Diablo 4 Season 8 is here, and reactions have been a bit mixed. Players seem to be enjoying the new lair bosses, but the new reliquary battle pass, approach to seasonal rewards, and overall structure of seasons seem to be under intense scrutiny.
Diablo 4 has also seen increased competition from competing ARPGs like Last Epoch and Path of Exile 2, leaving Blizzard with strategic decisions to make over whether to emulate what’s popular in other games, or try out a different direction.
Before Season 8 dropped, I caught up with Blizzard’s Deric Nunez and Colin Finer to learn about how Diablo 4’s seasonal model has evolved, and the philosophies that will take Blizzard towards Diablo 4’s next big expansion.
On Season 8, lair bosses, and the seasonal model
Season 8’s big bad is Belial, returning from Diablo 3. The Lord of Lies was a major enemy in the previous title, and is a protégé of Diablo 4’s primary evil, Mephisto. His return marks an escalation of the calamity Mephisto is unleashing, after re-emerging into Sanctuary during the events of Vessel of Hatred.
“So, we see this as the continuation of the Age of Hatred, that accelerated at the end of the events of Vessel of Hatred,” Lead Seasons Designer Deric Nunez explains, “Mephisto is walking Sanctuary in human form. He created the perfect distraction for Belial, who has been waiting in the shadows.”
Belial emerges as part of open world activities, but also as a major new lair boss as part of a revamped boss ladder. I asked Blizzard how the approach to lair bosses has evolved since their introduction in the base game.
“We see Season 8 as an opportunity to put focus and refine the foundation of major end game features,” says Nunez. “The Lair Boss system is getting a pretty massive overhaul, not just the new bosses like Belial, the Harbinger of Hatred, or Urivar, but the general quality of life improvements to the feature as a whole. We wanted to set it up to sit more confidently in the wider pantheon of other end game activities, owing to the pivot on materials. We want to boost the frequency that players are engaging with bosses.”
Some players have complained that Diablo 4’s season journey and boss battles are too easy, while others have complained that obtaining rewards like the seasonal pet have become too grindy. I asked how Blizzard maintains a balance between difficulty and accessibility, given that games like Path of Exile 2 have begun exploring boosting difficulty to excite players.
“We’re trying to return to the heart of the Diablo experience, where you level up to fight this big bad, and get all the rewards, to then fight bigger bads. When we first introduced lair bosses, there was a journey to climb up the ladder fighting harder and harder bosses,” says Colin Finer, Lead Systems Designer. “In a lot of ways, we feel we’ve lost that by Season 7. Players have gotten stronger, there’s been some power creep, and economic creep on the boss materials side. Season 8 aims to bring the lair bosses back into focus. By eliminating the economic costs, we can raise the difficulty a bit, you can test yourself whenever you want.”
“Hopefully we can take it back to that feeling you got from Season 2, where maybe you can get a cheeky kill early in your Torment difficulty journey. We’re okay with people being able to one shot bosses eventually, as long as the journey to get there is satisfying. We think of Diablo as a power fantasy game, that’s why we have the ultimate form of power fantasies in Season 8 — taking powers directly from bosses, and becoming ‘the boss,’ right? You can ascend to becoming a God. What we don’t like is that, if you’re entering a boss battle like Duriel at the start of Torment, and you slap him easily, and you get his loot practically for free — that’s what we don’t want.”
Colin Finer and Deric Nunez acknowledge the challenge of balancing risk and reward, and finding that specific sweet spot. The team also wants to explore ways to make obsolete gear useful, either via resources or additional stat rolls.
“Ultimately, we want Diablo to feel like it’s a rewarding experience. We want everyone to hop in and feel rewarded. If everything dies in one second, then it doesn’t feel like you’ve earned the reward. We also don’t want it to be so difficult that it feels like a slog. It’s a difficult line for us to walk to hit that sweet spot where it’s just challenging enough to feel like the rewards are sweet, but not so challenging where the rewards become an afterthought.”
“We want to streamline the experience in Diablo 4 to make it clearer when items are upgrades. We don’t want you to have to spend tons of mental energy sifting through loot to try and figure out what is or isn’t good for you. So, we do phase out certain rarities, because we think it’s part of the progression journey. You become so powerful that certain loot just becomes beneath you, right?”
“One thing we do miss the mark on is, what happens to those rarities when they do get phased out? In the future, we do want items that, once they become useless to you, they automatically turn into salvage that you can then pour into more powerful loot, or potentially more pulls on stat rolls.”
One thing many Diablo content creators are calling for is better rewards for Diablo 4, either via account-wide season-over-season meta progression, or via things like the Battle Pass. The new reliquary system was designed to give players more control over what rewards they pursue, but others have noted that it seems to have fewer items than the previous linear battle pass track. I asked the team how their philosophy is evolving with regard to the game’s battle pass model, as well as get hints about the future of more permanent progression systems.
“We are open to the idea of having more meta progression to give more meaning to playing a season,” Finer explains. “We made a change in Vessel of Hatred to allow all Paragon levels, for example, to carry over into Eternal. You could argue that’s a sort of meta progression tracker, right?
“On the seasonal model, I do think it’s actually helpful to casual players who haven’t played in a while, because it lets everyone start fresh. You don’t need to remember anything about your previous character, sift through gear, and so on.”
One thing that concerns me about Diablo 4’s direction is the volume of rewards-as-microtransactions, rather than obtained via play. Blizzard focused on making the higher ranks of Torment more tough, and put some of the most compelling rewards up in there, until fan feedback led them to change tac. The team emphasized that player feedback shapes their decisions, although there are limits.
“We have added a lot of great stuff to the season journeys. Last season we had our first flying pet, Dorian, as part of the season journey. We think it’s cool to have aspirational rewards in the game, like Dorian, and this season’s is Iris the cat. The aspirational stuff is tricky — we know it’s important to have things to aspire to, but we also want it to be a rewarding experience, regardless of how hard you play. It’s tricky to balance. Some feel that there’s a disservice if it’s not hard enough, but it then makes it inaccessible for a lot of players. We look to fan feedback to find out where sentiment is landing on things like that. We’re happy to revisit things, like moving Iris from Chapter VII of the season journey to Chapter VI.”
As a World of Warcraft player, I had to ask about Vessel of Hatred’s new raid layer, and whether it could see improvements, with a reminder about Diablo 4’s enigmatic roadmap.
“We’re happy that we tried something new for Vessel of Hatred, we haven’t seen it before in the mainline series. We’re still parsing player feedback to help validate our investments in raids and other types of content. In our roadmap, we have nightmare dungeon improvements, infernal horde improvements — focusing on the core systems players love and enjoy.”
I tried to tease some hints about a Paladin class or new features coming to the expansion for Diablo 4 next year, but the Blizzard team were proving tough to crack on that one. Although, they acknowledged how much potential still exists in Diablo 4, especially as competition from other ARPGs gradually ramps up.
“I do agree that Diablo 4 still has a lot of untapped potential. I think Season 8 is jammed with cool stuff, with new lair bosses, new move sets for lair bosses, and quality of life improvements. We’re very excited for the next expansion in 2026. I think players are going to love it. I do agree that there’s so much more we can offer players. There’s more to come.”
A huge thanks to Colin Finer and Deric Nunez for fielding our questions — I’ll see you guys in Sanctuary!
