Just like the lead up to PAX East and Blizzcon, the days leading up to Gamescom this year give something to be excited about as Blizzard fans. In the past few years Diablo has been Blizzard's main focus, announcing Reaper of Souls there in 2013. This year however, Blizzard has a lot more going on and therefore a lot more to expect. Let's work through the games and see what we can expect.
Diablo 3: Originally I had expected an expansion2 announcement at this years Gamescom primarily because years past have set the precedent. However, this year it seems that Diablo will not have a gameplay area. When Reaper of Souls was announced, Blizzard had an area set up for people to try out the Crusader class and run through Westmarch. I can't imagine Blizzard would announce an expansion without having a least a simple demo area. On top of that, they seem to be hitting their stride when it comes to the patch cycle. Patches 2.2 and 2.3 have brought not only new items and sets that have created new play styles, but also some sweeping changes to the way the game works. I'll probably get into the details of that after 2.3 releases, but there are a ton of changes coming including huge changes to bounties and rifts. I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to take their time on an expansion, since the patch content is providing a decent amount of replay-ability in the meantime. At this point I would be shocked if we didn't get an expansion announcement at Blizzcon.
Starcraft: Legacy of the Void is listed as one of the playable games in Blizzard's section. I don't think there is much new we can see in terms of gameplay or missions that we haven't already seen in the beta or prologue missions, but this would be a great time to reveal the opening cinematic for the expansion. We all know Blizzard's cinematics are top of the line and they pretty much sell copies of the game my themselves. Get people excited with that and then let them play with new units and all that jazz in the pit.
Heroes of the Storm: With Leoric being released last week, we are nearing the end of the Eternal Conflict event. The two things on the Conflict website that we haven't see yet are the Monk and a second Diablo themed battleground. I would expect to see an in-depth preview of the Monk and his kit, and at least a flyover look at the battleground. Blizzard has been claiming a 3-4 week per hero time frame, so by the time Gamescom rolls around we will only be a week or two away from the Monk rolling out. As far as the battleground goes, this is pure speculation but perhaps we'll see some kind of Tristram tile set. Maybe demons/zombies invade the town every few minutes and your team or your minions get a buff based on how many of the bad guys your team kills. Just a thought. Maybe we will see another hero announced for after the Eternal Conflict winds down, but they may not want to distract from the event by making players look past it.
Overwatch: Things have been quite since Soldier 76 was revealed, but I think we are primed for a PAX East level preview in Germany. Blizzard teased a tourism poster on Friday for a fictional city called Numbani. The tag line "City of Harmony" has a very Zenyatta feel to it, and the robot silhouettes back that up. If you stop the Soldier 76 story trailer at 34 seconds in, you can see that Numbani is a city in the Ghana or Nigeria region of Africa and is one of the "Active Threats" in Overwatch's system. These breadcrumbs seem to be leading us to another battleground. We still don't know who the two characters are in the Overwatch poster whom the community have named "Green Ninja" and "Fat Bane". In addition to all of that, a few community members and content creators have been invited back to Blizzard HQ. A similar showing/playtest session was held prior to PAX East and it allowed them to get videos and reactions ready to go as soon as the official announcement was made. We got a bunch of videos about their impressions of McCree and Zarya after PAX and I'm fully expecting the same at Gamescom. There is a small chance we will get a beta start date, but thats only if Fall 2015 means early Fall 2015. If not I expect to wait until around Blizzcon.
World of Warcraft: In a post I wrote in March I went through my Blizzcon predictions and I was adamant that we were getting an expansion announcement just like every other expansion. Given the state of WoW and the discontent of the player base as of late, I don't think they can afford to wait that long. Blizzard has been inviting notable WoW community members to a invitation-only event at Gamescom. They did something similar back in 2013 when they were announcing Reaper of Souls. They gave the expansion announcement it's own event rather than tacking it on to their overall panel. I don't know what happened from the time they came up with the idea of Warlords of Draenor, to the time they got it implemented and out to players. I don't know if it was a learning curve of new developers and designers to the team. I don't know if they just bit off more than they could chew, but Warlords clearly wasn't what they envisioned it to be. There was potential in the story of this expansion and it could have been handled better, but something went wrong along the way and they had to change the path they were heading down and here we are. As a result, I think they want to move into the next expansion as quickly as they can. There was a supposed "leak" detailing a Dark Prophet expansion dealing with the South Seas, the Zandalari under new leadership, and Azshara making her grand return. Some of the things in that post would be great directions for the game to go. I like the story ideas and think that despite some people's hatred for Troll content, there is a decent story to be told there. People have been asking for a South Seas expansion for years and tying in the Tomb of Sargeras is a nice way to bring the Legion threat full circle after the events of Warlords of Draenor. I could do without us having a ship and recruiting pirates or whatever, primarily because Garrisons are leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Whether or not the leak is legitimate doesn't really matter. There is a chance it is and there is an even bigger chance that it isn't. Either way I think we see an expansion annoucement and hopefully with it, something players can truly be excited about. We need it.
The Grand Tournament
The timing of this expansion is a little strange however. Coming from a card game background that included Magic the Gathering, I believe there is a strong need for consistency with expansion releases. I know this may be an unpopular opinion, but I would be fine with a release schedule where every Spring we get a new adventure, and every Fall we get a full expansion. Anything more than that and I worry about what the game looks like in 2-3 years. It's important, when setting expectations for Hearthstone versus a physical card game, to remember the key differences. With each new set that is released it becomes harder and harder for new players to acquire cards for truly competitive decks, and because we cannot trade cards with other players, the only viable answer is to buy packs. And while it should be Blizzard's goal to make money, they long term health of the game is what truly allows Hearthstone to become a cash cow. Sure it's a free to play game, and players can earn gold from just playing over time, but they amount of time to acquire a collection gets bigger and bigger with every set. If players feel the only way to compete is to spend money and sometimes a lot of money for some decks, then they get turned off from the game. The goal needs to be to give new players the feeling that given the right investment of time or money they can get a continued level of enjoyment out of the game. And when you can provide that then you have that player hooked. It's not the tournament player we need to worry about. They are going to spend whatever they need to in order to get the cards they need to play on a competitive level. I think most tournament players would be content with 2 adventures and 1 expansion annually. Naxxramas and Blackrock Mountain have proven that a small release can have just as strong of an influence on the metagame as a full blown set.
Another problem with 2-3 sets being released yearly is power creep. Power creep is a problem for all card games. In order to make new cards exciting they need to be better than older cards to a certain extent. Chillwind Yeti was a reasonably strong card before we had any expansions. It was the best stats we could get on a 4 drop. GvG came out and we got Piloted Shredder. On the surface a 4/3 is worse than a 4/5, but when you consider the average 2 drop that comes out of a Shredder is a 2/3 all of a sudden we have 6 attack 6 health versus 4 attack 5 health in our 4 drop spot. As a result Chillwind Yeti ends up on the sidelines while Piloted Shredder is the universal best 4 drop. The way Magic combats this problem is primarily through rotating formats. To put it simply, every time a new set comes out a set from a year or two ago is no longer legal in that format. This way they can make different aspects of cards more powerful at different points. If one set has particularly strong creatures, then the next sets they may tone down the power level of creatures and raise the power level of spells to create this sort of see-saw effect. This way the overall power level is never too high, but certain aspects feel strong and create excitement. Sometimes the occasional card breaks the mold and sets a new standard (think Dr. Boom) but for the most part the process works. The issue with this process in Hearthstone is we have a digital card game. What would happen if when Grand Tournament was released, you could no longer queue for ranked if your deck contained cards from the original set. Those cards would cease to have in-game value outside of what they could be disenchanted for, but they were still purchased with real money or real time. In Magic there is a secondary market for cards, so when a new set is released players have the option to sell off the cards they can't play with anymore, usually for less than they were worth when they were legal to play. In Hearthstone the only "price" associated with any one card is the amount of dust it costs to craft. So if Hearthstone were to introduce a rotating format to prevent power creep, they would need to do something to dust prices for older cards to compensate. I know this became a wall of text, but my main point is by a slower release schedule, Blizzard has more time to decide how to tackle the power creep problem, as well as how to keep the game somewhat accessible to new players or players returning to the game. I for one would like to avoid any kind of rotating format for Hearthstone, but it does making the design and balancing of new cards far more difficult.
Sorry to go all wall of text on you there. But this is something I have been curious about that the announcement of the Grand Tournament brought to the forefront, and it's something I haven't heard much discussion on from the community. Let me know what you guys think.
Well that's gonna do it for this week. As always, thanks for reading.
Till next time, Chris
