Heroes of the Storm was the first game Blizzard put on stage at the BlizzCon 2026 Opening Ceremony, which seems to be an odd choice since it’s a game the company officially stopped adding content to in July 2022. Xal’atath, the Harbinger of the Void and the central villain of World of Warcraft’s current Midnight expansion, is joining the roster on September 28, with a Public Test Realm run starting September 14. She’s the first new hero since Hogger arrived in December 2020 as the game’s 90th, a gap of nearly six years during which Blizzard limited its work on the MOBA to balance passes and bug fixes.
Blizzard framed the announcement around the players who kept showing up anyway. Its roundup credits Xal’atath’s arrival to those who continued to carry the torch for Heroes over the years, and it ends the section with a line that might be more exciting than the hero reveal itself: there may be even more to come for Heroes in the future.
Xal’atath originated in World of Warcraft’s Legion expansion as the voice inside the Shadow Priest artifact weapon before graduating to the primary antagonist of the Worldsoul Saga, which makes her a timely pick given the Eclipse update Blizzard previewed for Midnight during the same ceremony. Her role and kit in Heroes of the Storm weren’t detailed in the written announcement, so the PTR on Monday is the first real look at how she plays.
Heroes of the Storm launched in 2015, got a 2.0 relaunch in 2017, and has been in maintenance mode for four years, the last of them under Microsoft ownership, which added hero licenses as a Game Pass perk. Whether one hero and a tease amount to a revival is a question Blizzard left open on stage, and the answer probably depends on what comes after September 28. I played the game at BlizzCon back in 2013, two years before it launched, which is a long time to still be writing about it.
