Blizzard recently explained the reason for not extending the Diablo IV campaign story with its post-launch season.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Associate Game Director Joe Piepiora explains how the stories of the post-launch seasons of Diablo IV will work separately from the main campaign.
“We have two different kinds of releases after the game launches,” Piepiora said. “We have our quarterly seasonal releases, then we’ll have our expansion packs. While we’re not talking about our expansions today, it’s important to realize they’re a part of the ecosystem of what we support the game with moving forward.
“Now seasons, though, when we think about the story, we know that we want to continue to build upon the world of Diablo 4 and the world of Sanctuary, but we do not want to extend the campaign into seasons and then make seasons required reading for the expansions, for that to make sense.”
Piepiora insists that there are a lot of reasons for their approach, but the most important one was to free up the developers to create compelling seasons in isolation.
Each season will have a certain theme, which will affect the seasonal story-driven quest line.
“Each of the seasons has a quest line that is about that theme, that explores that theme,” Piepiora said.
“It might introduce new characters, it might bring back old characters, but it is a self-contained canonical story set in Sanctuary that is going to persist for the duration of the season, and will also introduce new gameplay mechanics and other things that will be available during that three month period at the same time, only for it to be replaced in the following season, where we will now introduce a new seasonal questline, a new seasonal theme, new seasonal gameplay, rewards to chase, monsters to fight, new boss encounters, things like that.”
Diablo IV launches on June 6, 2023 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
