Season 8 ended earlier this week in Diablo 4, making way for Season 9: Sins of the Horadrim. Season 8 felt rushed, stumbled out of the gate due to strange bugs and missing features, and had the misfortune of being the one to introduce the much-hated Reliquary battle pass system to the game.
By most accounts, it felt like everyone – Blizzard most of all – wanted to get through it as quickly as possible, while trying to shift everyone’s attention to Season 9. By the time the Season 9 PTR (Public Test Realm) wrapped up, you could tell that most players just weren’t as excited about the then-upcoming season as Blizzard expected them to be.
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Season 9: Sins of the Horadrim is not a complete misfire. It brings a few things worth getting excited about – some of them even affect the core game outside of the Seasonal Realm. But it’s just so anemic and derivative, and that’s exactly what Diablo 4’s most dedicated (and vocal) players have been complaining about pretty much since the whole idea of seasons started.
There’s an unmissable ‘this is the new normal’ feel to Diablo 4 that Blizzard has been communicating through the game’s roadmap, and through the seasons themselves, most of which effectively rely on re-working the same power-acquisition mechanics from the previous one, tackling one other part of the game that needed work and calling it a day.