring those places through other means whenever I get to those parts. It was interesting to see how the crowd reacted to certain things but not others. Either way, looking forward to it.
TrailerCraft
This panel was on my "maybe watch" list and I am very happy that I did end up watching it, because not only did it go into a good bit of WoW stuff, it also ended up very connected to the cutscene panel which came right after. Seeing SceneTimelineEditor in action (for the first proper time), seeing how they do the separate render passes for depth as well as how one of the shots in the Ula'tek trailer was made was not only very informational, it was also simply cool to see. A lot of things I used to wonder about, especially when seeing bits and pieces of all this tech sneak into the client every now and then, are now perfectly contextualized!
Building Cutscenes in World of Warcraft
Getting a front row seat on how they make the in-game cutscenes was awesome. I've messed with the SceneScript tech a good bit myself and it is incredibly powerful and this deep dive into it clarified a lot of questions/things I was wondering about it. The further clarification/separation of the various types of cutscenes they can do was also good. The audience participation thing was a fun addition as well! Hope the machinima developer community takes some pointers from this panel. :)
WoW Midnight: What's Next
Obviously a must watch, but this one was structured a bit weirdly. They started with Talebound, which I guess they did because it is coming next, but I feel like they probably should have started off with 12.2. Spending 10 minutes on it is also probably a bit much if you have a 35 minute panel with very little other time at BlizzCon for Retail. As I said earlier, the world core zone looks amazing and getting a closer look is much appreciated but that was kinda it. Thraegar look cool. Skipping ahead to housing as I don't really care about the other things. Housing showcases. YES! Can't wait to explore a bunch of builds. Happy that mannequins are coming, I hope that they can be made invisible, too. Copy paste & multi select is awesome. I half-predicted these coming in 12.1.x, but 12.2 is great too. No grouping yet it appears, hopefully that is coming next. Buy more is an obvious win that I initially predicted for 12.2.x, so I'm happy it is coming a patch earlier!
WoW Forever: Deep Dive
This one was a bit more interesting to me than Forever's What's Next panel, and just because of Ana Resendez's part of the presentation as I didn't care much about the camp, transmog changes or item/racial changes. The Legacy Points system looks like an interesting iteration on the warband mentor system. Now, the most interesting part was the server/ruleset part of the presentation. Blizzard going realmless and instead going for a smarter layering system around rulesets and various other factors was something I didn't expect them to do for Forever and moreso expected this on Retail down the line. It is becoming very clear that Forever seems to be their testbed for various things that are harder to implement into an already live game. The same goes for surnames being the unique identifier for the whole region. I expected that to come at some point, but for Retail, and didn't expect them to have an actual technical usecase. It'll be interesting to see how all this is implemented when Beta hits on Thursday.
WoW Housing: Crafting Coziness and Creative Freedom
This is one of the panels I was looking forward to in particular, probably second after the World Building panel, and boy did it deliver. The passion these devs have for the community, and the housing one in particular, came through more than any other panel and. We also got so much insight into how the system was developed. Very cool that they initially thought about using that unused instance portal in Stormwind like was its initial intention, but obviously it didn't fit for what they wanted the system to end up being. The in-depth talk about some of the issues they faced during development was interesting as well. Damn you, quaternions. I already talked about the new housing additions coming earlier. Very happy with the transparency given by the housing team and hope they can keep that up going forward. Second best panel, right after...
World Building in World of Warcraft
This is always my favorite panel at BlizzCon, and for good reason. As people who've either read this blog before or have known me for a few years, I've always been fascinated by world building/zone design, to the point where I've spent a good amount of time on tooling as well as learning the process myself and even making my own map and Hearthstone Tavern exterior model for WoW. I haven't given my artistic skills enough time to grow yet, but panels like this not only rebuff my motivation in that department, it also makes me think about design decisions I've made in my tooling compared to similar decisions in official tooling which in a way is also an art.
Anyways, as for the contents of the panel, similar to some of the older world building panels, they had multiple designers on stage each working on their own thing. Jestry Ahlswede working on Maisara Caverns dungeon design, Esther Love working on Eversong/Silvermoon kits/brains/stamps and Jeff Miller working on Founder's Point. It was great to see all the steps they go through and hearing official terminology for much of the steps I've previously talked about in my zone design blog post. (There will be another part of that blog post based on this panel as well as a bunch of dev stuff we've seen since that post.)
I think this is the most we've ever seen of the zone design process condensed into 40 minutes, including parts of the tooling we've never seen before. I can only hope that this is the start of returning to talking about their amazing tooling and creative process because that has unfortunately been pretty rare the last few years. Not only does showing how stuff is made build a lot of goodwill with the community (transparency and all), it also motivates young artists (or even older people larping as artists) to create their own stuff or even tool developers to work on tools that help artists output that creative energy.
Also, fun facts, they had special maps (map 3176, I see you!) for the panel and the data branch the WoWEdits were running on was that of The Last Titan (13.0.0), which wasn't visible on stream because of the cropped screens. Exciting. They must have been sweating to not click around too much. Hell, they probably rehearsed. :D
WoW Forever: Evolving a Timeless World
This panel was a surprise. It was called "WoW Art Design" pre-opening ceremony and that is quite the rename!
As I mentioned before, I wasn't aware of the extent of the rendering updates in Forever. We kinda knew about the water/lighting changes based on unused changes that had been popping into the Retail client for a while. But boy, there's quite a few more things than I thought! The way they kept the vibes of the zones intact is very impressive. They are being very good curators of that Classic feel and I'm very happy to see that. Now, the big question is when we can expect these kind of things in the mainline modern WoW client.
A lot of the core of the game (the engine if you will) is historically shared between the branches and I expect most of these capabilities to land in 12.1.7 or 12.2.0. That said, I don't think they'll be using most or any of them any time soon. As the panel explained, the fog, lighting and water changes are all handcrafted and I don't see Blizzard adding that to all existing Retail maps anytime soon as it is a lot of work. But who knows, maybe they'll launch 13.0 Northrend with some of these and expanding it to the rest of the world in 14.0? I can only hope, as what I've seen so far looks gorgeous. I've taken some cursory glances at how things are hooked up in the client, but I would love to take a look at some of the tooling for these features in future BlizzCon panels.
WoW Forever: Found Photographs
Wasn't sure what to expect of this panel, but it was pretty insightful into how they're tackling the changes to existing content, and new content, in Forever. A lot of the content that was scrapped or not sufficiently expanded upon in Classic WoW I have a deep interest in and I can't wait to see how they do some of these ideas justice. From what I've seen so far, Dalaran does seem a little underwhelming, but I haven't taken as close of a look at BlizzCon floor footage as I kind of want to keep actual content/story stuff a surprise for myself. The Old Ironforge instance however seems right up my alley.
WoW: The Past, Present, and Future of Hardcore
I liked the conversation style of this panel, I wasn't super invested as hardcore definitely isn't my thing, but it was interesting to hear about how hardcore came to be and what they've experienced around it themselves.
Interviews
I watched several BlizzCon interviews and I will NEVER understand why they schedule them DURING the announcements. Creators whoms interviews are scheduled during the announcements get worse interviews (out of their control) since they'll just be announcing things we already know about. That sucks for the creator, for the people being interviewed and for the people reading/watching. I've also noticed that interviews this time around seem less informational, at least those for Retail, and a lot of non-answers are given. Maybe in the future the option should be given to do interviews on the Blizzard campus in the week after BlizzCon as well. There was the Q&A livestream they did, but that frankly was largely just reiterating what was announced at BlizzCon as well as just not actually answering questions, at least for Retail. The Forever bit had some solid new information, at least.
In Closing/PR rant
Boy, was I wrong in my worries going into BlizzCon. Not only did we get everything I wanted, we got more AND it was also for free this time around. That said, Retail WoW did get a little pushed away by both Forever and Blizzard's... unwillingness.. to talk about the future of Retail WoW under the guise of "not wanting to spoil stuff". I'm sure there's some truth to that, but not every gameplay feature or addition to the game is a spoiler. You could perfectly well talk about how you're adding character customizations 2 patches from now or in the next expansion without showing new characters. There's also been plenty of patch/expansion features in the past that could be shown off in older content. Not wanting to spoil stuff while understandable for ACTUAL spoilers, is just a lame excuse and I wish they would reconsider that position, or at least be truthful about the actual reasoning, because this ain't it.