Blizzard Entertainment Showcases New IPs
Connor Strange
Staff Writer
Video game company Blizzard Entertainment held their annual convention, BlizzCon, at the Anaheim Convention Center on November 8-9 to announce forthcoming titles and expansions to already-established games.
The main reveal was the new expansion to the massively multiplayer game “World of Warcraft.” They dubbed it “Heroes of Draenor,” and promised to return to the roots of the Warcraft series rather than continue branching out. Alongside the next addition to WoW, another main franchise will receive new content; Diablo III’s new expansion, Reaper of Souls, is an effort to make up for the mistakes made in the initial launch of the title.
Those two big pieces of news aren’t quite so interesting as a couple of smaller announcements, however. Blizzard is making new stuff, if only in the style of the games. The company famous for three series (Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo) in three very specific genres.
“Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft” is one of the two new intellectual properties to come out from Blizzard. The monolith of gaming has showcased their new card game for quite a while, and it’s very close to being accessible by anybody and everybody. They announced that it would enter the open beta phase next month at the convention, which expected after the hype that has surrounded its closed beta.
The other tidbit of information is centered around a newer type of game: the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). There was an immensely popular user-made modification for Blizzard’s Warcraft III called “Defense of the Ancients” (DotA 2), which was the first MOBA ever created. To put it simply, two teams of five face off on a small map to attack each other’s bases.
Blizzard sat on the potential of developing DotA 2 for a long time-- long enough for Valve Entertainment to sweep the property out from under them and create it themselves. Valve recently hosted the third international tournament for the game, in which the grand prize winners received a total of $1.43 million.
The MOBA genre is practically split down the middle between Valve’s DotA 2 and Riot Entertainment’s “League of Legends,” both of which are played religiously by their fans. The idea of a new contender in the style of game isn’t new, but it has yet to really work. Nobody has been able to rival those two games, and Blizzard will actually step into a genre that they aren’t sitting on top of comfortably (for the first time in many years) with their newest title, Heroes of the Storm.
Blizzard Entertainment dominates the RTS, Action RPG, and MMORPG genres. They’ve ruled those three types of video game for years on end (they started out the Warcraft franchise in 1994). To see them introduce themselves into not one but two new game types will certainly stir up something interesting.
The future looks promising for the gaming titan known as Blizzard. New additions to existing franchises have shown success time after time, so who knows what will come from Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm.
