In an extended livestream today, Blizzard revealed a whole lot more details for Season 2 of Diablo 4, called Season of the Blood, and major reworks to progression and the endgame player experience.
Season of the Blood will focus on vampires, who become the latest major scourge of Sanctuary in the wake of Lilith's actions in the vanilla Diable 4 campaign. The player is infected with vampirism and gains evil powers to weild against this classic foe, giving plenty of excuses for new, deadly powers for players to add to their seasonal ARPG arsenal. Blizzard will also introduce a new NPC, Erys, a crossbow-weilding vampire hunter who will become the player's bestie for the next few months.
But beyond the details about the upcoming season, Blizzard also spent a lot of time detailing big changes coming to the game that specifically target the endgame experience, which has become a sore spot for many players after a series of debuffs and widely criticized changes to the meta put a damper on the live-service game despite an extremely strong launch.
The biggest of those changes are improved XP gains after level 50, which will supposedly make the endgame grind to level 100 "40% faster".
In a lengthy interview with IGN, game directors Joe Shely and Joseph Piepiora discussed a wide range of topics, from endgame content to the Steam release, their learning from the launch of Diablo 4 to microtransactions.
"We found that the game feels like it slows down a bit," said Shely. "We felt that there needed to be more content in the 50-100 and especially the 70-100 range. We also felt like it was simply too slow to get to 100. The way that players have approached the game is that they set a goal for themselves to reach level 100 and that goal needs to feel like it's an achievable goal for a lot of our players. It felt, in Season 1, we think, like it was not as achievable."
Blizzard hopes the addition of five endgame bosses, including one high-difficulty enemy with an arduous summoning process, will help that grind feel better as well, and much attention is being paid in Season 2 on activities to take on at higher power levels.
Other changes are less dramatic to the meta, but nonetheless badly needed, like the long-promised gem rework, which will move those items to the crafting materials page, freeing up some much-needed space in the player's inventory.
When asked if Blizzard was too quick to nerf the fun out of the game after the launch of Diablo 4, the team acknowledged it's still learning how to walk that particular balancing tightrope. "I think we learned a lot from the release of the game and these are ways I think we can deliver more of what players want to see," Shely said.
"We're really excited about players getting to see everything we have in Season 2," said Piepoira. "There are some big adjustments in it, but they're things we really believe in that we think make the game feel a lot better to play — we think players will too."
Among the slew of announcements is the surprising decision by Blizzard to bring Diablo 4 to the competing PC distribution platform, Steam, starting October 17, in a move to provide "more ways for players to engage with Diablo 4". Diablo 4 is the second Blizzard game to make a delayed debut on Steam, following in the footsteps of Overwatch 2.
