Blizzard Confirms 10 Major New Announcements At BlizzCon 2026

Published Sep 13, 2026, 11:09 AM EDT Allyson Cochran is an Editor at TheGamer who has worked as a journalist since 2020 and in games journalism since 2022. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and focuses primarily on guides, previews, and developer interviews, with particular expertise in cozy indie games and live-service FPS titles. She has interviewed numerous game directors, including those of games like Overwatch and Dead by Daylight. Allyson has written and edited thousands of guides, and she genuinely loves every minute of it. BlizzCon 2026 had no shortage of surprises, and Blizzard clearly decided subtlety is overrated. Between major announcements, returning favorites, and some unexpected changes, there’s a lot happening across Diablo, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, and the rest of the Blizzard universe. If you’re trying to keep up with everything while also remembering what game you’re supposed to be playing, honestly, same. It’s a lot to keep track of, especially if you have the attention span of a girl who opened one tab and somehow ended up with 37. The good news is that I have your back, dear reader. There’s a lot to dig into, from familiar faces making comebacks to new adventures that are still a few years away. Let’s take a look at the biggest announcements from BlizzCon 2026 without making you sit through the two-hour recap. Diablo 5 Is Coming In 2029 Blizzard has officially confirmed Diablo 5, although we're going to have to wait until 2029 to play it. The team is currently working on the next mainline entry, which will take place roughly a century after the events of Diablo 4. That's a pretty significant time jump, especially considering how thoroughly Sanctuary has been beaten, battered, corrupted, and generally put through the wringer over the course of the series. Blizzard says Sanctuary has fallen, setting up a very different world for the next chapter of the franchise. Details are understandably scarce right now, given that Diablo 5 is still several years away. Still, simply confirming that the game exists is enough to make this one of the biggest announcements of BlizzCon. Diablo Is Getting A Netflix Animated Series If you thought Blizzard was finished expanding the Diablo universe, surprise: we're getting a Netflix animated series. Johanna Faries announced the project during the opening ceremony, confirming that Blizzard is partnering with Netflix to bring Diablo to television. Unfortunately, that's about where the concrete details end. Blizzard didn't reveal a release date, story details, animation studio, or exactly which corner of Sanctuary the series will explore. Considering how much lore Diablo has accumulated over the years, though, there certainly isn't a shortage of material to work with. The announcement also came with teases for animated projects based on Overwatch and Warcraft. Again, Blizzard didn't provide release dates or much in the way of specifics for either project. Overwatch’s Ninth Hero Is A Vampire-Inspired Support Overwatch is getting its ninth hero, and Blizzard decided the roster needed a little more gothic drama. Doctrine is a vampire-inspired Support hero coming in Season 5. He brings a decidedly spooky flavor to the game alongside a pretty important connection to Overwatch's ongoing story. Doctrine is a confidant of Doomfist, tying the new hero directly into his storyline and the latest chapter of the game's narrative. Blizzard revealed Doctrine alongside the next major story developments. This gives us our first proper look at the character and setting up a potentially very interesting relationship between the two. The vampire inspiration is also a pretty fun direction for Overwatch, particularly with Doctrine arriving in the middle of spooky season. I mean, if Blizzard was going to introduce a vampire-adjacent Support, Halloween is basically the most legally appropriate time to do it. World Of Warcraft: Forever Brings Back Vanilla WoW World of Warcraft is going back to basics with World of Warcraft: Forever, Blizzard's new take on the classic WoW experience. The project is designed to bring players back to the vanilla-era version of World of Warcraft, but it isn't simply putting the original game in a time capsule. The level cap will remain at 60, while the experience gets a substantial expansion with 1,000 new quests, nine new dungeons, revamped zones, and the addition of Skyborne Elves. Interestingly, Blizzard says the focus isn't just on adding more content. Player journeys and social features are a major part of Forever, which feels particularly appropriate for a project built around the earliest days of WoW. I'm extremely curious to see whether Forever can capture the social magic that made vanilla WoW so memorable. Sombra And Roadhog Are Getting Major Overwatch Reworks Two Overwatch heroes are getting some of their biggest changes yet. Blizzard officially announced major reworks for Sombra and Roadhog, with both arriving alongside Season 5 on October 6. Sombra's rework is easily the more dramatic of the two. She's leaving the DPS role behind and becoming a Support, transforming from a damage-focused recon specialist into a Support technician. Roadhog, meanwhile, is staying a Tank, but Blizzard is reworking him around the idea of feeling like one. The goal is to make him a Tank who better supports his team rather than just being a very large man with a hook and a personal commitment to making enemy players miserable. Hearthstone Finally Gets A New Class After more than half a decade of waiting, Hearthstone is finally adding another class. Monk is coming to the game in 2027, which makes it the first new class added to Hearthstone in six years. That's a surprisingly long time to go without expanding the roster, especially for a game that's been around for more than a decade. Monk also feels like an obvious addition given its history in the wider Warcraft universe, so I'm mostly wondering what took Blizzard this long. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Blizzard differentiates Monk from the existing classes without making it feel like a remix of mechanics we've already seen. Six years gives you plenty of time to come up with something weird, at least. Heroes Of The Storm Is Getting A New Hero I genuinely did not have 'new Heroes of the Storm hero' on my BlizzCon bingo card, but here we are. Blizzard announced Zalatath, marking the game's first new hero since Hogger launched in December 2020. We're talking about a gap of nearly six years between new heroes. Blizzard was careful to frame the announcement, though, making it clear that Zalatath isn't necessarily the beginning of a guaranteed new-hero production schedule. Instead, Blizzard said future additions will depend on player engagement and feedback. If players return and show enough interest, the team may consider adding more heroes in the future. Diablo 4 Is Bringing Back The Amazon Diablo had a busy announcement segment. While Diablo 5 looks to the future, Diablo 4 is reaching back into the franchise's history for another fan-favorite addition: the Amazon class is returning. The Amazon is one of those classes that has managed to remain memorable despite not appearing in every mainline Diablo game. Its return gives Diablo 4 another opportunity to pull from the series' older ideas while giving longtime players something they already have an attachment to. Of course, nostalgia can only take a class so far. The interesting part will be seeing how Blizzard translates the Amazon into Diablo 4's current combat and progression systems without just recreating the class exactly as it existed decades ago. StarCraft Is Getting An Open-World Shooter In 2030 Blizzard opened the BlizzCon 2026 ceremony with a StarCraft cinematic, and it immediately became clear that this wasn't a nostalgia trip. The studio confirmed a new open-world StarCraft shooter, currently scheduled to arrive in 2030. That makes this the furthest-out announcement from the show, but arguably one of the most intriguing. StarCraft has been associated with real-time strategy for decades, so taking the universe into an open-world shooter is a pretty big departure. There isn't much else to go on yet, which is probably for the best when we're still four years away from release. Blizzard has plenty of time to show us what this will look like. Overwatch Spotlight Returns In 2027 Blizzard is bringing back its Overwatch Spotlight event in 2027, and considering what happened at the last one, that could be worth paying attention to. The previous Spotlight came with the announcement of ten heroes in a single year, a significant jump from the game's previous cadence of roughly three or four new heroes annually. Now that Blizzard has confirmed the event will return in 2027, I'm expecting another round of substantial announcements. We don't know exactly what Blizzard has planned yet, and I'm not going to pretend I can see through the corporate curtain. But between new heroes, reworks, story developments, and whatever else the team has cooking, Spotlight is clearly becoming an event worth watching.