by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Last week, Gamescom 2016 arrived to Cologne, Germany. Lauded as “the world’s largest trade fair and event highlight for computer and video games”, this mega event usually occupies the attention of hundreds of thousands of people in-person over the course of five days while encapsulating millions around the world via content created by the show itself and both media and companies in attendance.

This year’s Gamescom took place from August 17 to August 21 and, of course, Blizzard Entertainment made a return to Germany to highlight all of the latest and greatest excitement across their multiple IPs. Amazing announcements such as the reveal of Legion, the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, as well as Reaper of Souls, the current expansion for Diablo III, were made at past Gamescoms, so anticipation was running high for what could be in store this year. On what was styled as “Day 0”, Blizzard released a video wherein many of the developers and important members of each franchise that would be in attendance at the show revealed tidbits of what to expect in the coming days. Particular to Diablo, Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng sat down with Soe Gschwind-Penski, wherein Wyatt talked mostly about the history of Diablo as a franchise and put a bit of attention on Blizzard celebrating 20 years of Diablo. The video for that is below and Wyatt’s interview begins at 8:11.

While many community members were hoping for some sort of groundbreaking announcement or hint at the future of the series, that news unfortunately remained unreleased, as the rest of Gamescom didn’t see much spotlight shined on Diablo in general. The other official Blizzard offerings were live streams of Diablo games run by community members Quin and MrLlama, as well as a live art session curated by Senior Artist Paul David, which can be viewed below.

Some Redditors used this opportunity to create hype around a potential upcoming Diablo II HD remake.

There were also summary videos created by Soe and Mark Turpin shot from inside of the venue that quickly checked in with each franchise. While nothing particularly new was revealed in these regarding Diablo, the Reddit community did have a bit of fun trying to figure out if they were giving us signs on potential Diablo IV news in the way that they would talk about the game. There was also an interesting segment where Senior Director of Audio Russell Brower went over his top five “most important cool things about the Diablo music”. This particular segment can be found in the Day 5 recap and you can find all of those recaps here.

With a lack of any true updates on the future of the franchise, speculation is running as high as ever. We still know that the Unannounced Project continues to chug along in secrecy; it’s simply a matter of time as to when Blizzard will reveal exactly what they are up to you. What do you think? Will we have a groundbreaking announcement at BlizzCon 2016 or will we have to wait for a future event in 2017 and potentially beyond?