FAILURE TO LAUNCH

After promising so much, Diablo 4 Season 2 falls at the last hurdle

Diablo 4's second season stopped working right when everyone logged in to play.

News by Sherif Saed Contributing Editor

Published on Oct. 18, 2023

The highly-anticipated start of Season of Blood, the second Diablo 4 season, did not go as planned. After spending weeks hyping up everything coming with the new season, from the impressive list of quality of life changes, to the new gear and class meta and, of course, the new content - Blizzard had everyone who cares anxious to download patch 1.2.0 and begin the hunt.

Unfortunately, just as everyone was getting ready to jump in, trouble started.

Season of Blood was initially set to kick off at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm BST, which is when patch 1.2.0 was actually released. Shortly after, Blizzard issued a note on Battle.net to let everyone know that the new season will now be starting an hour later.

Season 2 did not end up kicking off then, however, due to a problem the developer ran into when rolling out the new season. These "complications" forced Blizzard to delay the start time by a few hours. When Blizzard tweeted the news, it did not say how long players would have to wait, but you could tell everyone was getting frustrated.

We've encountered some complications and will be delaying Season of Blood’s start time a few hours to remedy these issues.

We'll share updates as soon as we have them. We appreciate your patience.
— Diablo (@Diablo) October 17, 2023

It took around three hours for things to return to normal, and for Season of Blood to officially go live. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the day's troubles. Blizzard explained that it had to disable cross-play between PC and consoles in the process, which I imagine looked extra bad for players who picked up the game on Steam, where it had just launched (and was Deck verified).

Season of Blood is live, however due to a technical issue cross play between PC and Consoles is temporarily unavailable.

We are working to resolve this and will provide updates as they are available.
— Diablo (@Diablo) October 17, 2023

Despite the rough launch, players started getting on with the new content, before quickly realising that they are not making progress in the battle pass, or the Seasonal Journey. It took a little while for Blizzard to acknowledge the issue, but the developer later issued an in-game fix.

As noted on the Blizzard forums, the fix ensures that player progress through the battle pass won't be lost - everyone would just need to claim all earned rewards.

That said, if you made any progress in the Seasonal Journey before the fix was implemented, you'll need to re-do it, as it won't apply retroactively. That pretty much sums up the turbulent launch of Season of Blood.

We'll bring you more updates as we get to play ourselves, and see more of the community sentiment around the new season.