Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Diablo 4’s first expansion is finally out in the wild - just a little later than planned.
Blizzard Entertainment has officially launched Diablo 4’s first expansion, titled Vessel of Hatred. The expansion was planned to launch at 7AM GMT+8 today, but due to what Blizzard described as a “small technical issue,” it ended up launching on all platforms around 12.30PM instead.
Still, better late than never, right?
Diablo 4 suffers late launch due to “small technical issue”
Much like the base game, Vessel of Hatred has suffered a somewhat complicated launch. All in all, players had to wait roughly five hours past its previously-announced launch time, as Blizzard sorted out some last-minute technical issues in the backend.
Thankfully, the company was able to give players a heads up on the delay more than an hour before its planned launch, so anyone paying attention to Blizzard’s social media accounts weren’t left hanging at 7AM GMT+8. Around 5.30AM GMT+8, players were told that Blizzard was “tackling a small issue on the backend which is going to cause us to miss that 4PM PDT (7AM GMT+8) time” and that the company would be “locking logins and removing players from the game slowly while we prep for launch.”
Blizzard’s global director of community for Diablo, Adam Fletcher, then notified Battle.net users that they would have to download an additional sizable update before playing, and that they were “running last minute QA verifications before we turn things on.” At 12.16PM GMT+8, Fletcher announced that these verifications were complete and that Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred was officially live on all platforms.
Despite the delay, this is proving to be a much less complicated release than Diablo 4's thus far, which saw players experience massive login queues, serious gameplay bugs and multiple connection errors at launch. In one particularly strange incident, PlayStation owners begin purchasing microtransactions to bypass a login error during the game’s early access period.
Hopefully, Vessel of Hatred’s launch week fares a little better. Players have plenty of content to dig into in this expansion, ranging from an all-new character class to the jungle-themed region of Nahantu.