Diablo 5, the fifth entry in the long-running Diablo series, will be launching in 2029. This means that we will have received a new Diablo game just six years after the previous, marking a significant shift in Blizzard’s release strategy for the series.
This was confirmed during today’s BlizzCon, with a new cinematic showing apocalyptic scenes coming to Sanctuary. Angels are being rounded up and crucified, with the game’s world as it was known coming to a brutal and infernal end. Of course, being a cinematic, it does not show any gameplay or significant story beats, but we’re apparently in for a very wild ride.
What’s more interesting is that Diablo 5 comes just six years after Diablo 4, markedly fast considering we waited for 11 years to see a sequel to Diablo 3. Even Diablo 2 stood as the main game in the franchise for 12 years before Blizzard finally dropped the third title. Whether this increase in release frequency will lead to a drop in innovation and advancement remains to be seen, as the large gaps between each Diablo game often meant bigger jumps in looks and gameplay.
At any rate, the cinematic is incredibly good, as all Blizzard cinematics tend to be, and is as brutal and horrifying as a Diablo trailer should be. Today during BlizzCon, we also saw the cinematic trailer for StarCraft, a new open-world shooter coming in 2030, and it was as bloody and gruesome as you’d come to expect, so those things could indicate a return to form for core Blizzard IPs.
We’ll know come 2029.
