Diablo 4 is now in its seventh season – how the time flies, eh? The ARPG is continuing to uphold its end of the live service bargain with lots of new content, while players continue to pile into the game despite the fairly recent emergence of a major rival in Path of Exile 2. However, in a new interview, Diablo’s general manager Rod Fergusson has described traditional, seasonal battle passes as “antiquated,” hinting that some changes could be on the way for Diablo 4. He also says that while armor sets and other cosmetic items have been largely grounded in its hellish fantasy aesthetic so far, Blizzard wants to start being a bit more “flamboyant” and experimental.
Diablo 4 Season of Witchcraft is one of its most original and interesting to date in the RPG. However, it’s going to be running for a little longer than anticipated due to Season 8 being delayed to give the developers more time to finish up its content. It’s not the only Activision Blizzard game to be suffering with the relentless deadlines and demands of today’s live service climate – the crucial Season 3 update to Call of Duty Warzone and Black Ops 6 has also been pushed back by a couple of weeks. It’s an endless and difficult grind, and seasonal battle passes are one major element of this approach.
However, Fergusson has teased that some changes are coming to Diablo 4’s battle passes, which are currently fairly standard, linear affairs.
“We do think battle passes are probably an antiquated system now,” he tells Game File. “There are different ways to gamify and to give the players more agency. So I think what I would say is, watch this space for us. I think we’re going to be introducing some interesting things.” Fergusson also praises the system used in Call of Duty MW2 and MW3 in recent years (a system that was dropped for Black Ops 6) which let players plot their own route through a map of rewards, meaning they could prioritize the most desirable and relevant rewards for them first, rather than chunking their way through a hundred tiers in order.
Fergusson also wants to push the boundaries a bit more with Diablo 4’s cosmetics, introducing more “flamboyant” items as opposed to the “grounded” ones we’ve seen in the game since launch. He also wants to explore more crossover content as well, following on from last year’s World of Warcraft collaboration. “We talk about it all the time,” he says.
I can imagine that if Diablo 4 were to go to the same extremes that we’ve seen Call of Duty go to (a Warzone squad these days can consist of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Nicki Minaj, Skeletor, and Rey Mysterio, after all) there would be some backlash. But some tasteful collaborations that aren’t just copying and pasting a celebrity’s likeness into the game would likely be well-received.
Fergusson doesn’t confirm whether we’ll see any of these teased battle pass changes or some more vibrant and surprising cosmetics in Season 8, so we’ll have to wait and see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, here are some of our favorite games like Diablo if you want to try something a little different, or take a look ahead to some of the biggest upcoming PC games of 2025.
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