Diablo 4, Blizzard’s loot-grinding RPG that launched to commercial success and critical acclaim in June 2023, is regularly getting solid updates that fix mechanics and tweak classes for improved playability The latest big update is sure to bring some lapsed players back into the fold. Loot is sounding much more promising, as Diablo 4 Season 4 will introduce a new system to make gear-finding far more rewarding and personal than previous seasons have.
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Speaking to IGN on April 10, Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson discussed the game’s upcoming season, which launches on May 14. Diablo 4 Season 4 will feature a new loot system that totally reworks how you acquire, consider, and use the equipment you find. There’s so much loot in the game with so many different attributes and affixes, but not every piece of gear was useful for your character build or class selection, making the whole system feel unsatisfying on the whole. Now, with what Blizzard’s doing to loot, Diablo 4's gear-finding and item-sorting seems like it’s about to get a whole lot better come next month.
“Part of the change is also to make it more approachable,” Fergusson said. “When you got heavily into the itemization or the loot of Diablo 4, it could be a little intimidating with all the different attributes and affixes. You speed up when running away from things that are chilled—there was a lot of conditional things that could get complicated. It was hard to know, is that thing that just fell on the ground, do I want to pick it up or not? That’s really what Season 4 is about addressing, making things much clearer, and that what you’re looking for on the ground, you know what you want right away, and then you go in and start crafting how you want to adjust it using the tempering system and the masterworking system. That idea you have ownership about how your loot progresses through the game really empowers the players.”
This extends to The Codex of Power as well, Diablo 4's compendium for Legendary Aspects (or attributes) you can apply to the gear you find. Fergusson said that all the attributes you discover on the loot in your inventory will go into this handy-dandy notebook. This will not only free up precious inventory space, but this subtle change in Season 4 will also allow you to apply those attributes to whatever equipment you want. In this way, as Fergusson put it, you’ll have more “ownership and accountability” over your loot.
“You have a goal you’re shooting for in terms of that depth and complexity and interest, and realize, oh, this is actually maybe too far, it’s too complicated, or it’s causing tensions around the amount of space in your stash,” Fergusson said. “We get lots of like, ‘I need a loot filter!’ That’s a symptom, that’s not the problem. I could cure the symptom by giving you a loot filter. But we want to go after what the actual problem is, which is, loot is too complicated, and we want to make it cleaner for people to understand what’s good for them and what they can invest in and spend their time with.”
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This all sounds good to me. I bounced off Diablo 4 a few months after it came out, partly because of inventory and loot issues. It all became too complicated, too unwieldy, and unfortunately, too samey whenever I went questing, as much of what I found on the ground was rather useless. Season 4 seeks to improve my biggest gripe with the game, and with the first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, launching later this year, it’s a good time to get back into Diablo 4.