BlizzCon, or BlizzConline as it was called this year, felt rather different. It wasn't really the lack of a public for me—since that's something I've always had in a sense since I never went on location, so that was a bonus if anything—but rather the way the panels were structured. To be fair, I haven't watched all or even many of them yet, mostly just a couple of the ones that came after the main event, but still there was a distinct different style to them, much more personal something akin to a bunch of friends talking. Now it was at times rather obvious that they had a list of talking points that they needed to get through, but I still liked the vibe from what I've seen. To be fair, that probably partially came from it being the first time in a good while that they actually had the opportunity to catch up in real life as opposed to online, so perhaps that was to be expected even if it came as something of a positive surprise for me.
Another thing that really stood out for me this time around, probably owing to Blizzard not really having anything truly new to announce this year, was the heavy focus on nostalgia. That is naturally part of the whole thing when you've already released something like World of Warcaft Classic, and of course plays into the 30 anniversary, but still it felt somewhat interesting to see, especially when considering how much remastered stuff they actually ended up announcing.
This whole nostalgia thing did end up spurring some deeper thinking on my part, since it feels at times I can get rather stuck living in the past to a certain degree—looking at the current design of the blog—and while that isn't in and of itself necessarily a bad thing it can definitely be a indicator of something left unresolved. I think one of the biggest points on this for me in recent times, was when I ended up changing my main's name which felt like a much bigger thing than it probably is. Now sure, to a certain degree a name is actually a big thing, even if it is one in a game, but in retrospect I think there was quite a lot of unresolved emotions that I was clinging on to through the name, mostly unaware, and changing it helped me deal with those feelings better.
That doesn't mean that I think that something being old or having me be nostalgic about something translate to it in someway being bad or negative in and of itself, but it has encouraged me to more critically look and analyze the feelings I think I have and actually have about certain things, especially when there is some outside influence nudging me in a certain direction.
With all of that said, much of the nostalgia Blizzard was selling us on wasn't really something that applied to me, I didn't actually play that much Diablo II or any of the things from the collection, so that does afford me the opportunity to go in with fresh eyes if I wanted to, but I don't think I could handle the mechanics of old games at this point—even Diablo II, was never really a fan of the whole dropping items on death thing, just let me load the game.
The panels were really nice though.