Diablo 3: Seasons and Tiered Rifts Announced and Detailed

It’s been close to a month since the release of Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, and its developers at Blizzard have already announced plans to bring in even more content to the game in the game’s 2.1 update.

The bulk of this new content will come in the form of Seasons, which were just announced via an interview with Shacknews.

“We're working on two major systems for the 2.1 release, first is Seasons. Seasons are a shard of the existing game where everything is a fresh start,” wrote Production Director John Hight. “You start with a brand new character without access to any of the gold or items you collected with your primary account for the length of the season.

“We plan on creating brand new, powerful legendaries that only drop within in the season. After the season ends, all of your progress — your experience, your items, your gold, etc. — will be rolled into the main roster. The goal is the fresh-start feeling — so many changes and tweaks have happened since the launch of Diablo III — it is really energizing and fun to recreate that 'first-moment-in-a-new-game' feeling.”

In addition to Seasons, players will gain access to leaderboards where they’ll be able to race on a variety of metrics to try to become the leader in their region or the top of their friends and clan lists.

Finally, there’s Tiered Rifts, which are variations on the Nephalem Rifts concept in Reaper of Souls. Here’s John with the word again:

“You have a timer to finish a Rift (kill enough monsters to draw out the boss and slay the boss) and the better you do, the more challenging the level that you get to tackle. For example, if you finished a Tiered Rift in just a few minutes, you’d get to jump ahead to a much harder rift. These will also have unique rewards, custom leaderboards, etc. Tiered Rifts are a new end game activity that offers both challenge and competition but are easy enough for everyone at max level (70) to try.”

We'll keep you up to date on the changes they bring to Diablo 3 in the coming weeks and months. I for one can't wait to start a new character to play with in Seasons.