There's a generation of millennial gamers who are haunted by an entity known as 'old Blizzard,' an allegedly more competent, creative, and virtuous version of the present-day Microsoft subsidiary based in Irvine, California.

For the nostalgia-afflicted, BlizzCon 2026 felt like a nod to those good ol' days of Blizzard—at least in terms of ambition and scale—as developers rolled out a slew of major announcements including World of Warcraft: Forever, Diablo 5, and an open world shooter in the StarCraft universe.

However, the most meaningful moment may have been the very first reveal that occurred on stage, when Blizzard president Johanna Faries received a tepid audience response after announcing that Heroes of the Storm—Blizzard's niche MOBA that had been relegated to bare bones maintenance mode in 2022—would be welcoming WoW big-bad Xal'atath as a new playable character.

Blizzard surely drafted dozens of versions of its stage presentation in the lead-up to BlizzCon, and would have been well-aware that announcing Heroes of the Storm's first new hero in six years would barely register on the audiences' radar compared to the rest of their slate. With that in mind, you have to wonder if leading with HOTS was not just a quirk of sequencing, but a conscious, conciliarity choice.

Sunsetting games that fail to reach certain commercial benchmarks is a widespread industry practice, and from a certain perspective, any backlash to HOTS being put on ice could have been seen as unrealistic and entitled—come on, at least the servers weren't shut down!

At the same time, you didn't have to be a hardcore HOTS player with hundreds of hours invested to understand the greater sense of betrayal.

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