Diablo IV Season 15 is a birthday party, starring the birthday boy himself: Diablo.
Blizzard Entertainment recently took to BlizzCon to announce Diablo IV Season 15: Season of Hell’s Legacy. This season is a massive birthday bash for the franchise's 30th anniversary, including not just the return of Deckard Cain and Diablo himself, but also a potential return to Diablo III's Whimsyshire, many classic NPCs and voicelines, and almost the entirety of Diablo 1 remade and made playable in-game.
While they were having a massive BlizzCon outing, the developers of Diablo IV (specifically Lead Encounter Designer and Lead Seasons Designer Owen Leach, and Design Director, Live Services Dan Tanguay) sat down for an exclusive interview with GosuGamers. We talked about everything coming this season, from Whimsyshire to how Blizzard plans to build up to the arrival of Diablo V, and you can find all the juicy details below.
Here's a new gameplay trailer for Diablo IV Season 15:
Why did Blizzard bring back Deckard Cain in Diablo IV Season 15?
Let's get the big question out of the way first: why and how is Deckard Cain back after his demise in Diablo III? While the character has been a major influence on the franchise and provided plenty of nostalgia for older players, he was only mentioned in Diablo IV, but otherwise remained quite dead. When asked why now felt like the right time to bring Deckard Cain back, Blizzard told us:
"Well, it really came down to this being the 30th anniversary celebration, and we thought about who best to celebrate those 30 years of Diablo history. And when we just talked about it, it came pretty obvious that Deckard Cain is the guy to do that, right? Sort of the voice of Diablo, the grandfather of Diablo, I guess. So I know fans were a little displeased at how he met his end."
Blizzard isn't off the mark there. To this day, fans begrudge his ending; a strange and unsatisfying demise involving butterflies.
The developer continued: "So anything we can do to help sort of ease that pain and bring him back. And just... Michael Goff is so talented. Hearing his voice is just such an immediate trip down memory lane. It was a natural choice."
Bringing back characters for nostalgia is one thing, but Blizzard also wanted to make sure that Cain's return wouldn't feel forced.
“We wanted to make sure he was brought back in a natural way. And so, you know, in the current season, the season of death awakening, you know, we've established that not only are there these mysterious ruptures that are bringing pandemonium into sanctuary, but, the dead are starting to come back to life as well. And that seemed like a great opportunity to say, well, you know, if there's some very particular dead characters we want to bring back in order to celebrate, we could do that.”
This means Cain isn't the only one coming back: the Dark Wanderers are back too. This establishes the threat for this season, and Cain's reason for coming into the protagonist's life. He even comes with his own character arc. "We wanted to make sure that Deckard also got to depart on his own terms as well. So as you play through the seasonal quest line next week, you're going to see that Deckard has a couple things on his mind. He wants to make up for some mistakes that he feels he's made in the past, and he's going to get an opportunity to do that."
Why bring Diablo back in Season 15, and not an expansion?
Deckard Cain isn't the only major character to return in Season 15. Diablo himself, the franchise's namesake, is also making his grand return as a new bossfight. While Diablo is headlining his own game in the distant future (Diablo V), we had to ask: why not bring him back in his own expansion, just as Mephisto got a lengthy story in Lord of Hatred?
"We sort of thought about how best to tell that next chapter of Diablo's story. Is it better as a three-chain expansion for Diablo IV, or is it better to create an entire whole new game around it? And that kind of planted the seed of what Diablo 5 is all about. It's the story of Diablo.
"Diablo IV told the tale of hatred and Mephisto and Lilith's story from start to finish, and we just wanted to give Diablo his time in the sun and let him have his whole new game. That's what led to Diablo V"
Hence, Diablo will make a smaller appearance in Diablo IV Season 15. His return is tied to the Dark Wanderers, which are beings returning from the dead who remain tormented by the Prime Evils whose Soulstones they bore. These Prime Evils are Diablo, Baal, and Mephisto. One of the Dark Wanderers is notably Aiden, a former warrior from Diablo 1, who put the Soulstone in his head and became the Dark Wanderer, before eventually becoming Diablo.
In Diablo IV Season 15, Aiden will appear tormented by that decision, and the piece of the Soulstone remaining inside him. Players will face Diablo in Aiden's nightmare, which is in fact a remake of almost the entirety of Diablo 1. This segment of the season goes from the cathedral and catacombs, to the caves and hell, culminating in a bossfight with Diablo–just like the original game. It's a big bossfight that doubles as the climax of the seasonal quest line.
After defeating Diablo for the first time, you'll be able to collect a splinter of the evil that has been tormenting Aiden. After collecting all three splinters from Baal, Mephisto, and Diablo, you'll be able to bear that splinter and its accompanying power. If you do choose Diablo's splinter, "there's a good chance that every so often you'll also have to fight Diablo as an echo of the past, who will start coming to look to try and seize that power from you. That was in the PTR as the overland ambushes."
That's not the end of it, either. After Diablo's defeat, his bossfight will become available in Capstone Dungeon and a Pinnacle Capstone Dungeon, the latter of which bumps up the difficulty by some margin.
When we asked Blizzard if Diablo and his fellow Prime Evils might become permanent content, instead of disappearing after Season 15 was over, the developers seemed open to the idea–but not fixed on it just yet.
"Right now they're seasonal content, but that's something that we're talking about. There are some elements of the season, like the legacy Unique [items], that we're going to make Eternal right off the bat. That's pretty much a rule for us, that any new Unique you introduce needs to be available on Seasonal and Eternal.
"When it comes to other features, we kind of evaluate it on a case-by-case basis. In the case of Diablo and Baal and Mephisto, there are a lot of folks who would want to see this become Eternal. We're just trying to figure out what's the best way of doing that. Do we do that as a dungeon that's hard to find every so often? We don't know if that's the right approach, maybe treating this as an event that can come back every so often is a better approach."
Blizzard noted that the team is still debating on the issue at the moment, "but our ultimate goal is to make sure that players will get to re-experience this content down the road" and it doesn't want to "keep it from them."
Is Whimsyshire in Diablo IV?
At the end of the Diablo IV Season 15 trailer was a small moment featuring a cuddly teddy bear that might have gone under the radar. Some fans quickly picked up on it, however, tying it back to the potential return of Diablo's Whimsyshire–a tonally dissonant colourful environment filled with rainbows, unicorns, and death. When we asked Blizzard about it, the developers at first appeared reluctant to spoil anything in specifics–but they told us that we were "on the right track" when we asked if Whimsyshire was actually coming back.
Blizzard told us:
"When we finally had kind of put together a pitch for the season, you know, Owen pitched it to leadership and they're like, yeah, let's go ahead and do it. He pitched to the team and the team got really excited. We had some ideas of things we wanted to pull into the season to celebrate, but the team had so many additional ideas of things they wanted to try and get in and celebrate.
"So, yes, there are certainly fans of a... whimsical land amongst the team, and you might be able to find your way in there."
Whimsyshire confirmed? You decide.
Will Diablo IV get more character classes following the Amazon?
Another big BlizzCon reveal was the return of the Amazon, a class hailing from Skovos, as seen in Diablo IV's Lord of Hatred expansion. This new class brings a new power fantasy to Diablo, which Blizzard describes as: “you're an expert soldier, you're a veteran, somebody who's been trained in combat and you're able then to wield the power, the mythic magic of your ancestors. The Amazon is a soldier and very disciplined. So when they get up and close and personal, it's done so in a very tactical, you know, “take your shots and get out of harm's way.””
At range, the Amazon is meant to feel a lot more like a sniper, rather than a Rogue employing trick shots. The Amazon is really looking to take very critical shots at enemies and not waste arrows. Hence, this is a pragmatic class which has “a lot of similarities, at a high level, to some of the classes we have already. But when you really look at the execution, what we're going after, it's gonna have a different feel.”
The Amazon also represents a change for Diablo IV's pace of DLC moving forward. The Amazon will be released with a "Class Pack" rather than the usual expansion drops the game has released thus far. When we asked Blizzard how it plans to release new characters, it said that "we try to be as flexible as we can with it, but we also wanna make sure that players and fans know that that's it's coming out well in advance so that, you know, they can they can plan around it."
"For the Amazon in particular, it's not being released with an expansion. It's being released with a Class Pack. But we're going to be building our seasons in such a way that we're building up towards that moment that we're creating this sense of escalation leading up to the Amazon. So that you have the feeling that, oh, wow, there's this really big threat coming and I need some help from my friends at Skovos.
Blizzard added that Diablo IV's developers "really don't know if there's going to be another class. We just need to be flexible about how we approach it, because it honestly is what's driving our seasonal development. Every season has a different purpose. We want to make sure that we're just trying to meet our needs and the player needs at any moment."
Will future Diablo IV seasons build up to Diablo V?
Here's the big ticket item of BlizzCon's Diablo reveals: a fifth Diablo game is coming in 2029, and it features a Sanctuary that has been annihilated by Diablo. After the player's hard work for all these seasons, no less! We asked Blizzard if there are plans to build up to the release of Diablo V via in-game season updates, perhaps to explain how the destruction of Sanctuary exactly came about.
Blizzard's answer seemed a little unsure, though aware of the community's expectations: "That's something we're actively discussing right now. We aren't able to really talk about since it's early for us, but you know, it, it does seem important for folks to feel like there's this sense of connection between the two games. We are going to be exploring what options we have for that."
Right now, the developer seems more interested in figuring out what the "ending" of Diablo IV even looks like.
"The bigger discussion we're actually having at the moment is: what shape do we want the final form of the game to take for players? What does it look like when all the seasons are done? That's the thing we're trying to solve right now. After that, we'll work our way back to how we might want to create a road to Diablo V."
Diablo IV Season 15 is bringing back original voices and music from Diablo 1
When we asked Diablo's developers what they're most excited about in the jam-packed Season 15 update, their answer was, among others, the return of Na-Krul from Diablo Hellfire. Why? Because "I think we spent a lot of time denying that Diablo Hellfire exists and giving that game the time in the sun that it deserves. It is part of Diablo's history and seeing the iconic villain from that come back is like the coolest thing ever."
Additionally, the team appears to be pretty proud to bring all the original voices and music from previous Diablo games as "a very powerful way to transport people into their memories, and instantly trigger thoughts of when you first played Diablo 1 or Diablo 2."
Diablo IV: The Amazon's new Javelin weapon explained
The Amazon class comes with a rather unique weapon for this game: the Javelin. This weapon can serve as both a melee and ranged weapon, as it can also be flung at enemies. According to Blizzard, it "gives us some opportunity to do some things that Diablo II did, but also gives us some opportunities to do things that have never been done before."
Diablo IV's Amazon class will be a female-only class
While it shouldn't surprise anyone with familiarity of the Amazons and their real-world mythology, the Amazons will be Diablo IV's first female-only class. Other classes are fairly flexible with customisation and gender choices, so we asked Blizzard if there was a moment where they were tempted to bend the rules and allow for male Amazons.
However, Blizzard noted that "it was pretty important to respect, respect the lore that had come before that the, you know, Amazons were a, you know, female only fighting force. We've introduced so many other classes at this point, that it probably gives us a little room to do something like that.
Is Blizzard shutting down Diablo IV to focus on Diablo V?
Reactions to Diablo V’s announcement have not been as celebratory as one might expect. While some members of the playerbase are already looking forward to more Diablo, others are worried that the upcoming sequel is an ominous sign of the eventual sunsetting of Diablo IV. After all, while previous Diablo games were not launched as live-service games, Diablo IV launched with the concrete promise of more content to come for a very long time.
We asked Blizzard, straight up, if the announcement of Diablo V meant that Diablo IV was winding down development. Diablo IV developers responded heartily: “Certainly, it doesn't seem like we're winding things down. We've got a lot planned with the Amazon [class] and the upcoming seasons leading to that Switch 2 release. Right now, I'm thinking about what's coming after that.”
The developer continued unequivocally: “We're looking to continue to support Diablo 4 all the way through the release of Diablo V and beyond.”
Diablo IV Season 15 is officially out now. Check out everything you missed from BlizzCon 2026’s Opening Ceremony here.
