Blizzard doesn’t intend to rework Diablo 4 over and over again, but it also doesn’t want to leave behind ‘stuff that no one wants or cares about’

Diablo 4 is officially on its second major facelift in the almost three years it’s been around. Its next season will make sweeping changes to how monsters fight back and how players customize their gear, and there’s even more reworks coming in its next expansion.

A big question that has come up as the game transforms yet again, is how often this is going to happen, and if it will continue for the foreseeable future. Speaking in an interview with Diablo streamer Raxxanterax, associate game director Zaven Haroutunian touched on this concern.

“The intention is not to replace everything just because we can,” he said. Instead, the team tries to get a “holistic picture of the whole game,” and look at “what is not pulling its weight, what is not helping support the player experience in a positive way.”

Haroutunian says monster types were one of the things that went untouched since the game launched and that they needed to be redone before a dungeon with leaderboards could be added. The Tower dungeon coming in the next season relies on the new monster types to gauge your completion progress, encouraging you to seek out tougher enemies for more points—something that just wouldn’t work with the previous iteration.

“A part of the game just felt old, and it felt derelict a little bit because it had not kept up pace with everything else we were doing,” he said. Those systems, he added, are a “tax” on the team because they have to “maintain stuff no one wants or cares about.”

“Either we can have it do its job or we can remove it, those are usually the options,” he said. “The worst third option is [to] never touch it.”

The Tower and the new monsters are an example of how Blizzard wants to pair new systems with reworked old ones where it can so nothing gets left behind. And, honestly, that makes sense for a live service game that gets major expansions every year or so.

It’s going to naturally shift and evolve and new ideas are going to make more sense than old ones. Part of me sympathizes with the people who appreciate the largely static nature of the older Diablo games, but another part of me is glad that Blizzard doesn’t want to let anything in Diablo 4 get stale.

That said, I think it runs the risk of muddying Diablo 4’s identity if it keeps doing overhauls on this scale. Nobody wants to have to relearn the game every six months. Haroutunian’s comments throughout the rest of the interview more or less address this problem as he carefully talks around expansion-related stuff that will hopefully let the basic foundation of the game settle so more new stuff can be added on top.

We won’t know what those changes are until the expansion is properly announced, but that should hopefully be soon as we’re reaching the end of the 2025 roadmap Blizzard released at the start of the year.