Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred misses its launch window after Blizzard bungles release build, requiring everyone to download a big new update

Launching an online game is hard, this much is true. Though it may have been a while since we’ve last witnessed one of those all-time launch disasters, Diablo 4 seemingly wanted to remind everyone that we’ve been having it too good recently.

Somehow, the launch of the game’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, went down significantly worse than the main game’s. Players spent hours unable to play, as they waited for updates from Blizzard.

Vessel of Hatred was supposed to launch at 4pm PT (Blizzard HQ time), but right before it went live, Blizzard announced that it’s pushing back the launch. The developer didn’t offer a timeline, saying that while it still expects the expansion to launch “this evening”, it needed more time to ensure everyone can start playing at the same time.

Players then got locked out right when they expected to play, which is funny in itself, if not a little sad.

“We apologize for the late breaking news on the time shift, but this is an important step we need to make to ensure every player can start their journey through Nahantu together,” community boss Adam Fletcher wrote.

Over the following hours, Blizzard continued issuing updates to the community, before some bad news hit. Something was seemingly wrong with the build most players had pre-loaded, so in order to ensure everyone was on the same version, and could start playing simultaneously, the developer had to push out a big update.

That update came in at 24-35GB, and Battle.net servers predictably got hammered as everyone was attempting to download it at once, further slowing down the process. What Blizzard initially expected would be a two-hour delay grew to four, and that’s assuming you managed to download the patch quickly enough.

Vessel of Hatred is live now, but it appears after all that, the launch build is quite rough. Over on the Diablo 4 subreddit, plenty of players are complaining about all sorts of bugs. Some affect the new region, Nahantu, while others prevent some new mechanics, like the Seething Opals, from working.

Indeed, it appears there’s a repeatable- if no less annoying - issue that causes the game to think the player does not own Vessel of Hatred, before it returns to its senses and allows them to play expansion content.

One player, who freshly bought the expansion through the in-game link, said that while the money was taken from their Steam wallet, they couldn’t pick the new Spiritborn class to start the game with, which must be frustrating.

It’s all a bit of a mess right now, and it’s not clear which problems are caused by server hiccups, and which will require further patches to resolve. We’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, why not check out our guide for the best, fastest way to level up in Vessel of Hatred/Season 6? It’ll help you make up some of that lost time.