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- Blizzard wanted to tell a full, central story about the Lord of Terror, so they decided to give Diablo his own game.
- Diablo 5 demanded deeply structural changes to meet the team's ambition, changes that would be difficult to deliver via an expansion.
- Matt Zitterman says a deep understanding of who Diablo players are and what they want drove the sequel decision early on.
The unveiling of Diablo 5 during BlizzCon 2026 prompted a range of reactions from oohs and aahs to disappointment at the confirmation that the surprise sequel means no more expansions for Diablo 4. Diablo 4 currently has two expansions, 2024’s Vessel of Hatred and this year’s Lord of Hatred, and there won’t be any more as Blizzard focuses on getting Diablo 5 out the door by its planned release window of spring 2029. The game will still get regular seasonal updates, like the wonderfully nostalgic Season of Hell’s Legacy, but full-blown expansions are officially in the rear view for Diablo 4.
We haven’t seen much of Diablo 5 yet, but one big departure from series convention is the complete removal of towns and safe zones, which ties into the narrative premise about Diablo having won the big war against humanity before the story kicks off. Even with such a big change from previous entries, a lot of Diablo fans have asked what made Blizzard decide on a full-on sequel instead of more Diablo 4 expansions, and now we have a clear answer.
Talking to GameSpot, Diablo 5 executive producer Matt Zitterman says the decision to make a sequel instead of more expansions came down to a deep understanding of the Diablo community and what it wants.
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“Who are Diablo players? Why are they playing Diablo? What do they want out of a Diablo game?” says Zitterman. “That is a really critical step in the early conceptual phase for a game, even before you’re thinking about, ‘should we make this an expansion? Should we make it a sequel? How do we do this?’ Really deep understanding of who are players are.”
From there, Blizzard looked at what people liked and didn’t like about Diablo 4 and used that feedback to figure out its overall “ambition” for the series. Zitterman says it became clear “pretty early” that “some deeply structural changes” had to happen “in order to achieve what we wanted to achieve with this game,” and those changes would’ve been “frankly hard to do in an expansion.”
More importantly, or at least this is my read on Zitterman’s quotes, Blizzard just wanted to make a whole game about the Lord of Terror himself, the birthday boy celebrating 30 years, Al’Diabolos. “Diablo is the main villain. Diablo is the guy that we want to tell a real story about,” says Zitterman. “We want to tell a story that’s on par, and hopefully exceeds, the story that we told with Lilith and Mephisto, and to do that in an expansion just didn’t feel right. We needed to give him his own game.”
Of course, Diablo has arrived at long last to terrorize Sanctuary in Diablo 4 as part of the new seasonal questline, but Diablo 4 does still very much feel like Lilith’s game. With big dawg having appeared as the main antagonist in every Diablo release so far, I’m curious what the distinction will be in Diablo 5 with him being front and center to the game’s development.
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