Diablo 4’s Season of the Malignant is kicking into gear on July 20 and players will be starting fresh on new characters where they’ll engage in a variety of seasonal content and progress through the game’s 90-tier battle pass.Diablo 4’s first season will run for around three months and the seasonal realm can be accessed by players once they’ve completed the campaign.
Game Rant sat down withDiablo 4Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora, Dungeon Designer Michelle Piña, and Quest Designer Madeleine James to discuss the game’s debut season. They talked about how they looked back onDiablo 3’s seasonal content for inspiration and how they tried to improve the system while keeping many of the things they felt worked well for their predecessor.
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Diablo 4’s Seasons Will Be Easier To Progress Than Diablo 3
Diablo 4’s season journey is very similar toDiablo 3: it’s divided into several chapters, each of which consists of a number of objectives for players to complete before moving up to the next chapter. A major improvement overDiablo 3’s seasons is that players won’t actually have to complete the full list of objectives to move on. This ensures that players who aren’t interested in certain aspects of the game aren’t forced to engage in them, particularlyDiablo 4’s Fields of HatredPVP content.
Something we added was the ability for us to have more objectives than you actually require in order to move on to another chapter. For example, some players might not want to engage with PVP content in the Fields of Hatred. For players who do, they can go get some kills, find some shards, and use that as a way for them to complete parts of their season journey.
The other thing we really wanted to hold on to is the idea of meaningful upgrades that change the way I’m playing or give me more things to look forward to by leveling up new characters. We added new Legendary Aspects you will earn as you’re progressing through the season journey, but in addition to the new Legendary Aspects, we also took a bunch of Legendary Aspects you can’t normally get in the Codex of Power. You get those recipes as a result of going through the season journey. Now there’s more variety for you to actually choose from when you’re making a new character and more ways to get some parts of your build online.
Diablo 3’s season journey chapters typically rewarded class set pieces and portrait frames for their completion, and this has been expanded upon inDiablo 4. Players will be able to acquire Legendary Aspects that aren’t normallyavailable in the Codex of Power, so progressing through the season journey will actually open up more opportunities for build variety rather than sticking players with one specific set. Overall, players have much more freedom in terms of both progress and character builds withDiablo 4’s seasons.
Diablo 4’s Seasons Are More Narrative-Driven
Another major shift fromDiablo 3’s seasons is the new focus on narrative development.Diablo 3seasons offered little in the way of additional storytelling, andDiablo 4’s developerswanted to use seasons as an opportunity to explore more of Sanctuary’s lore. Each season ofDiablo 4will feature a more in-depth, self-contained narrative separate from the campaign, and this will provide some context when it comes to that season’s particular mechanics.
We talked about Diablo 3 seasons quite a bit. We have members of the Diablo 3 seasons team that we talk to and tried to get their philosophies and what lessons they’ve learned. a lot of this was finding out what seasons mean for Diablo 4. One of those is we wanted to take more of a narrative focus on explaining the new mechanics. What are the Malignant? I don’t think we’ll ever get to campaign-level storytelling, but we still wanted to explore all of the various stories of Sanctuary. Not everything is about Lilith and Inarius. We have a huge world and cultures, and we want to be able to go into all of that and expand on the story of Sanctuary through seasons.
This is great news for those who are interested inDiablo’s surprisingly deep lore, and players can look forward to exploring more of Sanctuary’s characters and cultures over the coming years. Although the developers stated that seasonal stories are intended to be separate from the campaign, it will be interesting to see how the stories take shape and what will become of Sanctuary’s future post-Lilith.
Diablo 4is now available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
