BlizzCon 2014 is now behind us, but it provided us with a monstrous amount of info and some big surprises, and if you’re anything like me, you’re still still digesting it all.

There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s get to it, shall we?

Overwatch: An intriguing conundrum

I’m still struggling to decide what I think about Overwatch.

Somewhat to my surprise, there’s a lot I find compelling about it. From what I’ve seen, they’ve built a pretty rich history and mythology around the setting — as with all their games — and of course that intrigues me. Despite the “Saturday morning cartoon” vibe, there is also something intangible about the Overwatch setting that I find appealing.

I think a lot of it may boil down to the fact that — like many Blizzard games, but even more so in this case — the developers were clearly very passionate about Overwatch, and they poured all that love and enthusiasm into the game. They told a story about the pitch meeting for Overwatch, where Chris Metzen (jokingly?) threatened to quit the company if they didn’t greenlight it.

I’m also intrigued by the obvious push towards diversity in Overwatch’s cast. It’s still not perfect — I mentioned Widowmaker in my last post as a stereotypical femme fatale, and while the character’s official name may be Mercy, I can’t think of her as anything but “generic healer girl” — but on the whole, Overwatch is tickling my IDIC feels something fierce, and there’s a lot to commend.

We’ve got one character who’s a Middle Eastern woman with a lawful good personality and practical, badass armour. We’ve got an Indian scientist. The poster character for the game is a sensibly dressed tomboyish lady.

This is certainly not something I ever expected from Blizzard, but it’s a most pleasant surprise.

Even putting aside the obvious ethnic diversity and strong push for representation of female characters, it’s very multicultural. It has occurred to me that none of the currently announced characters are American. Tracer is British, Mercy is Swiss, Reinhardt is German…

As someone thoroughly sick of sci-fi treating the future as the sole domain of the United States, I find this incredibly refreshing.

But every time I get myself jazzed up about all that, I then remind myself this is a purely competitive first person shooter, and then I feel sad.

I’m not pathologically opposed to shooters or PvP — I have dabbled in both and enjoyed them — but they’re both way down the list of my gaming interests, and a game that focuses exclusively on them isn’t terribly inspiring.

If Overwatch had a single player campaign, I’d be on it like stink on a monkey. As it stands, I’m feeling pretty conflicted about the game.

There may be some hope on that front, though. They did mention there has been talk of some sort of story mode, though it’s still just an idea. Metzen is apparently very keen on the concept, but has not yet succeeded in convincing the rest of the team.

Let’s hope.

If nothing else, I look forward to playing the Overwatch characters in Heroes of the Storm. I can imagine Tracer and Hanzo being a blast to play.

Legacy of the Void: New units and game modes

The other big news comes courtesy of StarCraft II, as Blizzard offered previews of the new units and game modes for Legacy of the Void.

Terran gain the herc, an awkwardly named melee infantry with a grappling hook and high health, and the cyclone, a highly mobile tank with strong single target damage.

Zerg gain the lurker, which is the lurker, and the ravager, which are basically those artillery bugs from Starship Troopers.

Protoss gain only one new unit, though another may be added later: the disruptor, a mobile bomb that enters an energy form to gain brief invulnerability before exploding for massive area of effect damage. It’s not a suicide unit; it can be detonated many times.

I’d say all these new units fit into the category of interesting, but not terribly exciting. They’re all solid concepts, but there’s not a lot of wow factor to them.

Several units have also received redesigns, some of them so radical as to make them virtually new units. Swarm hosts, for instance, have gone from being siege units to harassment units. Battlecruisers and carriers have finally gotten some buffs, as well, so hopefully we’ll start to see them used more seriously.

On the downside, immortals have lost their iconic hardened shield in favour of an activated defense buff. I can see the logic in this, but there was something so wonderfully Protossy about just shrugging off siege tanks blasts like they’re nothing. I’m really going to miss that.

They also announced three new game modes.

Automated tournaments are pretty self-explanatory. This isn’t a feature I see myself using a lot, but it’s been on many fans’ wishlists for years, and I think it will be very popular.

Archon mode is bizarre. This allows two players to control a single base/army in a 1v1 setting. I guess the idea is to make the game more approachable by splitting the responsibility between two people, but it still seems like it’ll lead to a lot of “too many cooks in the kitchen” issues.

Allied Commanders sounds the most interesting. I’ve had trouble finding details on it, but it’s apparently some sort of never-ending online campaign played cooperatively with fellow players. You have a character that will continually progress between matches (like home cities in Age of Empires III), and from what I understand, each match is an objective-based scenario versus AI like the campaign.

It’s hard to imagine what Allied Commanders will be like based on what little information is at hand, but I’m very intrigued. If they can balance the difficulty well and provide more variety than the standard skirmishes versus AI, I could see playing this a lot.

Finally, they also announced some pretty big changes to the core economy of StarCraft II: More workers to start, fewer workers per base, fewer resources per base. Seems they want to speed up the early game, an idea I whole-heartedly support.

Overall, Legacy of the Void looks to be making SC2 much faster and more micro-intensive. Though this may steepen it’s already harsh learning curve, I think these are positive changes on the whole.

Heroes of the Storm: New characters and maps

Rather than any big reveals, Heroes had a lot of little pieces of news at BlizzCon, mostly centered on new hero and battleground previews.

Most of the attention was given to three long-awaited new heroes: Thrall, Jaina, Proudmoore, and the Lost Vikings.

To my surprise, Thrall is a melee damage-dealer. I was expecting him to be a caster, and maybe a support. But he does have some of his iconic abilities, like chain lightning and earthquake.

Jaina is pretty much your standard frost mage. She focuses on crowd control and very high burst damage. Lot of people are going to hate playing against her.

The stars of one of Blizzard’s pre-Warcraft games from more than twenty years ago, the Lost Vikings seem ready to replace Abathur as the game’s most mechanically unique and challenging hero. Each is a completely separate unit that can be controlled, or killed, individually. I foresee that they will either be completely useless or brokenly overpowered depending on who’s playing them.

They also had some teases for other upcoming heroes. Sylvanas got quite a bit of attention. From the sounds of it, she may actually be a specialist rather than an assassin, which I find very surprising but also intriguing. Her current design has her able to stunlock anything that isn’t a player. Definitely looking forward to learning more about her.

Most surprising of all, her in-game model appears to be fully clothed.

Miracle of miracles.

Several more in-the-works heroes were mentioned and/or appeared in the background of the trailer shown at the convention: Rexxar, the Butcher, the Skeleton King, the Warcraft III blademaster, Zul’jin, and the Diablo III crusader. It looks like they’re using the female version of the crusader, which I find mildly disappointing purely because I have a man crush on Gideon Emery.

The two new maps are on an Egyptian theme. Details on their mechanics are still a little sketchy, but Sky Temple is supposed to have some kind of PvPvE capture points to unleash fiery blasts on the enemy base. Sounds a bit like Cursed Hollow and Blackheart’s Bay had a baby. I like.

They also showed off concept art for a new map based on the Diablo universe, where one half is styled after the High Heavens and the other after the Burning Hells. Looks very cool.

The rest: Trailer rage and the barbarian capitol

There wasn’t a lot of news for Warcraft or Diablo fans at this BlizzCon, perhaps not surprisingly.

The most interesting thing for Diablo was that they will be adding a new zone in an upcoming patch: Ruins of Sescheron. This will be in act III, and is the remains of the barbarian capitol.

The impression I get is that this will only be in adventure mode, though I’m not sure of that. I don’t see them adding new story to the campaign for it. It’s a neat-looking zone, though: snowy ruins. I like it.

The only Warcraft news of note surrounded the movie. To the great anguish of myself and countless others, there was a trailer at BlizzCon, but it will not be released to the public.

Son of a…

In the end, the most interesting tidbit to reach the public was our first glimpse of the film’s Orcs, which are created using motion capture like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Looks very good — exactly like in WoW’s cinematics.

* * *

All in all, this was a very interesting BlizzCon with a lot of surprises. I still would have liked some news on the idea of revamped Warcraft strategy games, as well as a trailer for the movie, but otherwise, I can’t complain.

What say you? What do you make of the revelations from BlizzCon 2014?