Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Diablo, Diablo 4’s 15th season, Season of Hell’s Legacy, is a fitting celebration of the action RPG series’ entire history, going all the way back to the very first game from 1996.
Blizzard’s Diablo team spent the majority of their time on stage at BlizzCon 2026 talking about the past and the future in almost equal parts. Whenever Diablo 4 was the talking topic, Blizzard waxed nostalgic for beloved games like Diablo 1 and 2, and to a slightly lesser degree, Diablo 3, whereas Diablo 5 conversations were naturally more forward-focused. During a panel attended by GamesRadar+, seasons lead Owen Leach dropped an absolute nostalgia bomb on old Diablo heads, teasing a Diablo 4-style return to the original Diablo 1 campaign via a new activity in Season of Hell’s Legacy.
The new activity, called Waking Nightmares, are “recreations of key moments from previous Diablo games, but built in D4’s art style with D4’s compelling gameplay,” per Leach. There are three kinds of these throwback dungeons, but the type I’m most interested in are the Prime Evil Waking Nightmares, which recreate “the most iconic moments, the moments that lead up to you killing Baal, Mephisto, Diablo.” You’ll run right into them in the seasonal questline, and as you might expect, they’re basically remakes of the dungeons leading up to each of those three above-mentioned final bosses, culminating in the Lord of Terror himself.
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“The last one, and the one I’m probably the most excited about, is actually a recreation of almost all of Diablo 1, so you start in Tristram Cathedral, fight your way to the Catacombs, down to the caves, and then of course into Hell itself to take down Big Red, the Dark Lord, Lord of Terror, Diablo.”
There is some earned controversy over Blizzard announcing the end of Diablo 4 expansions in favor of Diablo 5, but if future seasons are anywhere near as substantial as what’s being teased for season 15, I think I’ll be plenty satisfied for the next few years. That said, I play for an hour or two, max, most nights, so I’m not representative of the most hardcore players, who are likely to rip through seasonal questlines much more efficiently.
