On November 2, 2018, Blizzard closed its annual BlizzCon keynote by announcing, to scattered applause, a Diablo game for phones. It was a baffling marketing decision that immediately set off controversy, as fans of Blizzard’s iconic action-role-playing game franchise loudly accused the company of neglecting its PC players.

Other shows might be bigger, but every year Blizzcon brings out the absolute best in cosplay.

There was a time, hard as it might be to remember, when Overwatch's wackiest hero was a peanut-butter-loving science ape from the moon. Earlier this year, however, he was usurped by a mech-piloting, robo-voiced, Thunderdome-battling hamster who's also from the moon. How do you top that? Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan isn't sure he wants to.

Why was the Diablo Immortal backlash so severe? Why didn't Blizzard see it coming? Today on Kotaku Splitscreen, we discuss.

Since our deep dive into the culture of crunch underpinning Red Dead Redemption 2, and how ingratiated it is throughout the industry, developers have been a little more open about the human cost of making games.

At Blizzcon this year, I took the opportunity to ask multiple Blizzard developers on how their attitude towards crunch, and how they manage it within their own teams.

This year’s BlizzCon was an odd one on a lot of levels, but I was personally stricken by the number of friends and acquaintances who told me they’d taken weeks or months off from playing Overwatch.

Last year and the year before, it was an obsession. Lately, though, it’s felt a little stale. Despite that sentiment, game director and proud internet papa Jeff Kaplan isn’t sounding the alarms just yet.

Diablo has always been a franchise about battling back the seventh circle of hell, sometimes in a viscerally bloody fashion. It's a mature franchise. Diablo Immortal, on the other hand, will be a game Blizzard hopes to target at all ages.

At first glance, remastering 2002’s Warcraft III seems like a fairly straightforward task. Take the ugly bits and make them pretty. Overhaul the cutscenes. Give all the muddy terrain and building textures a 2018 makeover. Redo Arthas’ weird face. For Blizzard’s classics team, though, that’s just the beginning.

Overwatch fans disappointed with Ashe should know that six new heroes are in the works, Blizzard has told Kotaku, and that fans hoping for more diversity in the popular game’s cast of characters will hopefully find what they’re looking for in upcoming updates.

In many ways, Overwatch’s newest hero Ashe is a contradiction. She’s pinpoint-accurate at a distance, but she’s not a sniper. Her HP pool drains faster than a water balloon hitting a ceiling fan, but she can get down in the thick of things and help capture points.

Warcraft 3 is finally coming back. Due out in the middle of next year, the classic campaign of Arthas gone bad has gotten a substantial overhaul. Here's everything we know about the game so far.

Chuck Norris references. Anal jokes. Killing two dozen raptors to harvest ten raptor heads. The Barrens. Shit, after two hours of the World of Warcraft Classic demo, I’m still in the Barrens. It’s an inescapable nightmare, which is to say it’s perfect.

When Blizzard’s sole Diablo announcement at this year’s BlizzCon turned out to be a game for phones, it set off a firestorm of angry reactions from fans who had hoped for a new Diablo on PC. But what about Diablo 4?

Esports is a brutal world: there's a lot of gamers and not a lot of positions. But what happens when you have to compete for one of those positions while playing at 200ms at best? That's the unfortunate reality for Australia's Overwatch World Cup members, who have been trialling under some truly crappy circumstances.

People aren't happy about Diablo Immortal. Some of that is a backlash against Immortal directly, some of it is directed towards the state of mobile games, and some due to the lack of Diablo 4.

None of that is a great start for Immortal, which has ambitious plans for the Diablo formula. But judging off what was available in the Blizzcon demo, we're no closer to understanding how that ambition plays out.

Yesterday, during a BlizzCon Q&A shortly after the announcement of mobile game Diablo Immortal, a fan in a red shirt approached the mic. "Just was wondering," he said in a deadpan tone, "is this an out-of-season April Fool's joke?" The audience cheered.

Despite expecting some backlash, Blizzard has still been knocked around by the response to Diablo Immortal. So at every opportunity, the company has tried to remind fans that they're working on other Diablo projects. Not Diablo 4 exactly, but something.

Earlier this year it was announced that Blizzard founder Mike Morhaime would be stepping down as Blizzard president, after 27 years straight with the company. And to say farewell, Blizzard got the crowd involved.

World of Warcraft's first major post-Battle for Azeroth content update, Tides of Vengeance, launches on December 11, but that's not important right now. The update after that, Rise of Azshara, will take players to the naga home of Azjatar, the lost gnome city of Mechagon, and beyond.