2025 is set to be a big year for Diablo 4, Blizzard’s near two-year-old action role-playing game, and that’s despite the delay to its second expansion from this year into 2026. It’s set to launch Season 8 later in April, with Season 9 currently due out in the summer, and Season 10 later in the year. Each will improve the game in key ways, addressing fan feedback and adding long-requested features. And then, looking into 2026, Blizzard will launch Diablo 4’s second expansion, following on from last year’s Vessel of Hatred, add a new ranking system, and, finally, leaderboards.
Today, for the first time ever, Blizzard has published a Diablo 4 roadmap of content, providing fans with the kind of long-term insight into what to expect from the game they’ve never had before. There are even teases for upcoming IP collaborations thrown in there for good measure.
So why is Blizzard doing this now, and what, exactly, are the juicy details on Diablo 4’s upcoming updates? IGN sat down with game director Brent Gibson to quiz him on all that and more in an exclusive interview to coincide with the roadmap, below.
IGN: This [roadmap] is new for Blizzard’s Diablo team, right? So there’s got to be a reason why you’re doing it now for the first time. What are the factors that have gone into you making that decision?
Brent Gibson: We’ve never really been in the position to deliver on a roadmap with the game up until now, right? So when we released the base game, we were getting an influx of feedback from the community on what we should be going after. And so we were in this very reactionary, like, let’s stay on top of the big emerging issues that are coming out with the game. And we wanted to be in a position by this year to be able to be more proactive and be in a spot where we can predict out to a year on some of our ambitions and what we want to go after, and be able to do it confidently, knowing the types of things we wanted to commit to.
And so the value of a roadmap is us getting out there saying, ‘hey, look, these are the things that we want to go after. We hear you.’ We really want to make sure we’re going after the things that really matter during the seasons, and create consistency and quality in those releases. And so for the first time, we’re actually in a spot where we can see out into that future.
IGN: When I think of Diablo historically, it’s not as a live service game. It was more, you paid for the game and you had the expansions, and the expansions were a big deal, almost like mini-releases. But for Diablo 4 it does feel different. It feels like more of a live service. So I wonder if that creates more of a condition for a roadmap to be appropriate for Diablo 4 as opposed to the previous games?
Brent Gibson: It does. There’s a reason why they’re called roadmaps, because it literally is a road leading to what we want to do in 2026 with the expansion. A lot of the strengthening of our core from season to season are things that we’re building upon, to taking those bigger swings in the expansion itself. And so it’s important to us that there is that connectivity. That it is all working out in order and in a plan. And so even though it’s not always very transparent about what that plan is, we’re hoping that the roadmap is something that shows players those steps that we’re taking, so that when we get to the point of announcing the expansion, all those pieces come together.
IGN: Do you feel like the audience now when it comes to live service games is hungrier than ever for constant content and constant transparency? Needing to know what’s coming at any given moment, and wanting a relentless release of updates? I’ve been watching the Marvel Rivals team and it’s just incredible with the pace of their updates. And they’ve just said a new hero every month. Is this just the way things have to be now if you’re operating a successful life service? Is it more brutal than ever?
Brent Gibson: 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.
IGN: And that’s a really nice lead into my next thought on this, which is you are trying to do it all with Diablo 4. It’s not just live service with seasons as we’re familiar with live service games, but you’re also building big paid expansions on top of that. I can only imagine the challenges you must face trying to do everything with Diablo 4 to keep it interesting and everyone engaged. I know the original plan was for an expansion every year, but that’s obviously not happening. Is that one of the byproducts of having to do all of this stuff all at the same time, and also trying to do an expansion as well, when most games don’t have to think about doing both of those things?
Brent Gibson: Yeah, we’ve learned a lot about what it means to do both at the same time. I feel like we’ve done a good job at trying to not be beholden to the plan. And so if we needed the extra time for the expansion based on everything we learned on Vessel of Hatred, we’re taking the time to focus on the expansion in a responsible way. We don’t want to push it out 10 years. That’s crazy. But the adjustments you’ve seen are because of key learnings and the feedback that we’re seeing. And some of the strategy you’re seeing with what we’re doing with seasons is to bring consistency and control in one area so that we can get a little more aggressive in another area. And so the roadmap is a really good example of that where you can see that consistency, while also shifting our focus from activity type to activity type to refresh things for different style of players that have feedback for the game.
IGN: So let’s let’s dig into the roadmap a little bit. ‘Dungeon escalation’ — what are we getting there?
Brent Gibson: So you’ll notice with the roadmap as we make our way out further into the year, the words are fancy and they have some meaning and they have intent. You could see in that season that the word ‘dungeon,’ we’re going to be focusing on dungeons here, right? You got new nightmare dungeon activities that are in this mix as well. We know that nightmare dungeons, or dungeons in general is the bread and butter of Diablo, is playing that procedural content. And based on a lot of feedback, variety and challenge is one of those things that is a major ask for bringing nightmare dungeons back into the spotlight.
And so even though I’m not going to share the details that far out, you can see that the spirit of our intent is going to address that part of our game. The idea there for that season is about challenge and variety and that’s the goal that the team has, and they’re in development of that right now.
IGN: Part of the sentiment among the core community is that Diablo 4 isn’t hard enough. Is that season about addressing some of that feedback?
Brent Gibson: Yeah, and it’s not exclusive to that season. We met as a team at the very beginning of the year and bringing challenge back into the spotlight is something that we’re focusing on over the course of all the seasons. And how does a statement like that apply from activity to activity in our game?
You’re seeing with Season 8, we’re bringing a lot of challenge back into the boss lairs, and trying to make sure that difficulty is something that we’re keeping an eye on, while also not losing sight of accessibility. Because this is a game where we got a lot of people come in just to blast and relax. And so we don’t want it to be an experience that is hard at the sacrifice of fun. But we know that areas in our game that we can tackle that in a way that will be good for the casuals and great for the blasters, and we should be in a good spot.
IGN: It must be a really tricky balancing act.
Brent Gibson: Yeah. If we did that to the game as a whole, it would not service our goal. This is one of the reasons why our difficulty system has such a wide band in it, all the way from easy to the later stage in Torment. The goal isn’t to just say we’re dialing everything up. That is not the case. It is to take a look at the progression of a character and look at those spots where we can create an additional spike that is appreciated by the audience that just needs that one last little push, right? And so that’s the way that we’ve been looking at it, is more of like, how does the entire curve play across our broader audience, and not sacrificing one audience for the other.
IGN: Console keyboard and mouse support also caught my eye. How come it took so long?
Brent Gibson: I can’t answer on why it took this long from a deep level. But it’s one of the things that the players have been asking for quite a bit, and now that we are starting to get into the groove with the ongoing development of the game, we’re in a spot where we can start addressing issues like that and bring something new to the table.
My son was super happy because he’s converted to a keyboard and mouse guy but he loves his console. And so, being in a position where we can create more access to all different types of players is very important to us. Accessibility is huge for us. We put a ton of attention on it. We don’t want the hardware to be the barrier. So we implement anything we can to create that quality of life, and I think this is going to be a pretty big one in that season.
IGN: I know this is probably not something you can talk deeply about, but people get excited by new IP collabs, and there’s two of them in there. People might think of silly stuff, start talking about Microsoft stuff, Activision stuff and all sorts. Is there anything you can say about what people can expect, or maybe how you approach them and what’s right and what isn’t right for Diablo 4?
Brent Gibson: When you think about Diablo, it is one of the dark fantasy IPs, right? And as developers, we’re also fans of lots of other IPs that are that power fantasy of being in that dark gothic universe. So you can imagine that there’s a pretty heavy influence that is even beyond Diablo itself in that regard.
At the heart of the game we’re role-playing through those dark fantasies. And so I think something you can expect is us reaching out to other IPs that fit really well inside of our universe, and we can do some really cool cosmetic stuff and make it really exciting. But it’s not anything that is actually going to betray the brand, right? We talk a lot about, ‘hey, when’s the French Fries sword coming?’ We are avoiding the French Fries sword at all costs.
And so we really selected the collaborations we’re looking at very carefully. Even though I don’t want to expose what we’re doing coming up, it is one of those things where it’s like it, it’s going to be fun, it’s going to be super cool, it is totally Diablo. And so once it goes live, hopefully you’ll log in and check it out.
IGN: I play a lot of Call of Duty and COD has this thing where the mil-sim fans are like, ‘I hate that there are lizards and dragons and fairies and unicorns shooting me.’ In the context of everything that’s happened with Activision Blizzard in the last couple of years, some fans are worried that’s going to happen to Diablo. But from the sounds of things it’s not going to end up like that.
Brent Gibson: No. That is absolutely counter to our goal. And so when we’re looking at these things, we take a really hard look at making sure that the things that we’re bringing to the table, our fans are also fans of. So there’s never a moment where you’re like, ‘wait, really? That’s in there?’ And so we’re holding the line on that. I say holding the line, but we’re all aligned on it. There’s no question that this is the way that we want to approach it. And the one we have coming up in Season 8 is pretty cool and very spot on.
IGN: Is there anything in September to December that players should be excited for or should be keeping an eye out for?
Brent Gibson: Season 10 is a really good example of us taking a hard look at not only the activities that need to get refreshed because their role has maybe waned in popularity, but also looking at the things that are working really well and continuing to invest.
Infernal Horde is one of the most popular activities in the entire game. People really enjoy playing it. They put tons of hours into it. So we’re going to take the opportunity to also give it a little bit of love and put a little more player choice options out there for you to have in the experience and plus that up.
And so very similar to what we did with Helltide very early on where it’s like, yeah it’s going well, but we’re still gonna do something more. Not only are we shoring things up, but we’re gonna continue to push some of our activities forward. Season upon season, I really like the idea of us keeping our house in order as we’re making our way through the 2025 year.
IGN: So now the juicy stuff. Before we talk about new expansion, there’s a new ranking system and leaderboards in 2026. Finally! I mean it’s next year, but still at least it’s coming and we know now. What can you tell me about the leaderboards and the new ranking system?
Brent Gibson: I can talk about it philosophically. I remember having the conversation: ‘we want to be able to say leaderboard when we come out with this roadmap, even if it is a year out, right?’ The important thing to us is that players know that we’re listening, but we want to make sure that we get it right. Doing a leaderboard is really, really challenging. When we took a first stab at it with Gauntlet, we learned a lot of things with Gauntlet. We had a lot of new power being injected into expansion one, so that led us to take a breath and see where we’re at with classes and bring that back into harmony. And now that we’re here, we’re like, ‘OK, what’s the right way to do this?’
So we’re investing into leaderboards as we move forward. I won’t exactly say how. That will be revealed as time passes by, but we want to work with the community on getting to a place where we’ve done it right.
Now, we also know that leaderboards speak to the very upper echelon of our players, and so we want to also introduce something that speaks to everybody. And so this is where we want to have a system that also tells you, ‘hey, as you’re playing, as you’re building your character, how are you doing? Where do you sit rank wise with the rest of the world?’ And being able to have a very casual, friendly understanding of am I good or not? Am I doing good or not, right? And so it was important that we deliver both parts of that equation together so that there is something for everybody. And then there’s that hard, aspirational go get it at the very end as well. I am super excited about the designs that we’ve been talking about, and we’ve been iterating on this for quite some time, and hopefully in the near future we can talk some details.
IGN: Exciting. OK, new expansion. Is there anything that you can say about that, for the fans?
Brent Gibson: I definitely can say that there’s a lot coming in the expansion. What we did with Vessel of Hatred was fantastic and just the beginning. And as we’ve learned from that. We feel like we’re even more on the money with what we need to do with the second expansion. We have a whole team dedicated to getting ready to start announcing stuff over a really great campaign, to let you know what’s going in on this. We’re paying attention to it right now. The team is just like, that is priority number one. And so they’ve been putting all their heart and energy into making sure that it is the best release we’ve had.
Reflecting on what we’re talking about before, we’re taking that time to steady the core season to season so that this expansion is the biggest expansion we’ve delivered yet. So, feeling really great about it. I’m dying to talk more about it. Can’t at this time, but hopefully very soon we can revisit this chat.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
