Diablo 4 recently unveiled its first content roadmap, giving fans a sneak peek at what to expect in 2025 and teasing further developments 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 IP collaborations. However, the release of the roadmap has sparked a wave of concern among the Diablo 4 community, with many questioning the sufficiency of the new content planned for 2025.
Community reactions on Reddit have ranged from sarcastic to outright disappointed. Redditor Inangelion commented, "Oh boy! Can't wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers. It's gonna be so dope!" This sentiment seems to echo the feelings of many hardcore players who were hoping for more innovative and engaging content.
Feldoneq2wire compared the content updates to other action role-playing games (ARPGs), saying, "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.' 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?'"
Fragrantbutte expressed their love for the game but also their disappointment, stating, "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." Artyfowl444 added, "‘And more’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here."
The discussion on the Diablo 4 subreddit became so heated that community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne felt compelled to intervene, explaining, "We added fewer details to the later parts of the roadmap to accommodate for things the team is still working on. This isn't all that's coming in 2025 :)"
Part of the discontent stems from Blizzard's seasonal content approach for Diablo 4. While some players appreciate the seasonal reset, others feel it diminishes the incentive to engage deeply with each new season. There's a divide between those who believe a constant build-up of seasonal content would make the game overwhelming, and those contemplating a hiatus until 2026 when more substantial content is expected.
Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard Entertainment and current executive at Microsoft, shared his insights on the matter via a post on X/Twitter. He advised, "Don't ship to check a box. 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, originally slated for 2025, has also contributed to the community's unease. Blizzard had planned annual expansions for Diablo 4, with the first, Vessel of Hatred, launching in 2024, but the second will now skip 2025.
In our interview with Gibson, he discussed the challenges of maintaining 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, with Season 9 expected in the summer, and Season 10 later in the year.
