What To Expect at Blizzcon

Blizzcon, Blizzard's very own gaming convention, is where they tend to make their biggest announcements. As far as I know, every WoW expansion has been announced via Blizzcon, and it's where they've shown off games of their other properties.

Blizzard is a pretty focused studio, and somewhat conservative in the number of projects they take on, but that has historically paid off in terms of quality and polish. For a long time, there were basically three flavors of Blizzard - Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. Now we have Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm as well. So what will we see about each?

Warcraft:

As much as I know Blizzard is really pushing for faster expansions, I'm not going to put any money on the announcement of a new expansion this year, mainly due to the fact that Blizzcon will be  before Warlords comes out, and I don't think they'd want to steal their own thunder. This does mean, however, that if they do get expansions out faster this time, they're going to probably want to announce the sixth expansion in the first half of 2015, rather than at Blizzcon, unless they are able to go right to Beta after Blizzcon 2015.

What will we see? I suspect we're going to get more info on patch 6.1 or 6.2. There's not a lot of 6.0 really left to reveal, after all, and if they aren't going in for an expansion announcement, the best they can do is patch content. So Warcraft's kind of in a really weird "either a ton of information (if they do announce an expansion) or very little" situation for this year.

It's also highly likely we'll see some stuff about the Warcraft movie. This would be a great place to release the trailer.

Starcraft:

Heart of the Swarm has been out for a while now, and the grand Starcraft II plan is to have three sort of acts - Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, and Legacy of the Void. I imagine that we'll get an official announcement of Legacy of the Void and some details on how that's going to work out. This could, actually, be the big headliner.

Diablo:

Reaper of Souls has also been out for some time now. I can't really say how successful it has been, but I've certainly enjoyed it (the loot system in particular is a vast improvement over the 1.0 version.) I don't know what their longterm plan is for Diablo III, but I wouldn't be that surprised to see the announcement of a new expansion, possibly with a seventh class.

Hearthstone:

The Call of Naxxramas was already something akin to a Hearthstone expansion. I wonder if they'll keep making more "PvE" features like that. If Hearthstone is ever going to get a major expansion, though, I suspect it will be to add a new class - the Death Knight being the most obvious one (Arthas clearly being the Hero.) Another possibility is that they could add new heroes with unique abilities to existing classes. For instance, Uther summons little 1/1 knights, but you could imagine Tirion Fordring doing something different.

Heroes of the Storm:

I believe HotS is still in... alpha? I haven't been following it all that closely (it looks far more PvP focused,) but it's also looking like they've implemented a lot of the features. I think we could see a release date pretty soon, unless they want to take a super long time to tease out every possibility and character, kind of like they did with Diablo III.