26 | January | 2022 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Blizzard tweeted out yesterday with a message and an image indicating that their next project was going to be an entry in the survival genre.

If you announce something unannounced is it still unannounced?

There was a link to a post on the main Blizzard site, but references to the game itself were fairly vague and minimal.

Blizzard is embarking on our next quest. We are going on a journey to a whole new universe, home to a brand-new survival game for PC and console. A place full of heroes we have yet to meet, stories yet to be told, and adventures yet to be lived. A vast realm of possibility, waiting to be explored.

They are going to do their usual routine and jump into a genre that is already established and try to give it the Blizzard polish and spin, making things shinier and more accessible. I’ve been through that before in a post. (Though you should look at the first comment on that post. Winner!) That plan has worked in the past. In fact, that plan is pretty much the whole story of Blizzard.

Warcraft: Blizzard does Dune!
Diablo: Blizzard does a Rogue-like!
StarCraft: Blizzard does Warcraft in space!
Diablo II: Blizzard refines Diablo!
World of Warcraft: Blizzard does Everquest!
StarCraft 2: Blizzard does StarCraft again!
Diablo III: Blizzard tries to find something new in Diablo!
Overwatch: Blizzard does Team Fortress 2!
Hearthstone: Blizzard does Magic: The Gathering!
Heroes of the Storm: Blizzard does Dota 2!

Unfortunately for Blizzard, there is a bit of an inflection point there after WoW, where things are not always an automatic success just because Blizzard did them. StarCraft 2 has never really stood out from the original, Overwatch managed to fumble its initial success, and the less said about Heroes of the Storm the better.

Basically, since the launch of WoW, Hearthstone has been the most consistent success, though Diablo III did sell a lot of copies… it has just been a decade since it launched. And, more recently, we’ve just had expansions and remasters.

But now we have Blizzard announcing that they’re going to jump in with Valheim or Don’t Starve or Oxygen Not Included or Just Survive or half a hundred other survival style game.

Which might not be a bad thing. We’ll have to wait and see… with an emphasis on the waiting part, because most of the announcement is a recruiting message asking people to apply to come work at Blizzard on this unannounced survival game.

Of course, wags in the audience noted that working at Blizzard seems like its own form of survival game. On the corporate side of things, Blizzard seemed to be encouraging their employees to tweet about how excited they were about this project, as I saw a lot of line member hype from Irvine yesterday.

I find this an interesting development, but it is a long way from hype for me. Given that we still haven’t seen the launch of Diablo Immortal yet, a title that had a playable demo at BlizzCon 2018, I suspect that it will be some years before we get a chance to play this new game.

Still, Blizzard actually doing something new for the first time since Overwatch is worth a mention.