Updates on Diablo, Wow, Overwatch, Johanna Faries

The iconic orc statue that lives at the center of Blizzard Entertainment’s Irvine campus is standing a little taller these days as the brand behind “World of Warcraft,” “Diablo,” “Hearthstone” and “Overwatch” builds to its 35th anniversary.

Sitting in her office above the Microsoft-owned brand’s campus on Jan. 20, Blizzard Entertainment president Johanna Faries told Variety that the slew of announcements that would be revealed the following week in Blizzard’s big “Showcase” presentations were “the amalgamation of so much hard work and collaboration across everyone at Blizzard.” “And to me, that, in and of itself, is such a point of pride,” Faries said.

It’s a moment of hard-fought-for pride for Blizzard, a video game publisher that’s managed to maintain its beloved status with exuberant fans despite multiple controversial changes in leadership, a $35 million settlement over misconduct accusations, and a reputation for a “frat boy” workplace culture.

“The way that the game teams have come together to ladder up into something bigger that reflects the power of Blizzard — it’s easy to say, it’s incredibly hard to do,” said Faries, who joined Blizzard as president in 2024, following two years as general manager of the “Call of Duty” franchise at sister company Activision and more than 10 years in business and marketing exec roles at the NFL. “And the way that the simple symphony orchestra that is Blizzard has come together, it’s a showcase of an immense amount of work, an immense amount of creative collaboration. And it just makes me so excited to come to work every day, to be able to do this together in that way.”

But the major news revealed out of Blizzard’s showcase presentations — including the rebranding of “Overwatch 2” to “Overwatch” as it debuts a year-long narrative arc, “World of Warcraft’s” deep expansion into in-game housing, “Diablo’s” 30th-anniversary expansion plans — is not the peak of the anniversary celebration, but the start of the climb. What Faries and her team are really building toward is the triumphant return for BlizzCon this September, which will mark the first version of the event under Microsoft ownership after more than two years off.

“I’ve heard this from many of the teams that what we’re going to announce across ‘WoW,’ ‘Diablo,’ ‘Overwatch,’ even ‘Hearthstone’ and many others, just in this moment in time for Showcase, much of that would have been what we would have put on the main stage as an announcement at BlizzCon, at something of that caliber,” Faries said. “So I’m hopeful that not only do we drum up an enormous amount of excitement in the here and now, but that also signals how confident we are in the belief that 2026 represents a huge, banner year for Blizzard — because Blizzcon only has more behind the curtain that we’re excited to share. So hopefully players really see that and recognize, wow, if Blizzard’s coming this big in this moment of time, imagine what they might be also staging for us in September.”

While Faries hypes up just how much she’s not overhyping BlizzCon 2026, she’s also focused on what comes after that big in-person experience and what the next 35 years are supposed to look like. A big part of that is decided on the ground in Irvine, where Blizzard is cultivating its existing, homegrown talent. It’s a mission Faries is charged with just as longtime Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer exits and CoreAI exec Asha Sharma takes over and concerns about consistency arise.

“If you go into my office and look at the art on the walls, you’ll see how much it helps that we have real icons and leaders in the artist community,” Faries said. “We have, I would argue, the greatest artists in all of gaming and entertainment. And so their network gives us the leg up. They’re constantly thinking about, how do we recruit? How do we train up upcoming talent to continue to maintain the high-standard bar that we’re known for? Our players know there’s a Blizzard polish. There’s a Blizzard caliber for our artistry that stands out among all the rest, and we’re going to continue to make sure that that’s something we prioritize.”

With the artist legacy a firm part of its past, Faries wants to make expanding the mediums that art is showcased in part of Blizzard’s future.

“We talk a lot about this. We’re not Blizzard Games, we’re Blizzard Entertainment. We want to be able to show up on every screen imaginable,” Faries said. “We want to be able to create new fans who may not have been with us for the past 35 years. How we continue to engage Hollywood or film and TV in bigger ways is going to be, in the near term, probably a big part of that recipe. We also play in music. We also play in non-traditional spaces, beyond gaming, certainly.”

Faries added: “I would confidently say that every one of our IPs could be some of the greatest linear media experiences that the world could experience. So more to come on the specifics. What I will say is that there are highly generative, proactive, near-term discussions across almost every one of our worlds right now, with respect to what can we do, what format works, who’s the right team to take that to new audiences in a high caliber way.”

Among the announcements made during Blizzard’s series of “Showcase” presentations was a revamp for the nearly 10-year-old “Overwatch” franchise with a big narrative expansion. That move came just as Wildlight Entertainment was set to debut its “Overwatch 2” competitor, “Highguard.” In the weeks since, “Highguard” has struggled significantly, while “Overwatch 2” fans have had widely positive reactions to the ambitious roadmap for “Overwatch,” despite a few jokes poked at the rebranding.

“It’s coming to fruition after a couple of years of a strong conversation about, what is a real pivot going to look like?” Faries said. “And how are we going to make sure that it feels genuine, it feels deep, it feels rich, in all the ways that our players are going to want to experience these new characters? I will also say, and I hope that the team would say it as well, competition is a good thing. It keeps us on our toes. It keeps us adapting. It forces us sometimes to adapt and go quicker in spaces.”

“Overwatch’s” new update kicked off with an intense cinematic trailer that the team already knows has once again stirred up conversations about that IP in particular being adapted for TV or film.

“It’s something that we see signaled to us very consistently,” “Overwatch” general manager Walter Kong told Variety. “So whenever we put out any type of lore, including a cinematic thesis, there is a very common expression of, I wish we could have more of this, I wish that we could enjoy these stories. So when I took on the role of franchise GM, these future opportunities and possibilities were something that pushed me to say yes, yes, yes, because I think we have delivered on the game, but there’s still so much on the broader franchise experience that I wanted to bring to players and fans.”

Among “Diablo’s” big teases, including the release of the first update for “Diablo II” in 25 years, “Diablo IV” executive producer and vice president Gavian Whishaw was particularly proud of how in the weeds his team is getting with the features in their upcoming “Lord of Hatred” update.

“The paladin that we’re going to release with the expansion has an expanded skill tree,” Whishaw told Variety. “And this is one of the things that players have been asking us for for a while. It’s an extremely complex system. The joke is that we have a ‘skill twig,’ and they would like a tree, so we’re giving them a tree in the expansion and players have way more choices in the paladin skills. The thing that we’ve also done is we’ve gone back and we’ve done every other class as well. So we’re hoping we can be like — OK, you wanted the tree, here’s the tree for everybody.”

And if deep updates to its current game are what “Diablo” had to share recently, is news on a new title coming at BlizzCon?

“It’s kind of complicated when you’re talking about titles that have been around for 20 years and people are still dedicated to and still playing and still going to get excited about new content,” Whishaw said. “I’ll say at a high level, I think over 30 years of ‘Diablo,’ we’ve done five titles. So I would hope that over the next 30 years we do a few more than that, maybe we get some out faster.”

The “World of Warcraft” team, led by executive producer and vice president Holly Longdale, prioritized the game’s long-awaited housing update in its Showcase, and the priority of making the game as accessible to the staple “WoW” player as to larger casual community.

“There are many of us on the team that are fans of other games, and ‘The Sims’ being one of them, where we look at it and go, here’s some things the community finds frustrating, and if we can find a way to allow it and support it, then we will continually lower barriers for anybody who wants to do it and do it the way they want to do it,” Longdale said.

“There’s two sides to this. One of the most fun ones was when, through a bug, players discovered that they could make their house float above the landscape. We had a fix in place, and we were about to patch it, and the team just went, like, why are we fixing this? They’re making awesome stuff, and isn’t that the purpose? And then there’s some things that we’re like, oh, no, you should not be able to. That is one of the beautiful things about user-generated content is that once it’s out there, just like ‘World of Warcraft’ in general, they own it, and then it’s our job to support it and put some guardrails where they’re needed.”

Longdale says the journey to housing has been “iterative and involved a lot of deeper discussions from the beginning.” “And it got slowly over time less restrictive, less restrictive, less restrictive,” she said. “And then looking at problems like, well, why do we want raiders to care about housing? It’s like, yeah, we want them to care — but they’re not required to care. So making sure that every game loop and audience has some representation, but anyone can do it and participate.”

Blizzard Entertainment as a whole is now trying to strike that balance between giving its 35-year-old brand the room to grow and introduce new things to draw in new audiences and keep the business thriving, while not pushing away its stalwarts.

“We believe we have the best IP in entertainment,” Faries said. “We believe we have some of the greatest gaming talent the world’s ever known. We are going to be as good as our ability to collaborate across these functions and putting together the playbook internally to brainstorm as one, have strong strategic conversations and planning cycles as one, and to align against a big vision that we have for the whole company, in addition to our individual universes and games.”