This week, *Diablo 4* unveiled its first content roadmap for 2025, with a sneak peek into 2026. In an exclusive interview with IGN, game director Brent Gibson delved into the roadmap, touching on the second expansion and upcoming collaborations. However, the community has raised concerns about the lack of substantial new content for 2025, questioning its ability to keep players engaged.
Redditor Inangelion captured the community's sentiment with a touch of sarcasm, saying, “Oh boy! Can't wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers. It's gonna be so dope!” Many hardcore *Diablo 4* players share this disappointment, yearning for more thrilling content.
Feldoneq2wire compared *Diablo 4* to other action role-playing games, noting, “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, a self-proclaimed fan of the game, 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 echoed this sentiment, saying, “‘And more’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.”
The online debate grew so intense that Diablo community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne stepped in to clarify, “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 issue lies in Blizzard's approach to seasonal content, which resets each season. While some appreciate the fresh start, others feel it discourages deep engagement. There's a divide between those who believe constant content would be overwhelming and those who might wait until 2026 for more significant updates.
Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra chimed in on X/Twitter, advising, “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, originally slated for 2025 but now set for 2026, has sparked further discussion. Blizzard had planned annual expansions, with *Vessel of Hatred* launching in 2024, but the second expansion will skip a year.
In our interview, Gibson discussed the challenges of developing *Diablo 4* as a live service game with free seasonal content alongside major paid expansions. He noted, “I definitely feel like gamers are more hungry than they've ever been. 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.
