Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Diablo 4’s quarterly updates will add new story content and mechanics every three months.
Game Informer’s new cover story for Diablo 4 confirms that ‘meaty’ quarterly updates will add new story content and mechanics to the game every three months. These updates will also come with new seasonal battle passes, which come in free and paid-for tiers.
Diablo 4’s associate game director Joe Piepiora reportedly hesitated to use the word ‘expansion’ to describe these content updates, which sound more like the seasonal content updates doled out in games like Fortnite and Overwatch 2. Each season will run for around three months and include new story content, new mechanics and new features along with a battle pass full of cosmetics.
Season 1 will not go live when Diablo 4 launches. Instead, the game’s first season of content will likely debut sometime post-launch, when most players have beaten the campaign and are hungry for additional content. Three months make for a surprisingly short turnaround time for new story content in the action-RPG however, and fans shouldn’t expect major questlines like those seen in the main campaign to be churned out so quickly and often.
Blizzard also went into more detail on Diablo 4’s endgame in the Game Informer cover story, including the affixes that make replaying in-game dungeons so unpredictable. More than 120 dungeons are available in the game, and two newly-revealed affixes will make things difficult for returning players. One affix reportedly sends an unkillable pillar of lightning chasing after players throughout a dungeon, while another introduces a shade that can obscure player vision and summon enemies.
Helltides can also spawn within Sanctuary to usher in even deadlier enemies that threaten to destroy unprepared players, and multiple Helltides can exist at the same time in different places. These deadly enemies can even include in-game bosses. The game will also get expansions eventually, though the paid-for DLCs will add a lot more content than these regular seasonal updates.
Diablo 4 launches on June 6, 2023.
