Blizzard Entertainment might be all about Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 these days, but there’s still vestiges of the award-winning video game developers left in the company.
Amidst all the controversies surrounding the aforementioned title, Blizzard isn’t afraid to dip its toes into a different or new game, specifically a still-unnamed survival game.
Blizzard’s first completely original IP in a while was first “revealed” in January 2022, but we haven’t heard much about it – until now.
maybe..
— Jez (@JezCorden) October 3, 2023
As per a report by Insider Gaming, the game’s lead environment artist, Dan John Cox, put in “2027” as the release date for the game on his ArtStation page. Unfortunately, as soon as the internet caught wind of this “secret” information, the said artist changed the details, removing it entirely. Afterward, Jez Corden clarified that it was an error as well. But, he did say “maybe” when asked if Blizzard could make the game official at BlizzCon 2023 on November 3.
However, upon closer inspection on Cox’s LinkedIn account, it appears that this game has been in development since at least 2018, which lines up with earlier reports that it’s close to completion.
For all its controversies, Blizzard Entertainment continues to put out content for all three of its biggest games. World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch, all saw either new entries or expansions over the past year and more are coming over the next few months.
The best case scenario here is that Blizzard stumbles upon another goldmine, similar to what happened with Overwatch in 2016, with the survival game, but something tells us that unfair monetization practices will be its undoing.
Except perhaps for World of Warcraft, unholy amounts of monetization appear to be the crux of the issues surrounding Blizzard’s most recent titles. Overwatch 2, for example, was recently review bombed on Steam and is now the worst-rated game on the industry-leading digital game distribution platform. On the other hand, Diablo 4 is at the risk of falling into irrelevancy just months after posting a new launch sales record for Blizzard.
If it’s true that the game has been in development for at least five years, Blizzard should have something to show for it by November. If not, we’re curious to see if Blizzard will go ahead and surprise all of us with a StarCraft 3 reveal.
As the holidays kick into high gear and the developers are scrambling to push out their entries for the usually-lucrative season, cybersleuths are spending an inordinate amounts of time crawling all over the internet to find out more about future projects, and this includes ArtStation profiles of staff members. Unfortunately, the majority of these findings have since similarly been proven false, including the potential release date of State of Decay 3 in 2027.
For now, Blizzard is set to host multiple livestreams ahead of the release of Diablo 4’s second season, Season of Blood, on October 17.
