Diablo 5 is coming in 2029, and no that’s not a joke. We all expected that Blizzard was going to keep rolling Diablo 4 along for the foreseeable future as it worked its way through the prime evils, but apparently that’s not the case. Instead, while the Amazon class is coming to Diablo 4 next year, the developer is now working its way towards a full-fledged sequel. Starring the irredeemable eponymous villain, and with a return to a procedurally generated overworld with set items, it’s set in a future where Sanctuary has already lost.
“The heroes are gone, Sanctuary has fallen, and Diablo has won,” Senior Game Director Joe Shely explains. Diablo 5 will drag us into the next era of the RPG, and this time we won’t be defending Sanctuary from the titular force, because he’s already taken over. Senior Game Director Tiffany Wat asks, “What must you become when the world has already fallen?”
While that’s all we got during the show-opening presentation, the team later sat down on the Blizzcon 2026 main stage for a deeper dive into why it’s making Diablo 5 instead of more D4 expansions. “We started talking about, ‘What does the next era of Diablo need to look like and what do we want to do with it?'” Executive Producer Matt Zitterman explains.
“The whole reason we’re here is to make games that our players want to play, and after 30 years we’ve accumulated a very large player base with lots of different wants and needs from a Diablo game.” In order to meet all those needs, from story die-hards to hardcore blasters and build min-maxers, the team looked at the ups and downs of Diablo 4’s lifespan, and “how it’s grown over the years in response to player feedback” over the years.
Zitterman says that conversation led the team to consider whether that “next era” should be a Diablo 4 expansion or a full sequel. “Sequels allow us to do something really special to a long-standing game like Diablo where we can really get in and change the fundamentals of what the game is, and that’s really hard to do when you’re building on top of a game that’s been around for several years, and has had several expansions.”
As a long-time Diablo player, I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, I’ve always been concerned that continually stacking more expansions onto Diablo 4 might make it bloated in a way that doesn’t really suit its simplicity – it isn’t meant to be a deep, complex web of systems like Path of Exile, for example. However, Lord of Hatred feels like it got the core of D4, from itemization and crafting to endgame, to a pretty solid grounding. I hope Blizzard’s able to hit the reset button without throwing away all of that hard work.
Tonally, Diablo 5 is “really doubling down on darkness,” Senior Art Director John Mueller adds. “The scene of the crucified angels in front of the burning spires of Westmarch, I think this really sets the stakes for the world.” Sanctuary has never really been a ‘happy’ place, but this might be the most down on its luck it’s ever been. Narrative Director Jennifer Brandes Hepler says we will get to see some of the fruits of Diablo 4, however, with signs of a “golden age” in the wake of the events of Lord of Hatred.
Shely adds that Diablo will be “a fully developed character” who will be shaping the story from its beginning. Wat notes that Blizzard has a real penchant for the morally gray, as seen with Lilith’s story in D4, but “pretty quickly we kept arriving at the same conclusion: Diablo is the Lord of Terror. He’s not redeemable, he’s not misunderstood.” Our character is the ‘Heir to Westmarch,’ the region that’s been most totally overrun and transformed into an “outpost of Hell.”
Diablo 5 will also return to a procedural overworld. “If you go back to a region you’ve been before, all that information you knew yesterday – that path I found, that landmark I was moving towards, how to fight those elite monsters – none of that information is going to help me today,” Wat remarks. She says this lends a feeling of “constant discovery” that really reinforces the sense of unknown in the wake of Diablo’s takeover.
We also get details on the first Diablo 5 classes, two of which are making a return from D3 – the Demon Hunter and the Monk. Joining them is the Plague Knight, which Shely describes as “heavily armored walking death.” That’s all for now, but he promises the new game will launch “with more classes than ever before – and I don’t just mean ‘more classes at ship,’ I mean more classes, total.”
Shely then talks itemization. We get a first look at a concept for the inventory screen, and confirmation that gear sets are back. “We love what the Talisman did in Lord of Hatred, but we want to attach that set concept to gear again, because it gives you this quest.” He promises that Blizzard has “some incredible ideas for how to make sure that the set items can broaden the number of builds that are available, rather than shrinking them.” He also notes that the team is “experimenting a bit with stat requirements on items,” but that this isn’t set in stone.
Diablo 5 will be released in spring 2029. While we still have a long way before that date feels real, there are clearly lots of ideas at work here. “The information we’re sharing is just the start,” Zitterman concludes. “We’re going to be giving regular updates on how development is going and what we’re excited about to get that feedback from all of you, starting in 2027.”