Blizzard Announces End Of ‘World Of Warcraft,’ ‘Diablo III’ And Other Games On Windows XP, Vista

As Blizzard Entertainment continues to work on improving its games, it has decided to move forward sans the support for Windows XP and Windows Vista. The two Microsoft operating systems are already dated, and the video game company has also learned that most of its clients have already moved on to newer versions of the Windows OS.

Announcing the news on its General Discussion page, a Blizzard representative wrote that the process of terminating support for XP and Vista will commence later this year. What this means of course is the end of the road for “World of Warcraft,” “Diablo III,” “StarCraft II,” “Hearthstone” and “Heroes of the Storm” players who still use the aforesaid Microsoft operating systems on their daily drivers.

This should not come as a surprise for Microsoft already terminated its mainstream support for the two Windows versions in 2009 and 2012. The last time that Windows XP got updated was on April 8, 2014. On the other hand, Windows Vista has extended support that will last until April 11 of this year.

“After these older operating systems are no longer supported, the games will not run on them, so we encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version,” Blizzard explained. “We’ll be rolling out this change on a staggered schedule, and will post further notices as we get closer to making the change for each game.”

This will not cause some form of inconvenience to players who have already jumped ship and switched to either Windows 7 or Windows 8 or even to Windows 10. Blizzard is posting the dates of when support for XP and Vista would end, but gamers should do the upgrade as soon as possible if they wish to continue playing their favorite Blizzard titles, as per PC Gamer.

Meanwhile, Blizzard also announced recently that it is releasing three expansions for “Hearthstone” this year. The expansions will comprise 130 cards each, and every expansion will be released at specific times. Though no specific dates have been announced as of late, IGN reported that the first expansion will come out early this year, the second will be released in the middle of 2017 and the last one will arrive toward the end of the year. More details about the game expansions are found here.