Lord of Hatred upgraded Diablo 4 into one of the best action RPGs out there, but its new season ignores everything that made it great

Diablo 4 is easily in the best spot it's ever been. The Lord of Hatred expansion gave it depth where it sorely needed it without ruining its strength as a straight-forward action RPG where numbers go up and loot rains from the sky. It's never had a better foundation for Blizzard to build on as it sets course for whatever's next.

The newest season, the Season of Death Awakening, is essentially a test run for another foundational change that, while controversial, is probably a healthy decision in the long run. But everything else in the season feels like a step back.

Lord of Hatred restructured Diablo 4 around customization. It gave every class powerful (and flavorful) new skill trees, the bones of an incredible item crafting system, and a bunch of ways to curate the endgame into a loop of activities you like the most.

For the first time, Diablo had me excited to experiment with everything as I pushed a character to max level. I finally got to see my best friend—who I convinced to give the game another shot—see how fun it is to slowly build a character up into a demon-slaying god without resorting to a guide. For a lot of people, Diablo 4 finally felt like an action RPG with a vision that wouldn't be thrown out and reworked in a few months.

Almost nothing in season 14 acknowledges this massive leap forward for the game. All of it is still there and just as good as it was a few months ago, but it's largely the same experience with some new enemies tossed into the mix. I'm not asking for another expansion's worth of stuff to do; I just want Blizzard to let me play with all the new toys it's given us.

Missed opportunities

Season 14's Ruptures feel like a missed opportunity for Blizzard to utilize the excellent systems it just brought to Diablo 4.

The new "Ruptures" that appear in the world are easy to understand: All you do is stand in a circle and kill monsters until they stop crawling out of the ground. They're a fun little event that brings players in the open world together and supercharges your journey to max level. They lose all value the moment you don't need a boost in XP and want to hunt down specific upgrades for your character.

I had no problem with these mini events losing all relevance in the endgame in past seasons. Diablo 4 simply wasn't built to do much more than funnel you into higher and higher difficulty tiers for better and better loot. Seasonal events were usually appetizers for the main course, whether it was a reworked dungeon type or a set of build-modifying powers.

In a post-Lord of Hatred world, however, season 14's Ruptures feel like a missed opportunity for Blizzard to utilize the excellent systems it just brought to Diablo 4. Ruptures are completely left out of the endgame loop where you cycle through a random set of activities given to you by the War Plans table. They also don't have a skill tree or any way of increasing their challenge beyond raising the difficulty level. As a result, they feel like a leftover from an older version of the game, one that was frequently criticized for lacking meaningful depth.

Instead of doubling down on a new mechanic, season 14 does what older seasons did and abandons them as soon as you hit max level. Unless I'm fishing for junk items to salvage into crafting materials, I've started to skip every Rupture I see. There's nothing uniquely valuable from doing them that I can't get anywhere else in the game.

The same goes for the new world boss encounter—a return of the big Realmwalker demon—and the "Deathtoll Chamber" you can enter afterward. Both of them are opportunities for the same amount of loot you can get by doing all of the standard endgame dungeons. Even if Blizzard swoops in with a significant buff to the quality of items they drop, they still won't be anywhere as robust as everything else in the game. The only thing worth doing is the new boss fight for more chances to craft one of the newly-reworked and super powerful Mythic Uniques, but even that just reminds me that I would've loved to see more shakeups to the crafting if only for the length of the season.

A better way

Blizzard has said that creating new seasons takes quite a while, which means it was working on season 14 well before Lord of Hatred came out. I'm sure it's tough for developers to predict what's going to be a hit with players when you're completely in the dark. But I would've waited another month or two to play a season that properly follows up on the best parts of the expansion.

It's a shame because Diablo 4 is still as good as it was last season, if not better, with the amount of bug fixes and balance changes Blizzard made in the last few months. Season 14 might be a sign that its approach to seasons needs to change so that there's no glaring disconnect between the current state of the game and what's being added. And if that means untethering stuff from requiring the expansion, then so be it.

I usually can't stand the way people online compare Diablo 4 and Path of Exile, but Grinding Gear Games has proven that it knows how to repeatedly expand on a seasonal action RPG. I appreciate that Blizzard found a way to add systems clearly inspired by PoE, like item crafting, without ruining Diablo 4's relative simplicity. But it's disappointing to play a new season that doesn't even attempt to expand on what's there.

Lord of Hatred proved Diablo 4 needed more to chew on and exceeded my expectations for all that it did to a game I already enjoyed quite a bit. New seasons should serve as both an opportunity for new players to jump in and a chance for Blizzard to experiment with new ways to improve the game. I still believe Blizzard is capable of doing that, but season 14 misses the mark.

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