Diablo 4’s Season 1 has begun and with it, the grind is officially back on. With the launch of Season of the Malignant, the community is diving back into Sanctuary once more to pursue new chase items, experiment with new builds and power through new content. Of course, all of this is being done with new characters. You won’t be able to access seasonal content with pre-existing characters, a decision that sparked some controversy among the community.
Even though seasonal content is a pillar of the modern action-RPG, not all Diablo 4 players were too happy about the soft reset that occurs at the beginning of every season. Why can’t you just do the new content with the same character? Well, as I found out in a recent group chat with Associate Game Director Joe Piepiora, Quest Designer Madeleine James, and Dungeon Designer Michelle Pina, the Diablo team has its reasons.
Each season of Diablo 4 is designed as a self-contained story and meta. In fact, the entirety of the game has been built “from the ground up on this character reset methodology," as Piepiora put it.
There are a couple of reasons why Diablo has gone in this direction. Firstly, the team wants to foster an environment where players can jump back into Diablo 4 at the beginning of each season. “There’s no fear of missing out," James begins. "I find it intimidating jumping into a game that’s been on live service for X amount of years, I have to go through this story and that story and this meta and I have to watch a three-hour video about the lore. [In Diablo 4] you can jump in any point and not feel like you’re missing out because it’s a self-contained story and a self-contained meta.”
As someone who finished Diablo 4’s main campaign about a month after everyone else, I appreciate this. I’m in no hurry to jump into Season 1 immediately after wrapping up my first playthrough. Even if I give the first season a miss completely, I can always return for Season 2 without being “behind” everyone else.
The devs point out that there are a lot of new players playing Diablo 4, and it’s a sizable enough portion where you can’t just “throw them to the wolves” when it comes to an infinite grind. Seasons are a nice compromise, allowing players to tackle new content at their own pace without the feeling that they’re 'on the clock.'
Design-wise, the self-contained meta aspect also stops Diablo 4 from becoming too bloated. The first season has added malignant hearts - aspects that are roughly equivalent to legendary powers. These hearts have serious build implications and if they weren’t self-contained within a timed seasonal meta, then old “season zero” builds and items would now be irrelevant. It's a bit of a misconception among players that seasons are essentially invalidating the time you put into your eternal realm character, when in reality it's doing the exact opposite.
“I used to be that ‘I don’t want to start a new character’ person, but then I started working on seasons and one of the things that most attracts me to the idea is that for my eternal character… all of that loot is still relevant," James points out. "And it’s still going to be relevant in Season 7. I think the issue we would run into if we did it a different way is that all of that work would become irrelevant because of new chase items.”
If every season were to co-exist then Diablo’s meta would become virtually impossible to balance. Every subsequent season would wipe out the meta of its predecessor, or there would be unforeseen interactions between items or abilities that could quickly spiral out of control and require hotfixing. It’s the same philosophy that shapes competitive card games. Old sets gradually become phased out to give designers more freedom to shape the meta without having to worry about every single card interaction that’s ever existed.
Piepiora believes that new players may not realise it yet, but the fun of Diablo and other aRPGs is the journey, not the destination. “A lot of the enjoyment of the game is the journey of building the character and reacting to the drops that occur and adapting as you go," he begins. "As I’m playing, I expect to find legendary items at this kind of rate, I expect to make build decisions at this rate, and I expect to have challenging encounters at this rate. When you start imagining ‘What would be really fun for one character over the course of a season?’ That’s the way we tend to look at things, we want it to feel punchy when items drop for you, we want you to be making steady progress, we want you to have goals. You have all these new things to chase as part of a new season.”
Seasons are an attempt to satisfy the maximum amount of Diablo 4 players without overburdening the developers with unnecessary balance stress. Regardless of how you feel about the execution of certain features in Diablo 4, the philosophy of the development team regarding seasons is a sound one.