lizzCon 2009 offered up a lot of news. First, the big (albeit expected announcement): the next WoW expansion, Cataclysm, will ship in 2010. Also unveiled was the Monk, the fourth playable class in Diablo III. As cool as these morsels were, what impressed me most was the work that Blizzard was doing behind the scenes to improve all their products, future and existing. Forget Goblin and Worgen news — these three advancements will have the biggest impact on how you enjoy Blizzard's games in the years to come.
The New BATTLE.NET
While it may not get players as excited as a new Diablo III class or the upcoming WoW expansion, Battle.net has clearly been the focus of most of Blizzard's attention over the last year. What began as a simple matchmaking client for online multiplayer is being completely reinvented to compete with more full-featured online gaming communities. Battle.net 2.0 looks to combine the very best of Xbox Live, Facebook, Twitter and IM clients — when it launches alongside Starcraft II (presumably sometime next year), you'll be able to use the service to browse and download mods, communicate with gamers across the library of Blizzard games and easily find players of your skill level to team up with or play against.
None of these features are revolutionary by themselves, but Blizzard's implementation is truly a sight to behold. While not announced, expect cross-platform functionality like we saw with the recently released WoW Armory App for the iPhone. Do you think it would be cool to talk to your guildmates via WoW chat even when away from the game? Well, rest assured — Blizzard thinks it would be cool, too.
Starcraft II Mapmaker
There are mapmakers, and then there are mapmakers. Starcraft II's content creation tools are truly a sight to behold. Players with the right amount of skill and imagination are bound to release some pretty impressive stuff — the mapmaker that's packaged with Starcraft II is the exact same coding tool which Blizzard is using to assemble the game's campaign missions.
To help amateur designers get their content out to the public, Blizzard is also unveiling a maps marketplace not unlike Apple's Apps Store for the iPhone. Maps can be distributed for free, or designers can try to market their really great concepts as "premium," pay-to-play content.
Cross-Server "Looking for Group"
Any WoW player can tell you: unless you're trying to play the newest maps and content, finding a group to team up with can be an absolute pain. Blizzard hopes to make things a little bit easier. Starting in patch 3.3, it will be possible to form a group for instances with players on different servers. At release, this will only work for 5-man parties, but Blizzard hopes to expand this to 10 and 25-man raids as soon as possible. Looking for players to run BC dungeons just got a whole lot easier.
