Blizzard has released a new trailer for Diablo 4’s first season content, Season of the Malignant.
The story scenario is an intriguing one, custom made to be good for a season, but not too long to make it worth making a new game over.
A new plague of sorts has struck Sanctuary, and it’s turning both the humans and demons into ‘bloodthirsty fiends’. You join a new character named Cormund, who has figured out how to combat and reverse the plague, but his champions have already died and he needs your help to bring the fight forward.
As reported by PC Gamer, you can expect to see these changes effective in this season:
- Elite level monsters will have a chance to spawn as a “Partly Corrupted” variant and drop a Malignant Heart, which spawns an even more powerful “Fully Corrupted” of that enemy before you can claim its heart.
- There are 32 total Malignant Hearts with special effects that socket into jewelry like a gem would, but are ultra powerful, allowing for “stupid, new broken builds.”
- Jewelry and Malignant Hearts during the season each have three possible colors that need to match for them to be paired together.
- Malignant Tunnels around the world will be a place to farm for Malignant Hearts with a higher rate of infected enemies.
- The Season Journey menu includes chapters with objectives and completion bonuses for the season.
- A new boss Varshan the Consumed will be lurking in Malignant Tunnels.
- The season will bring 6 new Unique Items and 7 Legendary Aspects
Since Diablo 4 is still pretty new, there may still be some confusion on how the seasons work. Blizzard hasn’t made some arrangement to increase max levels for the characters you already made for the main story campaign.
Instead, you will get new seasonal playable characters, who get their own bonuses just for that particular season. When the season ends, they will be converted into regular characters. For now, we don’t know if you’re starting over with new characters with each and every season, but it would be interesting for players to build such a mythology of different characters.
Although the new Diablo 4 seasons won’t use those old characters, there are storyline ties between the main narrative and this season. Therefore, you will have to beat the main campaign to get access to Season of the Malignant. Once again, it’s the sort of thing that not every fan may want, but Blizzard is willing to take risks on, to push the franchise forward in this new live service direction.
You can watch the Diablo 4: Season of the Malignant announcement trailer below.
