Diablo 4 Last season, for the first time in a long time, the game was not radically changed. Blizzard has spent much of the last year reworking major parts of the game to better fit how people want to play it. While players don’t expect significant up-to-date features to come to the game during Season of Wonderland, work is ongoing behind the scenes, project director Dan Tanguay told Polygon in an interview earlier this month.
Tanguay says Season 7 was intended as a “palette cleanser” after all the work Blizzard put into transforming the core of the show Diablo 4. This is the first time since Season 3 that players can gain unique powers related to a theme – in this case, witch magic. But even though it’s been done before, the team “spent a lot of time behind the scenes developing tools to make things easier,” Tanguay said.
“I think at the beginning of the seasons we were really just learning how to proceed at that point in developing the seasons,” Tanguay said, “and when it comes to development, sometimes you make concessions to do something without investing in something long-term.”
Season of Wonder is the result of the team creating a structure to build better, more versatile seasons in the future. In the same interview with Tanguay, quest designer Nathan Scott told Polygon that the goal was execution Diablo 4 the world feels more alive than previous seasons, which largely focused on isolated up-to-date threats. In Season 7, regions of the world are overrun by roaming rotten head enemies, and as you chop and slash, pulsating pustules erupt from the ground and emit a purple glow. Previous Diablo 4 the seasons had their moments, but none of them felt as ubiquitous as season 7.
The seasonal mission is related to the events of Vessel of Hatred expansion and follows members of a coven of witches trying to lend a hand an irate antique tree. None of them are imperative to the main conflict of the campaigns, but they’re much more than a fancy tutorial.
By defeating Headrotten, you’ll gain up-to-date witch powers, such as a giant poisonous frog, and you’ll eventually be able to craft up-to-date seasonal gems to put in your inventory. The goal, Tanguay and Scott said, was to make seasonal powers useful to everyone, whether they’re low-level or busy destroying end-game dungeons. And while some of these issues may sound familiar to players who have been with the team for the first few seasons, Tanguay said the team now has everything in place that will allow them to do things more efficiently, leaving room for bigger improvements in the future. This could include witch powers returning to the game permanently as its own unique system, Tanguay said.
Tanguay said players understandably look at seasons individually, but the team looks at them “as a continuum” of learning and seeing what comes next. “The hope is that when we get to, say, season 20, we’ll look back and think, wow, we can do so much more and deliver so much more that it seems like it’s night and day.”
