Diablo 4 Goes to Hell in a Horde Mode in Season 5

It’s a given that in a Diablo game you’ll eventually set foot in Hell itself, so it might come as a surprise that it turned out this way. Diablo4 takes over a year to get there, and that the terrible moment doesn’t come in a major expansion storyline, but as part of a season. But that’s just what happens. Diablo4The fifth season, Season of the Infernal Hordes, kicks off on August 6 and centers on replayable, random raids on Hell.

As announced over a month ago in the game’s Public Test Realm, Season 5’s big feature is the Infernal Hordes, a permanent new endgame mode that sees players battle waves of demons throughout Hell. Built with multiplayer in mind, the Infernal Hordes are entirely solo-playable. They’re designed to constantly up the stakes: between waves, players can choose from three Infernal Offerings that offer both blessings and curses. In other words, players can ramp up the rewards as well as the challenge.

At the end of a run, they will encounter a boss fight with 10 permutations. The Fell Council is a cabal of five demonic priests, returning from Diablo2and players will fight a random selection of three of them each run. As if that wasn’t enough, randomized events can see massive bosses invade the game mid-run, including a version of Diablo4‘s terrorizes Butcher who is literally on fire.

“We wanted to make sure that players could get into a flow, that they could just keep fighting, collecting stuff, and occasionally coming up for air,” Dan Tanguay, lead seasons designer, told Polygon. “We wanted to make sure that there was a lot of replayability, which is also really important for an endgame mode. And that there was also some surprise, some randomness, and some memorable elements. Sometimes that comes in the form of blessings and curses, and sometimes it comes in the form of Butcher-like events, things like that.”

The Fell Council’s design is a key part of the goal of constantly surprising the player. “What we don’t want is for players to feel like they’re just doing the same thing every time they go into Infernal Hordes,” said Antonio Watson, a dungeon designer who worked on Infernal Hordes. “So a lot of the questions we had to answer were: How do we take this set of permutations that we have of this boss and make it feel a little bit different every time the player plays, so they can’t just mindlessly run in and bulldoze everything.”

It sounds like a balancing nightmare, though Tanguay explained that the problem was largely solved by pushing each of the five Fell Council members into archetypes that complemented each other. Maffer, for example, is “just a big brawler,” and Geleb is a caster who only attacks with fire. But when it came to Bremm, “the lightning guy,” he was changed from another pure elemental caster into a character who would create stormy hazards in space that players could find their way around, so he would work with the others.

That said, the Blizzard team is okay with some permutations of the Fell Council being tougher than others. “Ultimately, with this kind of systematic iteration, it all really feeds into the player’s story as a whole, right? And so, yeah, it’s like, “I totally passed Bremm on this run, I’m happy. Or, in my case, I actually struggle the most with Geleb for whatever reason. And so when I pass him on a run, I’m just like, ‘Uuugh, okay, well, I’ve got to fight this guy this time.’ But that’s just part of the story of that run, right?”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Since Infernal Hordes is an end-game mode, it’s limited to the World Tier 3 difficulty, which is only available starting at around level 50. That’s fine as far as the game’s Eternal (i.e. non-seasonal) Realm goes, where most players have already crossed that threshold. But players on the Seasonal Realm will all start at level one on August 6, so Blizzard has created a seasonal questline and progression that will lead them into World Tier 3. Key to this is a special type of dungeon called Hellbreach, which will be exclusive to Season 5 and will offer a bite-sized, watered-down taste of Infernal Hordes gameplay to prepare players for what’s to come.

The Infernal Hordes themselves, however, are a permanent element meant to Diablo4‘s endgame. It seems that Season 5, like the fantastic Season 4 that overhauled the game’s loot, is focusing less on seasonal content and features, and more on implementing permanent changes to improve the game. “For Seasons 4 and 5, there was a bit of a philosophy shift where we determined that the game as a whole could benefit from a lot of the things that we wanted to address,” Tanguay said. “And that’s obviously different than what you saw in Seasons 1 through 3, which were much more about the seasonal content itself.”

But the shift in strategy isn’t necessarily permanent. “In future seasons, we’ll continue to evaluate what that mix is. And I think it really depends on the types of things that we feel need to be addressed and what the players tell us,” he said.

However, there is no doubt that season 4 has been a huge win for the Diablo4 team. Asked what the team was thinking, the normally phlegmatic Tanguay broke into a broad smile. “We’re incredibly happy with how Season 4 has been received and how players are engaging with it,” he said. “I mean, I’m still playing it now! We think the itemization changes have been a big hit overall, the Helltide changes have been a big hit. They’ve definitely breathed new life into the game.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

There was a corner of Diablo4‘s item game that season 4 intentionally left untouched, however. In Diablo4Unique items are powerful items with very specific, build-altering effects that, unlike Legendaries, cannot be customized using the game’s crafting systems. Blizzard’s balance designers left Uniques alone in Season 4, opting to wait and see how the rest of their changes played out. In Season 5, Uniques are getting a big boost to compensate.

“There were a lot of players who started ignoring Uniques and not using them (to change their character builds). They were just using Greater Affix items and not using Uniques at all, because that just seemed to be the most powerful combination of gear,” Tanguay said. “And you know, the balance team felt it was really important that players were using at least two or three Uniques, three or four, a handful of them. And that meant we then had to look at all of the Uniques and make them a little bit more relevant to players now that they have all of these other powerful options.”

There’s a lot of speculation about how the Season of the Infernal Hordes storyline will tie into Diablo4‘s first expansion, Ship of hatewhich launches on October 8 and introduces the Spiritborn class. But from talking to Tanguay and Watson, it seems that Season 5 could also be seen as an extension of Season 4’s efforts to get the game’s balance, itemization, and endgame in that sweet spot. If the changes are even half as good, the game will be in excellent shape for the big moment in October.