Diablo 4 General Manager Owns Up To Season Of The Malignant’s Disastrous Launch

It’s been a rather bumpy ride for Diablo 4 since it launched back in June to widespread server issues, but things got even rougher following the release of its first season update. Season of the Malignant was met with overwhelming criticism after it nerfed each and every class in the game.

While the developers quickly tried to appease players with a follow-up patch, the damage had been done. In a brief interview with GamesRadar, Diablo General Manager Rod Fergusson said that, at the time they felt that they were doing what was right for the game.

“One of the things we recognised early on was that we had made some sort of mistake in managing expectations,” he admitted. “It was hard because we felt like what we were doing for the game were the right things to do.”

“But there were other parts that needed to go along with it,” the Diablo boss continued. “We were trying to move a little fast, we were trying to be very responsive and agile. So we were like ‘hey, we have two-thirds of a solution. So let’s give them the two thirds, and we’ll do the other third later.’ And that didn’t work out in our favor.”

Fergusson also acknowledged that they failed to communicate the changes in advance and failed to set proper expectations, a problem that they’ve now addressed by announcing changes well ahead of time and releasing patch notes in advance.

“We had to just own that and recognize we have to do better to get patch notes out before that,” he said. “We were doing patch notes at the moment the patch dropped, we weren’t doing live streams ahead of time to talk about it.”

With the next season set to begin on October 17th, the team is already making good on their promise and has started teasing what’s coming in Season 2: Season of the Blood. We just hope that it’s not going to be another fiasco like Season of the Malignant.