While I suppose this isn't the biggest of surprises, it’s now official. After ten years of seasonal, live-ish content for Diablo 3, season 29 would be the last official year for the game. After that, while there'll still be seasons, season 30 and beyond is going to be mixing and matching cosmetics from older seasons, with no actual new seasons going to be developed after that.

You may clearly know why this is actually the case, as d4 items launch at the beginning of June. And that game may have its own seasons, ones intended to be more robust than Diablo 3 seasons, you need to include modern practices like battle passes.

All development is shifting to build up these new Diablo 4 seasons. Diablo 3 will essentially maintain maintenance mode where one can still listen to it, obviously, but there'll be no actual new content in the future. I suppose not until they remaster it 10 years from now, maybe. It makes sense, considering the fact that it will take a colossal effort to aid Diablo 4 in a manner that competes with other live games. Though I do know some players happen to be wishing they’d ditch the live concept and merely go back to big expansions.

Honestly, I’m confident they’ll do both. Given that Diablo 2 had Lord of Destruction and Diablo 3 had Reaper of Souls, it’s quite a standard part of any Diablo lifecycle. Albeit Diablo 3 reported did possess a second expansion they killed and sliced up into pieces, as observed in some of the brand new zones they randomly added, and also the post-launch Necromancer class which didn't come with significant new story content. It’s somewhat unclear what Diablo 4’s long-term plans are here, but I could be amazed as we didn’t get at least one Reaper of Souls-size expansion here, as well as the live content.

The live stuff promises that it'll not be anything pay-to-win, using the battle pass focused exclusively on cosmetics. We’ll see what degree of grind it is going to be, and just how the new seasonal character system works. I never really engaged with Diablo 3 seasons, but I know plenty of people did, priming them for the same system in Diablo 4.

The same WoWhead interview which has the seasonal info has other good stuff you can examine. They say you will find endgame activities they haven’t revealed yet, that their launch focus is on server stability which wildly scaling multipliers happen to be toned down for that game’s unique what-to power can’t spiral completely unmanageable. It’s a fascinating interview I’d take a look at to be sure.

We are actually less than 8 weeks away from the d4 items launch, which is shaping as much as a “surprise hit” based on the Wall Street Journal. But for everybody else, not really a surprise, and surely another massive installment is originating, and it'll absolutely be one of the largest games of the season.