Blizzard's loved a good roadmap, lately—and, as an occasional WoW player, it's mostly been reaping the rewards of them. But things aren't so bright and sunny over in Diablo 4 land, with the latest one falling a smidge flat.
For starters, half of the thing's burnt off: Seeing as Diablo 4's next major expansion isn't arriving until 2026, one would hope there'd be a swarm of seasonal content features to tide players over. Instead, it's mostly rep boards—which are sort of like battle-pass style seasonal grinds to unlock various gubbins. There's some other stuff on there—like new lair bosses—but when "earnable pet" is a flagship feature on every timeslot on your roadmap, something's up. It doesn't help that the map only gets 3/4ths of the way through a year before essentially going 'we've got more, trust us, it's gonna be great'.
Mike Ybarra, former Blizzard president—who took a bit of a weird zag into CEO of Prizepicks, a fantasy sports company—weighed in on the lukewarm response on X in a very polite, three-point takedown of what he sees as the D4 team's current issues.
Point one: "Don't ship to check a box," Ybarra says. "Seasons need to get off the cycle of shipping, spending 2 months to fix issues, then repeating." Which is an astute enough observation—I'm not familiar with Diablo 4's issues, but I've seen more than one live service game go through this cycle. Helldivers 2 is a prime example of a game caught in an eternal loop of 'it's so over' to 'we're so back'.
Point two: "Pause and give the team time to really address the end-game issues. Playing for a week to then [one-to-three-shot] an 'uber' boss 500 times for a unique, then quitting until next season is fundamentally not fun." Technically true, but I feel like Ybarra is just… describing a seasonal ARPG, here—maybe Diablo 4 is more stagnant than others. I'm certainly getting that vibe from the community.
And lastly: "[The] expansions schedule is too long—should be yearly. Reduce "story" investment (costs so much for one-time element in an ARPG) and focus on new classes, new mob types, new end-game activities that last more than a few days." He's not entirely wrong, here, either—a solid story is nice in an ARPG, but most come to these sorts of games to burn out their dopamine receptors by incrementally building towards a build that can backhand god. The story is an accoutrement, rather than the main course.
"If the cycle continues," Ybarra concludes, "To just ship w/o fixing the fundamental issues, then I'm not sure where Diablo is going. You can add all the end-game activities you want, but you'll be running in place with the same issues. At some point there's just so many random things, it's not worth the effort."
While Ybarra is saying all the right things, I should point out that Diablo 4's current state—which, judging by this thread of player complaints, has a lot to do with the fact that "Service games suck!"—is also kinda his fault, right? Diablo 4 was a game developed under his stewardship as company president, and while he left in January of 2024 after the Microsoft acquisition, Ybarra still oversaw around six months of Diablo 4's post-release content.
Sure, he's said he planned to cut down on the game's live service elements before leaving, but hindsight is 20/20. It is, ultimately, extremely easy to say you'd have made all the cool and popular choices after you aren't being held accountable for actually acting on them.
To his credit, he's at least self-aware about this: "Anyone can say things. Teams have to understand and do them," he replies to one player who asked why these things weren't set in motion sooner. Joking elsewhere that he was paid to be "Captain Obvious." On the other hand: You were president of Blizzard, my guy. I can't think of someone more qualified to get people to understand and do things.
As for Diablo 4, I hope its developers are able to get out of the seasonal rut soon—I very much know what it's like for one of your favourite games to fall into a stagnant formula with tremendously slow content updates. I hope this roadmap's flames are merely hiding big news in the future, rather than an ill omen of further burns to come.
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