Season 1
Diablo 4 Season 1 will start in mid to late July, and to embark on this next chapter, you must first complete the Campaign. Because of this, we recommend you begin your pursuit of Lilith in advance so you can jump into the first Season as soon as it becomes available.
Every season runs for 3 months and a year has 4 seasons. Seasonal updates introduce new quest lines, loot, challenges, and more to regular balance adjustments. Each Season will have a distinct theme. An example theme is Zombies. The seasonal questlines will guide players on the themes and mechanics of that particular Season.
Seasons are quarterly releases that will add additional gameplay features, questlines (with new and old faces alike), Battle Passes, Legendary Items, class balance changes, quality-of-life improvements, and much more. Seasons will introduce fresh concepts and ideas into the world of Sanctuary, for all wanderers to enjoy while simultaneously iterating upon your baseline experience. Above all, we want Seasons to be celebratory moments; something to look forward to and enjoy with your friends and other members of the Diablo community.
Seasons want to introduce fresh gameplay to give incentive for different character builds; these changes are temporary and will be retired at the end of their respective seasons. Seasons are taking long term progression into account, using things such as the Season Journey mechanic from Diablo III; large rewards are given at the end of each "chapter", including new Legendary Aspects.
Players will have to recreate and re-level their characters each season, however there is a non-seasonal Evergreen mode where characters do not reset. After completing the campaign, new characters will have the opportunity to skip the campaign, even in Seasons.
Once Mounts are unlocked, they are unlocked permanently for all characters and all levels. Stat bonuses from Altars of Lilith are permanent unlocks, however the renown bonuses for finding them are not. New Legendary and Unique items are added per season that will stay after it ends!
Seasons will have Aspirational Challenges, building on the endgame to keep things fresh - such as Bosses and Dungeons. Balancing will take place throughout each Season to prevent one spec or class from becoming so powerful it is the default.
Characters get merged to the Eternal Realm after a season ends. Diablo 4 will not have a leaderboard in Season 1 and Season 2 - but it could come back after.
Progressing Through the Season Journey and Earning Rewards
If Seasons are the night’s sky, then the Season Journey is the North Star, your guiding light. Players can look to the Season Journey for details on the new content available to them. The Season Journey will be invaluable in helping you quickly level-up your Battle Pass, as this is done through completing Chapters that are comprised of Objectives. Completing all Objectives in a Chapter will score you Seasonal rewards, such as useful Crafting Materials and Legendary Aspects for your Codex of Power.
Each objective also rewards an amount of Favor, the resource used to level up through the Tiers of the Battle Pass. Favor can also be obtained from completing quests, slaying monsters, participating in events, and more.
Injecting Variety with the Optional Battle Pass
With each Season comes a new Battle Pass for you to earn rewards from, containing 27 Free Tiers and 63 Premium Tiers. You can earn Cosmetics and Smoldering Ashes from the Free Tiers just by slaying demons as you normally would. Smoldering Ashes are a resource that can be spent on Season Blessings, which provide you with a bonus to earning XP, Gold, or Obols depending on which Blessings you spend Ashes on. Players can have more than one Season Blessing active at a time and can use additional Ashes to upgrade the bonus they receive. The bonuses gained from Season Blessings only last until that respective Season ends. Since Season Blessings affect gameplay, you must meet certain Character Level requirements to claim the Smoldering Ashes needed to apply Blessings. This ensures they are earned by achieving gameplay requirements and there is no advantage gained from purchasing Tier Skips.
To earn rewards from the Premium Tiers, a player must purchase the Premium Battle Pass. This upgraded track of the Battle Pass will not provide any in-game power, but instead unlocks tiers that provide Cosmetics unique to that Season and the Platinum currency. Platinum can be spent in the Shop to acquire new Cosmetics that sculpt you into the wanderer you wish to become or put towards the purchase of future Battle Passes. Platinum can only be acquired using real currency, such as USD.
Overall, there are three versions of the Battle Pass available. The Free Battle Pass, simply called Battle Pass, the Premium Battle Pass, which will cost 1,000 Platinum (equivalent of $9.99 USD ), and the Accelerated Battle Pass, which includes all perks of the Premium Battle Pass, 20 Tier Skips, the Wings of the Creator Emote, and will cost 2,800 Platinum (equivalent of $24.99 USD).
New Season & Next Season
Diablo IV's Seasons are modeled after those of Diablo III. When a new season begins, all the characters from the prior season are moved to the Eternal Realm, where you can keep playing, leveling up, and collecting loot. To play in the new season, you’ll create a fresh character and experience the new seasonal features and content while leveling up alongside other players. This, along with capping paragon points in Diablo IV, ensures that your effort and skill—measured by both dexterity and theorycrafting —determine how powerful your character becomes. It also allows players who missed the last season to participate. This season design requires that all sources of character power come from playing the game, so you will not be able to pay for power in Diablo IV.
- Account-wide Renown rewards (potion charges, skill points, paragon points, maximum obols) will be reset with the start of a new season.
- Blizzard will try to make the experience around collecting Renown feel as non-repetitive as possible.
- According to Joe Piepora, bonuses gained from Altars of Lilith will not reset with the start of a new season.
- Post-launch quarterly updates will introduce additional quest lines that tie into the new mechanics and features of each season. Rod Fergusson has clarified on Twitter that these quest lines will not be part of the main campaign but rather introduce new content like seasonal mechanics.
- Quarterly content updates will include a new Season Pass. On top of the Free Season Pass, the Premium Season Pass will cost $10. (This information has been around since last December)
We'll also be testing features that enable players who have completed the game's campaign to flag it as completed for new characters they create and allow characters on the eternal realm to contribute to seasonal progress.
FAQs
Q & A
- There will be no Battlepass pre-Season One, but there will be a rudimentary shop
- Shop cosmetics will be class restricted, but account unlocks
- Purchasing the Premium pass late will retroactively apply favor
- You'll unlock your mount around level 30, depending on how quickly you play through the campaign
- Altars of Lilith will be in static locations - they will likely not move
- The shop is personalized - items will swap out roughly once per week, but items will rotate back into stock
- When a Hardcore character dies, the Season Journey progress is retained but any character based progress is lost
- Some mounts, trophies, and titles are from completing achievement-style rewards
Will there be seasons in Diablo 4?
Many of you enjoy the Seasons in Diablo II: Resurrected and Diablo III and have asked for more extensive season support. We agree one of the most fun ways to play Diablo is through Seasons, so we're making the first one available soon after launch and building a dedicated team to bring you up to four Seasons a year, each with major new features, questlines, enemies, legendary items, and more.
How long is a Diablo 4 Season?
Every season runs for three months. A year has four seasons, each with major new features, questlines, enemies, legendary items, and more.
As the game director, Joe Shely noted earlier, we are pursuing a seasonal reset structure for our live game—Diablo is a game about choice and possibility! We feel it is at its best when you get a clean slate to start from in a season, picking a class, customizing your build, and chasing down items that support it along the way. This affords us several advantages and chief among them is that we can really shake the box of Diablo IV with each season, creating unique experiences with each of our quarterly releases.
Season's New Content
We think it is important that players see that the game is changing in meaningful ways. Each season will be released with a fresh new gameplay feature and questline that introduces new challenges, mysteries, and possibilities into the level-up experience. This is something players should begin to experience before the end of their first hour of play. One of the benefits of our seasonal direction is that it enables fun, new ways to play throughout your character’s progression.
Each Season's new questline will reveal more of the world of Sanctuary and your character’s place in it. Here, we get an opportunity to introduce new characters or revisit old ones while exploring the lore and content of the season.
Continue to improve the game
With each season we’ll be looking into ways to simply improve the player experience. As a live product, we intend to hold Diablo IV to an exceedingly high standard. We are here to build a live game that we can be proud of, and the best way to do that is by engaging our players directly.
Based on feedback that we receive, the team will identify quality-of-life features and polish work that can be done to improve the overall game experience and invite the community to vote upon their priority. While we cannot always flip a switch to tackle something immediately, you can rest assured that we will be active in improving the quality of the game experience for years to come.
Season's Event
Sanctuary is a living world filled with people, creatures, and factions striving to meet their own ends. Attentive players should be on the lookout for new live events that will crop up each season. An example of a live event might be the warning of an impending invasion of the Drowned, which may last a weekend, or the arrival of a strange peddler amidst the crags of the Dry Steppes. These events provide gateways to new adventures and unique rewards.
Season Journey
Alongside our major season releases, we see the return of the Season Journey. Players are pushed to explore Sanctuary anew, earning limited-time rewards with each chapter of the Season Journey that is completed. Completing the Season Journey is quite a feat, with the final step demanding the character overcome an extremely difficult encounter with an especially deadly foe. With future Season Journeys, we are regularly adding pinnacle-level difficulty challenges for players to complete, proving their worth and earning unique cosmetic rewards besides.
Like Diablo III, the Season Journey is free for all players. Completing Season Journey objectives also grants progress toward the Battle Pass, a new feature with a battle pass-style progression that advances alongside the Season Journey, enabling players to earn even more rewards just by playing. The Battle Pass has both free rewards (cosmetics, premium currency, and gameplay boosts) and paid rewards (cosmetics and premium currency only).
Will the Renown system and Altars of Lilith reset with every Season?
Joe Shely explained that Seasons in Diablo IV use a similar philosophy to Diablo III in terms of providing a fresh start with an equal footing for everyone. Some systems will be tied to your account and in some cases they will carry over between Seasons.
The last Seasons of Diablo II: Resurrected and Diablo III started within a week of each other. Are you looking at maybe widening that gap between Season launches for the different Diablo games?
Blizzard will try to have a more predictable cadence for Seasons in Diablo IV and move Diablo II: Resurrected and Diablo III Seasons around Diablo IV's seasons.
In a prior Quarterly Update you talked about the Season Journey having unique rewards attached to it. Does this only include cosmetics or also gear, like "Haedrig's Gift" in Diablo III?
Joe Shely explained that the Season Journey includes "power-based rewards" and "is not monetized".