Diablo 4 won’t have annual expansions after all

The next Diablo 4 expansion won’t be out in 2025, in spite of the studio’s previous comments about releasing them annually. Speaking at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas (via Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier), Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson said the follow-up to 2024’s Vessel of Hatred expansion won’t be out until 2026.

“In his DICE Summit presentation today on building a resilient live service, Diablo GM Rod Fergusson emphasized serving the game over the plan,” a Blizzard spokesperson told Polygon. “To that, we are excited to share that we are in development on our second expansion for Diablo IV, which will debut in 2026.”

A few months after Diablo 4 launched in 2023, Fergusson told Dexerto that new expansion releases would be annual. When asked about that statement in a 2024 GameSpot interview, his certainty wavered: “Our players deserve to have more content and more ways to play, but in terms of what’s the cadence and the right amount is not something I can talk about today.”

At DICE (via IGN), Fergusson said, “In 2025, or just before Season 8, we will have a 2025 roadmap for Diablo 4. Now, our second expansion won’t be on that roadmap, because our second expansion is coming in 2026, but at least players will have the road ahead.”

According to IGN, Fergusson said Vessel of Hatred slipped past the release date Blizzard originally had in mind as a result of the gargantuan overhaul to the game’s core systems last year. That shift pushed the upcoming expansion forward into 2026.

Blizzard hasn’t made any official announcements about what to expect in the next expansion, but anyone who has finished Vessel of Hatred will have a few good guesses on where the story will go next. In the meantime, the Season of Witchcraft is still on, granting players seasonal occult powers, like a poisonous pet frog.

Update (8:07 p.m. ET): This story has been updated with a comment from Blizzard.