Diablo 4 is far from dead, but don’t expect any new expansions for the game going forward. Instead, Blizzard is preparing to tell the darkest story yet in Diablo 5, one that required a new numbered game to properly reintroduce Diablo himself back to the series, following his defeat in 2012’s Diablo 3. Currently aiming for a 2029 release, this would mean that players are in for a relatively short wait for a new Diablo game–compared to previous releases–as Diablo 5 will arrive a mere six years after Diablo 4.

Speaking to GameSpot at BlizzCon, Diablo senior production director Tiffany Wat and executive producer Matt Zitterman explained that it made sense for Blizzard to move to a new Diablo so that the studio could make structural changes to the game–changes that would have been very challenging to pull off within the framework of a Diablo 4 expansion.

“It really started by looking at who our players are,” Zitterman said. “Who are Diablo players? Why are they playing Diablo? What do they want out of a Diablo game? That is a really critical step in the early conceptual phase for a game, even before you’re thinking about, like, ‘Gosh, should we make this an expansion? Should we make it a sequel? How do we do this?’ Looking at past examples, looking at what’s working well in Diablo 4, where there are opportunities for improvement, and we kind of build our ambition for the game at the conceptual phase through those avenues of information.”

“And as we started to understand and kind of solidify what that ambition was, it became very clear to us pretty early that in order to achieve what we wanted to achieve with this game, we needed to make some more deeply structural changes to the way the game works, changes that are just frankly hard to do in an expansion. Again, it’s all about figuring out what the best way is to make the best Diablo game we can for players. Diablo is the main villain. Diablo is the guy that we want to tell a real story about. We want to tell a story that’s on par with–and hopefully exceeds–the story we told with Lilith and Mephisto.”

“And to do that in an expansion just didn’t feel right. We needed to give him his own game.”

Player feedback also plays a vital role in the development of Diablo 5, and Zitterman said that by announcing the game this early, Blizzard could make important changes well ahead of the game’s eventual launch. “If we didn’t announce now and we kind of held back until we were much further along in development, at that point, it’s much harder to take that feedback and use it to make those really important changes and refinements to the game throughout development,” Zitterman explained.

For more on Diablo 5, you can learn how combat could be even more ferocious, how the game will offer more character classes than ever, and how the Plague Knight uses the grossest powers to stay a step ahead of Diablo’s demonic armies.

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