Diablo 4 Seasons Won’t Continue Main Story, Could Extend World Map

gamingbolt.com:

Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 4 is out on June 6th worldwide, but it’s only the beginning of years-long support for the action RPG looter. The first season goes live in mid to late July and will present new questlines, Legendaries, and characters with seasonal challenges to complete and cosmetics to earn.

However, seasons won’t extend the campaign’s story. Associate game director Joe Piepiora explained to Eurogamer, “We have two different kinds of releases after the game launches. We have our quarterly seasonal releases. Then we’ll have our expansion packs. While we’re not talking about our expansions today, it’s important to realise they’re a part of the ecosystem of what we support the game with moving forward.

“Now seasons, though, when we think about the story, we know that we want to continue to build upon the world of Diablo 4 and the world of Sanctuary, but we do not want to extend the campaign into seasons and then make seasons required reading for the expansions, for that to make sense.”

Of course, other reasons exist for taking a more isolated approach to seasons. Instead of building towards something with a season, the team wants it to be great alone. Seasons have themes, and their questlines explore those.

“It might introduce new characters, it might bring back old characters, but it is a self-contained canonical story set in Sanctuary that is going to persist for the duration of the season and will also introduce new gameplay mechanics and other things that will be available during those three months at the same time, only for it to be replaced in the following season, where we will now introduce a new seasonal questline, a new seasonal theme, new seasonal gameplay, rewards to chase, monsters to fight, new