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

This week, Blizzard unveiled the first content roadmap for *Diablo 4*, offering a glimpse into the game's future through 2025 and hinting at what's to come in 2026. IGN sat down with game director Brent Gibson to dissect the roadmap, covering topics from the much-anticipated second expansion to potential IP collaborations. However, the roadmap's reveal has sparked a wave of concern among the *Diablo 4* community regarding the depth and excitement of the planned 2025 content.

The community's reaction was swift and vocal, with many expressing their disappointment on platforms like Reddit. "Oh boy! Can't wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers," remarked redditor Inangelion sarcastically. "It's gonna be so dope!" This sentiment echoes the feelings of many dedicated *Diablo 4* players who were hoping for more substantial updates.

Fellow player feldoneq2wire elaborated on the community's expectations, 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, another fan, added, "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 chimed in, "‘And more’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here."

The online debate grew so intense that Diablo community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne felt compelled to respond on the game's subreddit, stating, "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 :)"

A significant point of contention is Blizzard's approach to seasonal content in *Diablo 4*. While some appreciate the fresh start each season brings, others feel it discourages deep engagement. The debate centers on whether the game should retain all seasonal content or if the current model, which some find repetitive, should be overhauled.

Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard Entertainment, weighed in on the issue via a post on X/Twitter, stating, "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 discussion around expansions stems from the delay of the second expansion, originally slated for 2025 but now postponed to 2026. Blizzard had planned to release expansions annually, but after launching *Vessel of Hatred* in 2024, the second expansion will skip a year.

In our interview, Gibson shed light on 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 noted. "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."

Gibson emphasized the importance of community interaction and the diverse needs of *Diablo 4*'s player base. "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."

He further explained how the team addresses different player segments with each season, saying, "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.