BlizzCon 2021 has been canceled, according to an announcement from BlizzCon’s executive producer Saralyn Smith via the BlizzCon site. The company plans to pick things back up early next year with a global event that will combine its recent online event, BlizzConline, with “smaller in-person gatherings.”
Smith said the COVID-19 pandemic and California’s changing safety guidelines are the reasons behind the sudden cancellation. Blizzard says that those issues left Blizzard and its partners uncertain that they would be able to put on an event on the level that fans expect by November.
This isn’t the first hit that the company has taken as of late. With the recent departure of Overwatch director, Jeff Kaplan and Overwatch lead character artist Renaud Galand, uncertainty seems to be the keyword for the company lately.
While Overwatch 2 is apparently on the horizon — Blizzard even released more information about the game just days ago — the string of bad news has left fans wondering what the future of the company looks like. IGN recently published a report about the state of the company, which outlines a list of pain points the company has endured over the past few years.
There may be even more information on the way for Overwatch and Diablo fans despite this cancellation, with the early 2022 show being confirmed via the same post by Smith. We expect more details on this online-physical hybrid event later this year.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”