How Diablo 4’s Witchcraft season is helping Blizzard shape what’s next

Diablo 4’s latest season is the first time in a long time that the game isn’t being dramatically overhauled. Blizzard spent most of the last year reworking major parts of the game to better fit how people wanted to play it. But even though players aren’t seeing major new features coming to the game in the Season of Witchcraft, that work continues behind the scenes, design director Dan Tanguay told Polygon in an interview earlier this month.

Tanguay says season 7 was devised as a “palette cleanser” after all the work Blizzard put into reshaping the core of Diablo 4. It’s the first since season 3 where players can earn unique powers tied to the theme — witch magic in this case. But even though it had been done before, the team “spent a lot of time behind the scenes building out tools to make it easier to build out the stuff,” Tanguay said.

“I think in early seasons, we were really just learning how to walk at that point in developing the seasons,” Tanguay said, “and development-wise sometimes you make concessions to get something done without investing in a longer-term thing.”

The Season of Witchcraft is the result of the team creating a structure for building better, more flexible seasons going forward. In the same interview with Tanguay, quest designer Nathan Scott told Polygon the goal was to make Diablo 4’s world feel more alive than previous seasons, which largely focused on isolated new threats. In season 7, regions of the world are infested with shambling Headrotten enemies, and as you hack and slash, pulsing pustules erupt out of the ground and give off a violet glow. Previous Diablo 4 seasons had their moments, but none of them felt as pervasive as season 7.

The seasonal quest ties into the events of the Vessel of Hatred expansion and follows members of a witch coven trying to help an angry ancient tree. None of it is essential to the main conflict in the campaigns, but it’s a lot more than a fancy tutorial.

As you defeat Headrotten, you earn new witch powers, like a giant poison frog pet, and eventually you can craft new seasonal gems to slot into your gear. The goal, Tanguay and Scott said, was to make seasonal powers relevant to everyone, whether they’re still low level or busy blasting endgame dungeons. And while some of this may sound familiar to players who were around for the first few seasons, Tanguay said the team now has a pipeline for being able to do everything more efficiently, leaving room for bigger improvements down the line. And that may include the witch powers returning to the game permanently as its own unique system, Tanguay said.

Players understandably look at seasons individually, Tanguay said, but the team looks at them “like a continuum” of learning and iterating on what’s next. “The hope is when we get to, let’s say, season 20, we look back and we’re like, wow, we can do so much more and deliver so much more that it seems like night and day.”