Diablo 4 Season 3 is coming very soon, inspired by one of Steven Spielberg’s most iconic films.

Game news Diablo 4 Season 3 is coming very soon, inspired by one of Steven Spielberg’s most iconic films.

Diablo 4 Season 3: A Release Date and Name

For your assemblies! Season 3 on January 23, called “Assemblies” will be deployed on Diablo 4 servers. This new seasonal chapter, like previous chapters, includes a series of seasonal quests. Here we are talking about the “loom”, a device created by the magician Zoltan Kull. During an interview with JV, Timothy Isme (Lead Game Producer) and Madeleine James (Game Designer Quests) explained Blizzard’s choice to focus on assembly:

I believe Joseph Piper, our head designer, had some ideas for the third season. One of them was buildings, because previous Diablos had some and we wanted to introduce them in Diablo IV. So we started by saying, “Okay, we want to do some assembly,” and then we moved on to projects. We wondered who made the assemblies. And then we met Zoltan Kull, who has close ties to the mage clans and constructs, which seemed natural to us.

This construction season can therefore be an opportunity to learn more about Zoltan Kull. In any case, Blizzard seems to focus on the content of the game over the gameplay as well as the story: So the seasons are a means for them to tell stories around the Diablo lore… provided they don’t worry about the main story suggested by Madeleine James.

Yeah, we usually say that we don’t want to touch the story of the main campaign because, you know, if someone’s not playing Season X, we don’t want them to feel like, oh, I missed a big scene, I feel bad now…

Diablo 4: Seasonal Chapter Under the Sign of the Trap

Of course, Season 3 also brings new ways to play. It was around these assemblies that the new power gain system was built: players would get their hands on a seneschal, a special assembly obedient to the player. The latter can customize it in their own way and have it fulfill several roles: tank, healer or a simple source of extra damage. To fix it, you’ll then have to explore the Difficult Vaults, which are also introduced by Season 3. These crypts contain treasures… the value of which will depend on the players’ performance! But who says vaults say traps. Like Indiana Jones, you have to avoid numerous traps scattered underground. And at the mention of this famous cinematographic license from Steven Spielberg, Blizzard admitted it was inspired by it, says Madeleine.

That really happened as a point of inspiration. We talked about the clip of Indiana Jones running away from the stone. We don’t have that level of trapping. We wanted the vaults to feel fresh and alive. In the base game, traps should be activated normally. You have to shoot the barrel so that it explodes. They will activate here when you enter a room or perform an activity, select a transportable item and the room will come alive and try to kill you. So that’s the general impression we want to give, that vaults are hostile and designed to kill you.

Similarly, players have to face death closely to prove their talent. A ranking system will be put in place in the weeks following the start of Season 3. that “competitiveness”, a high-level activity, which players will indirectly measure against each other. Each week, a specific dungeon will be the focus of the tournament. And you have to be prepared according to Timothy Ismay:

You enter a very difficult dungeon. You can absolutely die there. It’s not easy to beat, but that’s not the point. The point is not whether you live or not, or whether you beat him or not. What matters is your score. How fast can you beat him? How effective can you be? (…). But what makes the game fundamentally different is that you care about that score.

“The difficult factor is implementation”

Finally, this Season 3 is also an opportunity for Blizzard Team 3 to integrate some of the features players have been waiting for since the game’s release in June 2023. Timothy explains that, for Blizzard, player feedback is very important to them. The studio compares player data (especially those that engage them) with their feedback on forums. Then it’s time to integrate this own feedback into the game itself. Something sometimes delicate:

As avid players of the game, we compare them with our own opinions to decide which items we want to add to the list. But there is another important factor, and it is always difficult, and that is the difficulty of implementation. Indeed, regardless of player requests, items, and all this confusion, it may take longer or less time to integrate into the game than you think. So there are things that you will see very quickly because these are changes that we can try properly. For others far away, it’s still hard to talk about because they’re not quite ready, but there are some exciting things coming up in season four and season five. It’s just that it will take us some time to put them in place.

So it makes sense to see some of the features coming to Season 3 that have been requested for weeks. This is for example the case for the extra chest tab, a new way to change your skills on the talent tree. In addition, it is also Infernal Waves that will now be always active in this season 3.

On the subject, the teams behind Diablo 4 have changed their philosophy along the way, especially regarding class balance. After the patch was criticized for making some of them inoperable, they will now let it leak: Timothy explains “If players manage to find a build that works more effectively than expected, the developers will leave it in place” On paper, enough to promise more entertainment.