Diablo 4 boss Rod Ferguson apologized for the game’s troubled season one launch, which attracted vast criticism for featuring a huge number of nerfs to classes.
The Season of the Malignant received an overwhelmingly negative response from the community, which was initially largely orientated around the nerfs, although it soon extended out to the lack of content featured.
Diablo 4’s seasonal rotation will see new seasons launch every three months with a new theme, requiring a seasonal character to be created to access the seasonal realm and the new content that is provided.
At Gamescom, Diablo 4 revealed season two, which will be released in October and focuses on vampires and features Gemma Chan as a new character—but the big thing fans will want to see is considerable improvements from the disastrous season one launch.
Speaking to GamesRadar at Gamescom on Aug. 23, Ferguson admitted the team had made “some sort of mistake in managing expectations” and were “trying to move a little fast”—releasing two-thirds of a solution, rather than a full fix.
Ferguson, however, still stands by the controversial changes that were made, with previous updates being buff-orientated, so there was a desire to create a “level playing field,” which wasn’t explained fully by the developers.
Things will be different ahead of season two, as Ferguson promised Blizzard would get patch notes out earlier with live streams ahead of time to talk about it while using their own surveys and telemetry to provide a deeper insight into what fans want.
The problem that Diablo 4 now faces is that many players may well have been lured over to new games and there are some massive titles launching before the start of season two on Oct. 17, including Starfield, Baldur’s Gate 3 on PlayStation, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
