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

This week, the highly anticipated first roadmap for *Diablo 4* was unveiled, detailing the game's content schedule for 2025 and teasing what's in store for 2026. IGN had the chance to sit down with game director Brent Gibson to delve into the roadmap, discussing everything from the second expansion to potential collaborations with other IPs. However, following the roadmap's release, the *Diablo 4* community has voiced concerns about the planned content for 2025, with many questioning whether it will be substantial enough to keep them engaged.

The sentiment among some dedicated players, like redditor Inangelion, is one of mild excitement mixed with disappointment. "Oh boy! Can't wait for new Helltide color and temporary powers," Inangelion remarked sarcastically. "It's gonna be so dope!" This sentiment resonates with other hardcore players who had hoped for more innovative and engaging content in the upcoming seasons.

Feldoneq2wire elaborated on the community's expectations: "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?' "

Fragrantbutte, another fan, expressed their disappointment while still showing love for the game: "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 chimed in, pointing out the vagueness of the roadmap: " 'And more' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here."

The online debate became so heated that Diablo community manager Lyricana_Nightrayne felt compelled to respond on the main thread in the *Diablo 4* subreddit, stating, "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 of the core issues highlighted by the community is Blizzard's approach to seasonal content in *Diablo 4*. While some appreciate the reset that comes with each season, others feel that it diminishes the incentive to deeply engage with the new content. Opinions are split on whether maintaining all seasonal content would make the game overwhelming or if waiting until 2026 for more significant updates might be the better move.

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

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The discourse around *Diablo 4*'s expansions centers on the delay of the second expansion, originally slated for 2025 but now pushed to 2026. Blizzard had planned to release an expansion annually, with the first, *Vessel of Hatred*, launching in 2024. This shift has sparked further discussion about the game's development pace and content strategy.

In our exclusive interview, Gibson addressed 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," Gibson explained. "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."

Gibson also emphasized the importance of community interaction and the diversity of player types within the *Diablo* community. "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."

He provided examples of how the team aims to cater to different player segments across seasons: "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 later in the year. As the roadmap unfolds, the community will be watching closely to see how Blizzard responds to their feedback and whether the promised content will meet their expectations.