When is the Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred expansion release date? Not until late 2024.

BlizzCon 2023 teased the next Diablo 4 expansion — Vessel of Hatred, where we’ll journey to Torajan Jungles (known to the locals as Nahantu) in a continuation of the base title’s story. We don’t know much yet (the announcement was probably a minute within the two hours of Opening Ceremonies), but the D4 team said to anticipate the expansion in late 2024. Given the coming schedule for the title, we anticipate Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred will release in November, 2024.

Now how did we get to this estimate? Well, in the franchise history, we’ve seen three expansions — one for each main title. Assuming that ‘late 2024’ translates into a Q4 release, let’s assess our release timelines:

• Diablo 2 release date: June 28, 2000. D2: Lord of Destruction release date: June 27, 2001. Time between releases — one year.
• Diablo 3 release date: May 15, 2012 (12 years from the previous game, 10.89 years after LOD). D3: Reaper of Souls release date: March 25, 2014. Time between releases — 1.87 years.
• Diablo 4 release date: June 6, 2023 (11.1 years from D3, 9.2 years from ROS). D4: Vessel of Hatred release planned: late (~Q4) 2024. Maximum time between releases — 1.57 years.

So, a late 2024 release for Vessel of Hatred is right in line with past releases. However, we also need to consider the rolling season schedule that seems to accompany the title’s live service model. If we assume that seasons will continue their 3-month cycle, we can anticipate the following schedule:

• Season 4 — April to July
• Season 5 — July to October

Now, having both a new Season at the end of the year and a new expansion seems quite complicated, leaving players conflicted about what to play. So there are two main options: 1) pause the seasonal schedule to introduce the next story arc in Vessel of Hatred or 2) incorporate the expansion into Season 6. The first option seems likelier — the developers have previously described seasons as small, contained story arcs, which does not fit with an expansion.

Some particularly interesting details mentioned during BlizzCon hint that option 1 seems more likely: there is a separate team dedicated to working on the expansion, which means Seasons 3 through 6 will not suffer on the development front due to lack of resources — and vice versa. This gives me hope for a continuation of all the amazing improvements received in the title’s first year of seasons and patches. Hopefully, improvements will continue to flow out to the community as we await the next chapter in D4‘s story.

We may end up with more sprinkles of news from the Saturday D4 Campfire Chat but we definitely know additional details are coming in summer of 2024, well prior to the expansion’s release. Regardless, any new information will be featured here on Blizzard Watch. For now, you know we’ll have our first expansion, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred, in late 2024; we estimate specifically November, maybe released with BlizzCon 2024. See you in Sanctuary!

Originally published November 3, 2023; updated March 15, 2024