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Entertainment1 year ago

This week: Diablo 4 launches on Steam with vampire-themed Season 2

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Diablo 4 is coming to Steam on the same day Season 2 launches with all-new content. 

Diablo 4 is officially coming to Steam on October 18 this week, Blizzard has announced. The action-RPG will launch on the platform with a new vampire-themed season of content that brings more items, quests and bosses to the game - along with a host of quality-of-life updates.

 

Blizzard is finally bringing its games to Steam!

Blizzard previously announced that it would start bringing its games to Steam a while back, starting with Overwatch 2. It shouldn't be any surprise that its most popular ongoing game is following suit, especially with the launch of Season 2 being a great opportunity to pull new players in. Thanks to a forthcoming update, they won’t even have to play through the campaign anymore to access Season 2’s content. 

Diablo 4 will launch on Steam with cross-play and cross-save across all available platforms, but you’ll need to buy the game on Steam first and connect it to an existing Battle.net account. That means you can keep your progression from Battle.net, but you will have to buy another copy of the game on Steam first. Steam achievements will be available at launch, and the game will also be Steam Deck-verified for anyone who wants to slay Sanctuary’s more impolite inhabitants on the go. 

When Overwatch 2 launched on Steam, the game got review-bombed thanks to its aggressive monetisation, and now remains one of the platform’s lowest-rated games. With Diablo 4’s past controversies in mind, it will be interesting to see if history repeats itself this week. 

 

Diablo 4 Season 2’s big changes

Diablo 4’s second season is titled the Season of Blood, and it involves hordes of vampires invading Sanctuary to cause all manner of chaos. The player will team up with a vampire hunter named Erys (Gemma Chan) in a new quest line to investigate Sanctuary’s latest threat and harness vampiric powers. Besides the new quests, Season 2 also brings new combat abilities for players to use and five more endgame bosses to slay. Vampiric powers allow players to fight like a vampire, but they’ll need Potent Blood and Pact Armour to do so. 

The real star of the show seems to be the slew of new quality-of-life updates coming with Patch 1.2.0. Mounts are getting tweaked to move around Sanctuary faster, renown rewards now carry from one season to the next, players can gain XP 40% faster and itemisation is getting a hefty revamp. You also won’t have to backtrack through dungeons quite as often, and you’ll teleport directly inside Nightmare Dungeons instead of outside them. Gems are also a crafting material now, allowing you to declutter your inventories. 

For a full writeup of the changes coming to Diablo 4 in Season 2, check out our writeup here. 

Author
Timothy "Timaugustin" AugustinTim loves movies, TV shows and videogames almost too much. Almost!