BlizzCon 2026 will be arriving at the end of the week.  On Saturday September 12th we’ll get the big keynote speech that will reveal the plans for the company for the next year or so.

BlizzCon 2026

It is too late to get tickets to be there in person.  Those sold out ages ago.

Also, I will note that there are at least TWO aspects to the event to consider.  There is the in-person event, which I know people who attend regularly enjoy.  I’ve never been and it is unlikely I ever will, but the fact that the event sells out every time speaks to its popularity.

And then there is the information conveyance aspect, where we in the audience, both in-person or at home, learn new things about the games Blizzard makes.  That is what this post is about.

Like most everybody else, I’ll be watching the proceedings on the live stream.  But Blizz is going to reward our remote presence with a host of Twitch Drops.  There is something for every franchise.

Anyway, here is what I think will be announced.

WoW Retail – The Declared Path

The path is pretty much set for retail WoW currently.  We already know the next expansion will be The Last Titan. We can be pretty sure that we’re at least a year away from that launch, right?

  • WoW Midnight season and raid updates
  • Passive aggressive apology for how addons have been going
  • Housing updates
  • Previews of The Last Titan

That is all I can come up with… but what else is there?

WoW Classic – What is Classic Plus Anyway?

I remain skeptical of the whole Classic Plus idea for a number of reasons, the primary among them being that the team seems to be clear that retail is the path for new content and they believe that problem has been solved for the moment with their Midnight update cadence.

But there are plenty of loud voices out there that are 100% certain that Classic Plus… whatever that means, which is a whole different problem… is on the agenda.  For purposes of this discussion I am going to say if it isn’t a new content… read: new zones, or at least new landmasses within zones… with a new narrative path rooted in vanilla, then it isn’t Classic Plus.  Fiddling with classes and repurposing dungeons to make new raids ala Season of Discovery isn’t enough.

With that in mind, here is what I think we’ll see.

  • Warlords of Draenor date for original classic progression
  • Next phase for The Burning Crusade for anniversary classic
  • Wrath of the Lich King date for anniversary classic
  • The Burning Crusade for Hardcore
  • Plans for a new Season of Discovery style experiment

Also, when I say “date” I am counting even the vague sort of “Q3 of 2027” sorts of things on a roadmap that at least fixes a launch in a timeline of events.  It doesn’t need to be an exact months, day, year.

Hearthstone and Other WoW IP Related Items

I suspect the usual stuff for at least Hearthstone.  For the rest… we’re stretching my ability to care.

  • New Hearthstone expansion
  • How they’re going to fix what they broke with a previous Hearthstone expansion
  • More rewards in other Blizz titles if you’ll just come play Hearthstone for a bit
  • Something minor about Warcraft Rumble
  • Whatever they’re doing with Wizards of the Coast, which will end up being either a collectable card game or rules for a table top RPG
Diablo Things

Now we’re just into me guessing at things based on past patterns.  I haven’t played Diablo since Diablo II Resurrected came out.

  • Diablo IV new season
  • Diablo IV new expansion reveal
  • Diablo Immortal more seasons and more cash shop thingies
  • Diablo III yet another season
Ovewatch and Other Things

I still don’t know what Overwatch 2 is, except that it wasn’t a single player PvE campaign.  Do I have that correct?

  • Overwatch – new hero reveal
  • StarCraft – Something vague about a new game based on the IP
  • Heroes of the Storm – Patch update, maybe a new hero
  • Lost Vikings – Erik, Baleog, and Olaf showing up somewhere new
BlizzCon Keynote Bingo!

That isn’t all that much, so I figured I would actually do a Bingo game for the BlizzCon keynote.

Doing so required me to come up with more than 50 likely, semi-likely, or pretty unlikely things to be be said or done on stage during the BlizzCon 2026 keynote.  I took those and entered them into the Bingo Baker site and generated a randomized Bingo card for myself.

BlizzCon 2026 Bingo Card

You too can join in on this folly.  If you CLICK THIS LINK it will take you to my Bingo card entry and it will generate a custom, randomized version of the card for you based on my many random ass guesses.

Remember, this is only for the keynote presentation, though it could be interesting to see which items slip into later presentations during the event.

Anyway, that is all I have on BlizzCon for the moment.  It doesn’t help that I am not playing any Blizz games currently.  There will probably be a bunch of leaks this week that will invalidate some of my guesses and bring up things I had not considered.

Next week I will no doubt follow up with how wrong I was with my guesses, what was actually announced, and if I got a Bingo.