Diablo 4's 2025 Plan Disappoints Hardcore Fans, Confuses Ex-Blizzard President

This week, Diablo 4 unveiled its first content roadmap, offering a glimpse into the future of the action role-playing game for 2025 and teasing what's in store for 2026. IGN had the opportunity to sit down with game director Brent Gibson to delve into the roadmap, covering topics from the second expansion to potential collaborations with other IPs. However, the roadmap's release has sparked a wave of concern among the Diablo 4 community, with many players questioning whether the planned content for 2025 is substantial enough to keep them engaged.

"Oh boy! Can't wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers," remarked redditor Inangelion. "It's gonna be so dope!" This sentiment reflects the feelings of many dedicated Diablo 4 players who were hoping for more thrilling announcements regarding 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," expressed Fragrantbutte.

"'And more' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here," noted artyfowl444.

The online debate escalated to the point where Diablo community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne stepped in to address the concerns on the Diablo 4 subreddit. "We added fewer details to the later parts of the roadmap to accommodate for things the team is still working on," they explained. "This isn't all that's coming in 2025 :)"

One of the core issues highlighted by the community is Blizzard’s approach to seasonal content for Diablo 4. While some appreciate the reset that comes with each season, others feel that it diminishes the incentive to deeply engage with the game. There's a divide between those who believe maintaining constant seasonal content would make the game overwhelming, and those who are considering taking a break until 2026 when more substantial updates are expected.

Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard Entertainment and now a corporate leader at Microsoft, weighed in on the discussion via a post on X/Twitter. "Don't ship to check a box," Ybarra stated. "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 discourse around Diablo 4's expansions stems from the delay of the second expansion, initially planned for 2025 but now postponed to 2026. Blizzard had envisioned releasing an expansion annually, with the first, Vessel of Hatred, launching in 2024, but the second expansion will miss the 2025 window.

In our interview, Gibson shared insights on the challenges of sustaining Diablo 4 as a live service game, balancing free seasonal content with major paid expansions. "I definitely feel like gamers are more hungry than they've ever been," Gibson remarked. "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, followed by Season 9 in the summer, and Season 10 later in the year.