Interview: Blizzard on the future of Diablo 4

As the fastest-selling game in the history of Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo 4 couldn’t have enjoyed a better start.

The series has always been more about long-term play, however – Diablo 3 still enjoys a healthy active player count 12 years after its release, after all.

Given that the latest entry is once again built with continuous evolution in mind, then, Blizzard is conscious that it can’t rest on its laurels if Diablo 4 is going to come close to having the longevity of its predecessor.

The first big test of this comes on October 8, when the first major expansion pack Vessel of Hatred is released alongside the game’s sixth season.

Not only will it be a way of gauging early loyalty among those players who bought the game in its early days and gave it that record-breaking start, but now that it’s also on Xbox Game Pass, it’ll be interesting to see how many of those subscribers will pay for the DLC too.

VGC recently sat down with Diablo series head Rod Fergusson and Diablo 4 executive producer Gavian Whishaw to discuss the game’s first year and where it goes in the future.

Rod, you left The Coalition in 2020 to join Blizzard, and then three years later the Microsoft acquisition took place. How does it feel to be back at Microsoft again? It feels like fate keeps bringing you back there.

Rod Fergusson: Yeah, this is my third tour! I told Phil: ‘Look, if you would have just given me $1 billion directly I would have come back, you didn’t have to spend all $69 billion.’ [laughs]

No, it’s great. I mean, I love Microsoft and that was why I was there for the first two tours of duty, so it’s a great opportunity to be part of Xbox Studios and Microsoft Gaming.

I’ve known Phil for 20 years and known Aaron Greenberg and Matt Booty for over 10, and so it just feels very comfortable.

Vessel of Hatred is about a month away, along with Season 6. A game like Diablo 4 is designed to be ever-evolving – were there any issues or requests from fans of the series that you think are specifically most addressed in what’s coming?

RF: So we’re doing a stream that’s really talking about what Season 6 is, because Season 6 is obviously available to all players whether you have the expansion or not.

What we like to say is, what Season 4 did for loot, Season 6 does for progression. And so people are going to see a lot of really interesting changes into how we do paragon, how we deal with difficulty, how we deal with levelling, and we’re really excited for them to really see all that come to life in Season 6.

Gavian Whishaw: Yeah, there’s a pretty obvious big one in Vessel of Hatred, in that people have been asking for more campaign, more story.

They want to know where the characters are in the world, and what they’re doing, and how they’re progressing. So Vessel of Hatred answers quite a few questions about that.

Obviously the game’s development started long before the acquisition, so that wouldn’t have been in anybody’s mind while it was being designed.

GW: I never imagined! [laughs] Of all the things that we went through, I never imagined that would happen.

But now that it’s become, for example, the first Activision Blizzard game to come to Game Pass, does that change your strategy in terms of content as opposed to when the game was a straight paid title?

RF: I don’t think anything’s changed. I mean, the strategy for Game Pass is just “make great games”.

When you talk to Matt Booty about that and you go “okay, what can we do? What’s the number one thing? How do we lean in on Game Pass?”, he goes “make a great game”.

And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to have a game that people want to continue to play, a game we’re going to support for years and years to come, and make great additional content, and keep people playing, and keep our community fed.

Because that’s the thing, we had a long time between Diablo 3 and 4 and we didn’t want to go back to that place. And so we’re really focused on bringing things like Vessel of Hatred to our players.

GW: It’s super exciting to be where the players are. You know, there’s a bunch of people on Game Pass and it’s great that we can get the game to them. That’s very exciting.

RF: That’s like going to Steam. It’s like, when you see what we do with Diablo Immortal as a free-to-play game, it’s that idea of going where the players are and meeting them where they play. And so all the things that we’re doing beyond making a great game is making sure it’s available to as many players as possible.

Speaking of the wait between Diablo 3 and 4, we obviously don’t get the internal data you guys have, but estimates seem to suggest that Diablo 4 has around 4 million active monthly players but Diablo 3 still has around 3 million. If that’s accurate, is that a problem? Or are you just happy to have people playing Blizzard games, and if so would you hope they eventually move over to Diablo 4?

RF: I mean, one of the things you’ll notice about Blizzard is that we tend not to turn any games off, it’s very rare. So you can still go play Diablo and Diablo 2, Diablo 2: Resurrected and Diablo 3, right?

And so just people playing Blizzard games is awesome, so it’s not a problem that people are playing whatever version. That’s one of the things that’s been really exciting about Diablo 2: Resurrected, is that there’s a very large fan base for that game, which is a remaster of a 21-year-old game.

So just having people in our sort of ecosystem, playing and loving Blizzard games, is a huge positive.

But in terms of a financial sense, those people playing Diablo 3, there aren’t as many opportunities for them to spend money, so I’d imagine there must be a point high up where execs are saying, “it would be nice if more people who are on Diablo 3 moved to Diablo 4 because that’s where the opportunities are to make more money”.

RF: Well, I mean, yeah, there’s opportunities in terms of the Shop and the Battle Pass and those sorts of things, but we really want people to play what they want to play.

And whether they’re playing Diablo 4 today, or tomorrow, or whenever, the goal for us is to make the content and the features that are so desirable that people want to come and play Diablo 4, and we’re not trying to actively be like “how do we move them off?”.

And that’s why we continue to support things like Diablo 3 and Diablo 2, and so for us, it’s really a goal of “let’s just make stuff that’s so appealing that people want to come play”.

This is more about the state of gaming in general rather than Diablo specifically, but Diablo is certainly an example of it. I have a couple of friends who used to play Diablo back in the day and they want to come into Diablo 4 now, either because they just bought an Xbox or they just signed up to PC Game Pass, and they’ll say: “It’s five seasons in now, I’ve missed all this stuff.” How do you juggle keeping the game fresh without putting off the people who think they’ve missed five seasons of content?

RF: The whole goal of seasons is that it’s a reset, and we create a temporary sort of sandbox to play in so we can experiment, and try new things, and come up with novel ways to play.

So the notion that you’ve missed the previous four seasons, the only thing you’ve missed is us continuing to learn and iterate, so that Season 5 is as good as it is because of our previous seasons.

“The notion that you’ve missed the previous four seasons, the only thing you’ve missed is us continuing to learn and iterate, so that Season 5 is as good as it is because of our previous seasons.”

And we also want to make sure we’re respecting those Eternal Realm players too who don’t partake in the seasons, and what you see is things like what we’re doing in Season 6 with progression, what we’ve been doing recently like pushing Helltides to the Eternal Realm, making as many things as possible available to people who choose not to play seasonally.

But the notion of “oh, I missed the first five seasons”, that’s kind of by design. You’re supposed to be able to come into a fresh season on Season 6 and be like “oh, everybody else is starting at Lv 1 in this season, I can start at Lv 1 as well”.

If that’s the case, then do you think there’s a re-education needed for some players? Because I get the impression that many still treat seasons of games like they treat seasons of a TV show and feel like “oh, well, if I’ve not watched Season 1 then I’m not going to start watching from Season 6”.

GW: I think each season is incredibly easy to get into. For Season 5 we actually saw a ton of new players show up, so it’s really exciting.

I think the thing that players would do well to remember is that everybody is starting fresh each season. It’s a new storyline, there are new adventures and everybody is in it together. So it’s actually really easy to start, and season over season, we’re building more tools for in-game communication in communities, so Season 5 and Vessel of Hatred are a great time to start.

RF: But I think you’re making a good point. One of the things we try to do – and I think we’re breaking it really badly right now – is that when we started our seasons, we started to try to avoid the number.

So it was the Season of Loot Reborn, Season of the Construct, and those sorts of things where we were trying not to give that feeling of, “oh, I’m watching numbers tick by, it’s season 23 now, I can never catch up.” It’s supposed to be “oh no, this is the Season of the Thing”, so you don’t have that feeling anymore.

GW: Yeah, sorry!

RF: No, no! I’m just saying, it’s a good point. Our goal is to try to not have that feeling of “I’ve missed out”, but it is a bit of an education around the idea that seasons are a reset, as a way to kind of re-engage that progression and try something different.

Generally speaking, ARPG players want to try a new build every season because of balance or new Legendaries or new equipment, like “oh, this season is the season of the sword, or last season was the season of the Barbarian,” in terms of what the metas were, so these are great opportunities to try new things out and have fun doing that.

So, yeah, getting them into that idea of “this is a fresh reset to try something different”, that’s how they should be thinking about it, not “I’ve missed four seasons’ worth of progress.”

Is that trickier when there’s story-based content? Because although there’s obviously season-specific loot and stuff like that, when there’s actual lore being introduced in each season, does that make it trickier?

RF: I mean, we didn’t do quest lines for characters, we’ll introduce sort of season stories that are for the characters in our current season, with the two cultists. That’s relevant in this moment, but it doesn’t change the big campaign – that’s what we have with the expansion.

So those are meant to be sort of contained within, so it’s not like “oh, now I don’t know these characters or I’ve missed this huge piece of lore”. That’s really about what expansions are about versus the season.

GW: I would add just one more quick thing about new players in seasons – we’re always working on the levelling curve. We’re always working on the experience to get the end game. So season over season, those things become more smooth, and more fun, and more approachable.

It’s a constant learning process.

RF: Well, we’ve seen with the changes we did with Season 4 in the way that we changed Helltide, and progression and loot, and the way that in Season 5 we changed where the cap is for how you can benefit from killing monsters that are harder, or a higher level than you.

And you can see very early on, we would check “what’s the maximum level average after 7-10 days”, and it would be 52 – that was high for us for Season 4, that was the highest we ever had. It was like 52, now it’s 60.

And so we’re seeing that like a person coming in, even though they’re coming in fresh, in under two weeks they can be Lv 60, be in the end game and be enjoying the whole experience. So it doesn’t take that long because of how we continue to tune that levelling process for new players.

Is it frustrating or exciting to be almost playing catch up based on player behaviour? Presumably you’ll have a roadmap where you say “we’ll do this in Season 6, then that in Season 7”, but presumably there also have to be audibles called when “oh, actually, the players have acted in this way, we weren’t expecting that”.

RF: I think it’s super exciting. We have a lot of instrumentation and we get a lot of metrics. So we have a lot of numbers about performance, and what players are doing, and how they’re doing it.

But we also spend a lot of time talking to the community, and with the community, about how they’re doing, what the game experience is like for them, what they would change or what they would adjust. And then we continue to reinvest season over season.

So I think the super exciting thing for me is seeing us take player feedback, putting it in-game and seeing players respond positively to it, and then getting the next round of feedback for the next update.

GW: Yes, it feels great to be able to do. It’s one of the things I love about live service, is that unlike a boxed product where you ship it and whatever it was, it was, after your years of development, in live service you ship it and then you get all this feedback and then you can improve it, improve it and improve it.

Season 5 of Diablo 4 is a better game, objectively, than it was a year ago, and that’s because of that relationship we have with the players.

It’s obviously not a great time for the industry just now and Xbox and Activision Blizzard sadly haven’t escaped that. Do you think it’s going to get worse before it gets better? What’s the mood just now?

RF: I mean, you have to be optimistic. I think part of it is, everything goes through a rightsizing. Like, you get bubbles, and bubbles pop, and then you kind of fill back up, and when you see an economic thing happen and you go “how bad is this going to be?” and then you see it turn around and go on the uptick, and I kind of feel like that’s true.

The pandemic was really impactful on all the companies in the industry, and that bubble popped, and then we ended up sort of rightsizing, and then we’re continuing to build from that.

But I mean, I was just walking through the Indie Hall on my way here and like, wow, there’s a lot of really great indie games out there. And so to me, it feels like the industry is still thriving, and it’s great to see so many smaller teams and games out there that are doing really well.

One game that certainly isn’t small is Gears of War: E-Day. I know you’re not involved in it…

RF: No, not at all.

But when you saw the trailer and heard the Mad World music again, you must have thought “ah, I fancy getting involved in that”.

RF: [laughs] Well, I mean, there’s been nine Gears of War games and I’ve been involved in all nine of them, 15 years of my career was on Gears of War. So to have something be Gears-related and not be involved in it was kind of an odd feeling initially.

But we’ve always talked about, when we shipped the first Gears on the Xbox 360 back in 2006, we always felt like we couldn’t tell the E-Day story because that level of an invasion on the city, we felt like we just didn’t have the technology and the capability of the horsepower to do it justice.

And so I’m really excited about what The Coalition is doing. I’m hoping that they can really give you that feeling of what it means to have a complete city, or basically world, being taken over by the Locust. I think it would be really cool.

And you know, I love that team, I love those people and I’m excited about what they’re going to do.

Are you going to be able to enjoy it when it comes out, or will you be playing through it and going “huh, I wouldn’t have done that bit?”

RF: [laughs] No, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it. Like I say, that team is great and I’m able to disconnect that part. That’s why people are like “oh, you make games, you must not be able to enjoy them,” and no, I enjoy them a lot. So yeah, it’ll be fun.

Just going back to the season structure – Diablo 3 is currently on Season 32. In terms of what we were previously speaking about, building on Diablo 4 with each season, do you ever see a point where you reach Season 20, Season 30 and say “we need a complete reset here, it’s time for another game”? Or do you see this as a ‘forever game’?

You look at something like Forza Motorsport, which feels like it’s not going to have a sequel anytime soon, it feels like Turn10 is just going to continue building on it. I’m curious to know whether you have the same vision for Diablo 4, or if it’ll be like Diablo 3 where there’ll come a point – even if it’s a decade from now – where you go “okay, time to stop and move onto the next one”?

RF: Yeah, I mean, that’s very crystal ball-y. But the big thing is we want people to know that we’re going to support the game for years to come, whether through seasons or expansions and those sorts of things, that we want to have something for players to play.

I don’t see… you know, Destiny sort of made the call that “we’re a 10-year game”, and they were quick to change that, and it’s hard to make that kind of prediction for Diablo because it’s really about where the players are and what they’re looking for.

And the thing that we really learned is the community and the industry change so much in that period of time, when we look at what players wanted when they played Diablo 2, and what they wanted when they played Diablo 3, and what we thought they wanted when they played Diablo 4.

And then we were like “oh, wow, actually”… and what you’ve seen over the last five seasons is us adapting to that, and going “oh, we have to think about Mythic Uniques differently, we have to think about combat differently, we have to think about density differently than we thought we did”, because the industry and the community has changed.

“Destiny sort of made the call that ‘we’re a 10-year game’, and they were quick to change that, and it’s hard to make that kind of prediction for Diablo because it’s really about where the players are and what they’re looking for.”

And so when you look at it like a single game – like, I look at the 20-year anniversary of World of Warcraft, that’s amazing. And they’re still able to serve their players and deliver what the players are looking for. That’s really hard and challenging.

And at some point, we’re going to continue to evolve over time, but I can’t say whether, you know, when we would do a change or not.

GW: It’s been really clear that players want content. We have heard them loud and clear, so we’ll keep making content and we’ll keep listening to them.

So really, it’s just a larger version of the seasons, in that you’re continually listening to player feedback and continually checking the analytics, and adapting accordingly?

RF: You have to respond to how the players are responding to your game. We’re very active and iterative in how we’re working with that.

And the big thing for us is things like bringing the Spiritborn in, that’s a whole new way to play. Not only can you play the expansion as the Spiritborn, you can go back and play the whole campaign as a Spiritborn.

And so that ability to take some content that we already have and be able to play it with a new class – you know, Diablo is known for bringing new classes, much like we saw with Diablo Immortal, bringing the Blood Knight and the Tempest. And so, you know, we have a few plans for the future of Diablo 4 as well.

GW: Vessel of Hatred brings Mercenaries, which is an entirely new feature, it hasn’t been in Diablo 4 before. You now have companions that will fight along with you, they have their own little skill tree that you get to level up.

So we get to keep adding pretty big features like that over time, and that’s really exciting.