The next major expansion for Diablo IV won’t come out until 2026, according to remarks made by franchise general manager Rod Fergusson at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas on Wednesday. This isn’t too surprising, given that the first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, didn’t release until the game had been out for 17 months.
Fergusson announced that Blizzard will drop a 2025 roadmap just ahead of Season 8, but that it won’t include any details on the next major expansion. Additionally, he didn’t say when in 2026 it was likely to drop, nor did he provide any details.
Blizzard’s original plan was to put out a new expansion every year, similar to how Destiny 2 handled things in its early run. That idea went out the window when Vessel of Hatred missed the release window by nearly six months. There were bugs that needed to be fixed and community feedback to incorporate. It’s tough maintaining a live-service game.
In any event, I would prefer a polished expansion with plenty of new gameplay mechanics instead of a rushed effort to meet a yearly release quota. The next season of Diablo IV is currently set to go live in April, so we can expect that 2025 roadmap sometime ahead of that. It’s also highly likely we’ll start to get teases for the next expansion later in the year. The hype machine surrounding Vessel of Hatred started up in 2023.
We called Diablo IV “one of the best games” that Blizzard had released in a decade in our official review. The dungeon-crawling mechanics are just about perfect, though we thought the world-building felt a little flat. Vessel of Hatred added a new class and a new area to explore.