One Week Until Blizzcon

And so, dear friends, we've only got one week to go until the WoW-lover's event of the year: Blizzcon 2009! Unfortunately for me, there are many reasons preventing me to attend, though I would love to, at least once in my life. Some of these reasons include: finances, distance and real life obligations. I would also suspect that even if I didn't have the above issues, it would have been pretty damn hard to buy a ticket. I heard the first round of tickets sold out in less than 30 minutes after the site went online! That's Blizzard for you!

Well, even if I won't be attending this magnificent event, I still have reasons to be excited. That's because (I'm sure you all know) Blizzard always makes big announcements and reveals new stuff at Blizzcon.

Here are some of the things I'm anticipating and hoping for:

StarCraft 2 - Hopefully a release date for the first game in the series. Word is that it's been pushed to next year so I'm hoping it will come out in the first quarter of 2010. Now even though I won't be buying SC2 (at least not until a $50 Battle Chest containing all 3 games is released), I'm still excited about it because it is an awesome Blizzard game and it will also be a herald-of-sorts for Diablo 3. A live SC2 means that Battle.net is completed and D3 will also be able to use it. Also, it means that the release schedule for new games is cleared sooner, allowing D3 to be released sooner. One can only hope.

Diablo 3 - Weeell, this is the game I've been dreaming about for years. Unfortunately it's far from being complete. I'm hoping that they will reveal the last 2 classes at Blizzcon, as well as new areas from the game and a lot of other gameplay stuff. I'm also expecting a ton of new gameplay videos. I guess it's too much to hope for a release date since we all know Blizzard doesn't make long-term promises that it might not be able to keep.

World of Warcraft - There are high chances that details about patch 3.3 (containing the Icecrown raid) will be released. I certainly hope so. Blizzard has also promised details regarding the future Hunter ammo and Warlock shard systems. I'm very curious as to what they have planned regarding these 2 classes.

Next WoW expansion - Once again, we stand a high chance for Blizzard to announce the next WoW expansion. Woohoo! I'm expecting things such as: the name of the expansion, location in the WoW universe, some lore, new races, possibly a new class and new profession and hopefully the direction that they are taking with class design. Are we going to see major class changes as we did with Wrath of the Lich King? I would also be very interested to discover the new art themes for the expansion. Watery theme anyone? We shall see!

Update: OK, MMO Champion has just blown my mind with this article. Apparently the next expansion will be called Cataclysm. What's amazing is that it won't contain any new classes, nor any new continents. What? How is that possible? Well, it will have the 2 rumored races: Worgen and Goblins. However, the most amazing thing is that the whole of Azeroth will be revamped and changed in such ways as to allow flying! Now if that's not the greatest thing ever, then I don't know what it. Holy $hit! I'm really excited! To make the bombshell complete, apparently the new level cap will be only 85, which, if you think about it, is not a bad idea at all. Maybe I will finally be able to level up all my alts. Oh and it looks like more race-class combinations will be possible. Some of them sound really crazy to me but hey, I'm not complaining.

Now, all this new info is not set in stone. In fact it might all be false. My gut tell me that most of it is true though. Boy, Blizzcon can't come soon enough!

Unannounced MMO - We all know that Blizzard is working on a secret MMO which is a brand new IP. We're all very excited at the possibilities but Blizzard is very tight-lipped about this. Are they going to spill some beans at Blizzcon this year? I highly doubt it since there are already so many things to reveal. I'm sure they'll save it for next year maybe, when things will be less hectic. Personally I'm hoping for a vast space-based MMO, perhaps a cross between Eve Online and WoW. But that's just me.

As you can see, this year has the potential for one of the best Blizzcons ever. Whenever it looks like Blizzard has reached a plateau, they come up with some mind-blowing stuff. It's all good and we all love them. I'll see y'all after Blizzcon!