Blizzard has announced the next season for Diablo IV called “Loot Reborn,” but instead of introducing new mechanics and focusing on a seasonal story, season 4 will be all about reconfiguring itemization, buildcrafting, and addressing a myriad of tweaks and improvements requested by players.
In an advance showcasing of Season 4, IGN sat down with Loot Reborn’s leadership team to discuss this major deviation from what players have come to expect from a typical Diablo IV season.
“For this season we made an assessment along the way where, it really seemed like what we should be focusing our time on is making really substantial update to the item game,” lead producer of seasons Tim Ismay explained. “This season, very differently from past seasons, is really more of a core, fundamental change to how a big part of how Diablo gameplay works, as opposed to being more seasonal content.”
Among the enormous list of changes are an itemization update that will simplify affixes to make them easier to understand and more consistently useful, a new “Tempering” system that will allow players to customize gear they find, a complete overhaul to the Codex of Power, which will replace cumbersome aspect crystals, and a new, more powerful type of loot that carries “Greater Affixes.” All of these represent a significant revamping of the way loot works in Diablo IV, especially where endgame buildcrafting is concerned.
As part of this shift in focus, much less attention will be paid to your seasonal character and the story/new mechanics that were present in all three of the game’s past seasons, and the vast majority of the changes (like itemization tweaks and the overhauls to the endgame Helltide activity) will be playable on your standard “eternal realm” characters. But that’s not to say there still won’t be a reason to roll a seasonal character as well.
“For Season 4: Loot Reborn, we still will have an engaging story in the sense of the seasonal activity: the call of the wolves,” Deric Nunez, Lead Seasons Designer told IGN. “Narrative is still very much near and dear to our hearts and we wanted to utilize any opportunities to give more context to the Helltide uprising and just some of the cool gameplay additions we’re introducing with Season 4.”
To that end, Helltide has also been given some serious consideration, and will now be overflowing with cultists and doomsayers, and will introduce some new enemies including the Hellborn (dark reflections of player characters with many of the same abilities), Hellworms (which emerge from the earth to spawn a whole bunch of demons from their maws), and other dangers all with the intention of making the activity much more challenging and rewarding.
Blizzard has also announced it’ll be hosting a developer livesteam on May 2nd to dive into their learnings from the first Public Realm Test (PTR).
Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.
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