Diablo 4’s 2025 Roadmap Hasn’t Gone Down Well With Hardcore Fans — and Even the Former President of Blizzard Isn’t Sure Where the Game Is Going
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Diablo 4 this week got its first roadmap of content, providing an overview of what’s coming to the action role-playing game in 2025, with a tease for what’s coming in 2026.
IGN interviewed game director Brent Gibson to go over the Diablo 4 roadmap, discussing everything from expansion two to upcoming IP collaborations. But in the wake of the roadmap’s release, Diablo 4’s community has expressed concern about 2025, and questioned whether there’s enough new content to keep them coming back.
“Oh boy! Can’t wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers,” said redditor Inangelion. “It’s gonna be so dope!”
It’s a sentiment shared by a number of hardcore Diablo 4 players who were hoping for more excitement around upcoming content.
“A new season in other ARPGs is like ‘let’s put in a little housing system where you build up a home base with vendors that give you more gear’ or ‘let’s put in a whole shipping system where traders from other lands bring materials that let you upgrade your items in ways that change your class mechanic entirely,’ “ added feldoneq2wire.
“A new season in D4 is ‘what color are we making helltides this time?’ And ‘what powers and reputation skins are we whipping up this time?’ “
“I’m not a Diablo 4 hater, I love the game, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of meat on the bone here which is a bit disappointing,” said Fragrantbutte.
“ ‘And more’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here,” added artyfowl444.
The debate online got to the point where Diablo community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne stepped into the main thread on the Diablo 4 subreddit to address the complaints: “We added fewer details to the later parts of the roadmap to accommodate for things the team is still working on,” they insisted. “This isn’t all that’s coming in 2025 :)”
Part of the issue is Blizzard’s one-shot approach to seasonal content for Diablo 4. Some like that the experience resets somewhat each season, whereas others have complained that it makes engaging too deeply in each new season pointless. Where some say if all seasonal content remained constant Diablo 4 would become overwhelming, others say they’re thinking of ditching the game and not coming back until 2026 when more meaningful content comes out.
Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard Entertainment and corporate boss at its parent company, Microsoft, waded into the debate in a post on X/ Twitter.
“Don’t ship to check a box,” Ybarra said. “Season’s need to get off the cycle of shipping, spending two months to fix issues, then repeating.
“Pause and give the team time to really address the end-game issues. Playing for a week to then one or three shot a ‘uber’ boss 500 times for a unique, then quitting until next season is fundamentally not fun.
“Expansions schedule is too long – should be yearly. Reduce ‘story’ investment (costs so much for one time element in a ARPG) and focus on new classes, new mob types, new end-game activities that last more than a few days.
“If the cycle continues to just ship w/o fixing the fundamental issues, then I’m not sure where Diablo is going. You can add all the end-game activities you want, but you’ll be running in place with the same issues. At some point there’s just so many random things, it’s not worth the effort.”
The comments on Diablo 4’s expansions have to do with the delay to expansion two, which was once due out in 2025 but will now launch in 2026. Blizzard’s initial plan for Diablo 4 was to release an expansion every year, and while expansion one, Vessel of Hatred, launched in 2024, expansion two will skip 2025.
In our interview, Gibson discussed the reality of continuing to develop Diablo 4 as a live service game with free seasonal content as well as a big paid-for expansion.
“I definitely feel like gamers are more hungry than they’ve ever been,” Gibson said. “And even if you delivered on their appetite today, that appetite will shift tomorrow. And so you just have to be in a really good spot to adapt to that situation. Because a lot of times too, what’s important this month is going to be completely different three months from now. The priority of things can shift very, very quickly based on another game release or the state of your own game. Or maybe we’ve discovered something really cool and we want to be able to get it in there to change the formula.
“And so it is definitely a new way of developing. It is definitely high interaction with the community. The interesting thing about Diablo is that we have a lot of different community types, right? We have our casual players, we have our hardcore players. They all fall into subdivisions of types of players inside of that. And so what we look to do is season upon season, look at the things that are important to some of those groups and go after them with focus.
“When you take a look at something like what we’re doing in Season 8, we know we have a ton of boss lair feedback and so we’re adding in the quality of life improvements for those players where that is a big focus of their gameplay type, or we might shift to nightmare dungeons when we’re in Season 9. And so it’s an opportunity for us to address different groups at different times, leading to an expansion where we’re going to be addressing everybody all at once with something big.”
Diablo 4 Season 8 launches later in April, with Season 9 currently due out in the summer, and Season 10 later in the year.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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