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’s maybe surprising that it’s taken Diablo 4 over a year to get there, and that the dread moment comes not in a major expansion storyline, but as part of a season. But that’s just what’s happening. Diablo 4’s fifth season, named Season of the Infernal Hordes, launches on Aug. 6, and it’s all about replayable, randomized raids on Hell.

As previewed on the game’s Public Test Realm a month ago, season 5’s big feature is the Infernal Hordes, a permanent new endgame mode in which players will face waves of demon attackers in Hell. Built with multiplayer in mind, but fully solo-able, Infernal Hordes are designed to constantly up the ante: Between waves, players will choose from three Infernal Offerings that offer both boons and banes — in other words, players can increase both the reward and the challenge.

At the end of a run, they’ll face a boss fight with 10 permutations. The Fell Council are a cabal of five demonic priests, returning from Diablo 2, and players will battle a random selection of three of them on each run. If that weren’t enough, randomized events might see massive bosses invade the game partway through a run, including a version of Diablo 4’s terrorizing Butcher who is literally on fire.

“We wanted to make sure players could get into a flow state, that they could just, you know, keep [in] combat, gathering gear, and then come up for air occasionally,” lead seasons designer Dan Tanguay told Polygon. “We wanted to make sure that it had a high amount of replay, also very important for an endgame mode. And that it had some surprises embedded in it as well, that there were some random and memorable elements. That sometimes comes in the form of the boons and banes, and sometimes comes in the form of Butcher-like events, things of that nature.”

The design of the Fell Council is a key part of the aim to constantly surprise the player. “What we don’t want is for players to feel like every time they enter Infernal Hordes, they’re just doing the same thing every time,” said Antonio Watson, a designer specializing in dungeons who worked on Infernal Hordes. “So a lot of the questions that we had to answer were: How do we take these set permutations we have of this boss and make sure that every single time the players play, it feels a little bit different, they can’t just sort of run in braindead and steamroll everything.”

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

That said, the Blizzard team is OK with some permutations of the Fell Council being tougher than others. “Ultimately, with this type of systemic replay, all of it really feeds into the player story overall, right? And so, yeah, it’s like, ‘I totally pulled Bremm this run, I’m happy.’ Or, in my case, I actually have the most trouble with Geleb for whatever reason. And so whenever I pull him in a run, I’m just like, ‘Uuugh, alright, well, I gotta 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 endgame mode, it’s restricted to the World Tier 3 difficulty, which is only available from around level 50. That’s fine as far as the game’s Eternal (i.e. non-seasonal) Realm goes, where most players will have surpassed that mark. But players on the Seasonal Realm will all begin at level one on Aug. 6. So Blizzard has created a seasonal questline and progression that will usher them toward World Tier 3. Key to this is a special kind of dungeon called a Hellbreach, which will be exclusive to season 5, and which will offer a bite-sized and watered-down taste of Infernal Hordes gameplay to prepare players for what’s ahead.

Infernal Hordes themselves, however, are a permanent feature intended to flesh out Diablo 4’s endgame. It seems season 5, like the fantastic season 4 that revised the game’s loot, is less focused on season-exclusive content and features, and more about implementing permanent changes to improve the game. “For seasons 4 and 5 there was a bit of a philosophy change, where we had identified that the game as a whole could benefit from a lot of the things we wanted to tackle,” Tanguay said. “And obviously, that’s different than what you saw on 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 tackled and what the players are telling us,” he said.

There’s no doubt, however, that season 4 has been a huge win for the Diablo 4 team. Asked about how the team felt about it, the usually phlegmatic Tanguay broke into a wide smile. “We’re incredibly happy with how season 4 has been received and how players have engaged with it,” he said. “I mean, I’m still playing it right now! We think that overall, the itemization changes have been a big success, the Helltide changes have been a big success. They certainly have revitalized the game.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

There was one corner of Diablo 4’s item game that season 4 intentionally left untouched, however. In Diablo 4, Unique items are powerful items with very specific, build-altering effects that, unlike Legendaries, can’t be tweaked using the game’s crafting systems. Blizzard’s balance designers left Uniques alone in season 4, choosing to wait and see how the rest of their changes panned out. In season 5, Uniques are getting a big boost to compensate.

“There were enough players who were starting to ignore Uniques and not using them [to change their characters’ builds]. They were just running all Greater Affix items, and no Uniques at all, because that’s just what ended up being the most powerful combination of gear,” Tanguay said. “And, you know, the balance team felt it was very important that players run at least two or three Uniques, three or four, a handful of them. And so that meant that we then had to take a look at all of the Uniques and make them a little more relevant to players now that they’ve got all these other powerful options.”

There’s a lot of speculation about how Season of the Infernal Hordes’ storyline will tie into Diablo 4’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, which launches on Oct. 8 and introduces the Spiritborn class. But, from chatting to Tanguay and Watson, it’s clear that you can also view season 5 as an extension of season 4’s effort to get the game’s balance, itemization, and endgame right in that sweet spot. If its changes go down even half as well, the game will be in excellent shape for its big moment in October.