Diablo 4's 2025 Roadmap Disappoints Hardcore Fans, Puzzles Former Blizzard President

This week, Diablo 4 unveiled its first content roadmap, giving players a glimpse of what to expect in 2025 and teasing content for 2026. IGN sat down with game director Brent Gibson to delve into the roadmap, covering topics from the second expansion to upcoming collaborations with other IPs. However, following the roadmap's release, the Diablo 4 community has voiced concerns about the 2025 content, questioning its sufficiency to maintain player engagement.

Hardcore fans, like redditor Inangelion, expressed their sentiments with a mix of excitement and sarcasm: "Oh boy! Can't wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers. It's gonna be so dope!" This sentiment resonated with other dedicated players who had hoped for more substantial updates. Feldoneq2wire highlighted the contrast between Diablo 4 and other ARPGs, 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?' "

While Fragrantbutte expressed their love for the game, they found the roadmap lacking in depth: "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 escalated to the point where Diablo community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne addressed the community's concerns on the Diablo 4 subreddit: "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 :)"

One issue at the heart of the debate is Blizzard's approach to seasonal content for Diablo 4. Some players appreciate the seasonal reset, while others feel it discourages deep engagement. There's a divide between those who believe constant seasonal content would be overwhelming and those contemplating a hiatus until 2026 for more significant updates.

Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard Entertainment and a corporate executive at Microsoft, weighed in on the debate via a post on X/Twitter: "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

The community's concerns about expansions stem from the delay of the second expansion, originally slated for 2025 but now postponed to 2026. Blizzard had planned annual expansions for Diablo 4, with the first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, launching in 2024. However, the second expansion will skip 2025.

In our interview, Gibson discussed the challenges of developing 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. 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.