Diablo 4's 2025 Plan Criticized by Fans and Ex-Blizzard President

Diablo 4 enthusiasts have eagerly awaited the game's first content roadmap, which was recently unveiled, providing a glimpse into what's planned for 2025 and hinting at developments for 2026. IGN had the opportunity to sit down with game director Brent Gibson to discuss the roadmap, covering topics from the second expansion to potential collaborations with other IPs. However, the community's response has been mixed, with some expressing concerns over the sufficiency of the new content slated for 2025.

"Oh boy! Can't wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers," remarked redditor Inangelion. "It's gonna be so dope!" This sentiment echoes the feelings of many hardcore Diablo 4 players who were hoping for more substantial updates in the upcoming seasons.

"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,'" noted 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 discussion on the Diablo 4 subreddit reached a point where community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne felt compelled to address the community's concerns directly. "We added fewer details to the later parts of the roadmap to accommodate for things the team is still working on," they stated. "This isn't all that's coming in 2025 :)"

One of the core issues raised by players is Blizzard's approach to seasonal content in Diablo 4. While some appreciate the fresh start each season brings, others feel that the reset makes deep engagement with each season less rewarding. There's a divide between those who believe a constant stream of content would be overwhelming and those contemplating a break until 2026, hoping for more significant updates.

Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard Entertainment and a corporate executive at its parent company, Microsoft, joined the conversation on X/Twitter, offering his perspective. "Don't ship to check a box," Ybarra advised. "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."

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred Gameplay Screenshots

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The delay of the second expansion to 2026, initially planned for 2025, has sparked further discussion. Blizzard had aimed to release an expansion annually, with the first, Vessel of Hatred, launching in 2024.

In our interview with Gibson, he elaborated on the challenges of maintaining Diablo 4 as a live service game, balancing free seasonal content with significant paid expansions. "I definitely feel like gamers are more hungry than they've ever been," Gibson explained. "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 is set to launch later in April, with Season 9 expected in the summer, and Season 10 slated for later in the year.