Game news Diablo 4 Season 3 is coming very soon, it was inspired by one of Steven Spielberg’s most iconic films
Starting January 23, Diablo 4 players will have new content to get their hands on! Indeed, season 3 of the game arrives next week and is titled the assembly season. And one of its features was inspired by a very famous Steven Spielberg film series.
Diablo 4 season 3: a release date and a name
To your assemblies! On January 23, season 3 called “assemblies” will be deployed on the Diablo 4 servers. This new seasonal chapter includes, like the previous ones, a series of seasonal quests. Here we are talking about the “Loom”, a device created by the sorcerer Zoltun Kull. During an interview with JV, Timothy Ismay (Lead Game Producer) and Madeleine James (Game Designer Quests) explained Blizzard’s choice to focus on assemblies:
I believe Joseph Piepiora, our head designer, had some ideas for the third season. One of them was buildings, because there had been some in previous Diablos and we wanted to introduce them into Diablo IV. So we started by saying, “OK, we’d like to do some assemblies,” and then we moved on to projects. We wondered who created the assemblages. And then we came across Zoltan Kul, who has close ties to 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 the game’s content on gameplay but also on story: the seasons are therefore for them the means of telling stories around the lore of Diablo… provided that they do not concern the main story as indicated by Madeleine James.
Yeah, we usually say we don’t want to touch the main campaign story because, you know, if someone’s not playing Season X, we don’t want them to feel like, oh, I missed the big thing scene, I feel bad now…
Trailer for Diablo 4’s first expansion
Diablo 4: a seasonal chapter under the sign of trap
Of course, season 3 also brings new ways to play. It is around these assemblies that the new power gain system was created: players will get their hands on the seneschal, a special assembly obedient to the player. The latter can customize it in their own way and can ask it to fulfill several roles: tank, healer or even a simple source of additional damage. To improve it, you will then have to explore the Difficult Vaults, a feature also introduced by this season 3. These crypts contain treasures… whose value will depend on the performance of the players! But who says vault says traps. Like Indiana Jones, you will have to avoid the numerous traps scattered underground. And at the mention of this famous cinematographic license from Steven Spielberg, Blizzard admitted to having been inspired by it, says Madeleine.
It really happened as a point of inspiration. We talked about the clip of Indiana Jones fleeing the stone. We don’t have that level of trap. We wanted to make the vaults feel new and alive. In the base game, traps should normally be activated. You have to shoot the barrel so that it explodes. Here they will be activated when you enter a room or do an activity, pick up a transportable item and the room will come alive and try to kill you. So that was the general impression we wanted to give, that the vaults were hostile and designed to kill you.
In the same way, it is also to prove their talent that the players will have to face death up close. A ranking system will be put in place in the weeks following the start of season 3. It is through “tournament”, a high-level activity, which the players will measure against each other indirectly. Each week, a particular dungeon will be the focus of this tournament. And you will have to be ready 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 tricky factor is implementation”
Finally, this season 3 is also an opportunity for Blizzard team 3 to integrate certain features highly anticipated by players since the game’s release in June 2023. Timothy explains that, for Blizzard, player feedback is very important for them. The studio compares player data (especially what engages them) with their feedback on the forums. Then comes the time to integrate these own feedback into the game itself. Something sometimes delicate:
We compare them to our own opinions, as avid players of the game, to determine all the things we want to add to the list. But there is another important factor, and this one is always tricky, and that is the difficulty of implementation. Indeed, whatever the players’ requests, things, and this can be confusing, may take more or less time than you imagine to be integrated into the game. So there are things that you will see pretty quickly because these are changes we can try right away. For others, it’s still hard to talk about because they’re not quite ready, but there are some exciting things coming in season four and season five. It’s just that it will take us some time to put them in place.
It therefore becomes logical to see certain features arriving for this season 3 that have been requested for several weeks. This is for example the case for an additional chest tab, a new way to change your skills on the talent tree. Furthermore, it is also the Infernal Waves which will now always be active in this season 3.
On this subject, the teams behind Diablo 4 seem to have changed their philosophy along the way, particularly regarding class balancing. Criticized for having made some of them inoperable after patches, they will now let it leak: Timothey explains “if players manage to find a build that works more effectively than expected, the developers will leave it in place”. Enough to promise, on paper, more entertainment.