With the launch of Season 1, Season of the Malignant, about to drop for Diablo IV, the development team over at Blizzard Entertainment has taken time to discuss the details about it. Of course, it is a general Diablo developer update, so there is news for Diablo Immortal players as well, which includes some very exciting news.

Before we get into the details on how to prepare for the next season, take a moment to check out the official trailer for Season of the Malignant!

Once the patch comes out on July 18th, you can log in to Diablo IV with your character that has the most progress. Once you do that, it will lock it in for your whole account. This means all the maps you have uncovered, all of the Alters of Lillith found, and all of the renown you have earned from discovering areas and Alters will carry over to all characters. This means a player with a character that has done everything in these categories will have unlocked the third tier of renown rewards in all five sections of the map, a level 1 will have 5 extra potions and 5 extra skill points to use right away because it was already unlocked by their main character.

What does this mean for you? If you are looking to prepare for the best entrance into Season 1, you want to focus on three things:

• Finish the Campaign

• Uncover your full map

• Find all of the Alters of Lillith

Of course, these are rolling over to Season 1, so if you don’t fully uncover the map or find all of the alters, you can still do so after the next Season. However, you can give your new characters an incredible jump forward right at the start. You’ll be overpowered for the first chunk of the game which will be a nice way to boost your experience grow quickly.

Moving forward, after this initial change into Season 1, the game will check with every character to see if there is any carry-over progress made on it that can be applied to all characters. In other words, there will be aspects of the game that apply to your account for all characters and some aspects of the game will be specifically for the character you’re currently playing as.

If you want to check out the full details revealed for Season 1, check out the July 2023 Diablo Developer Update video above. Please note that Diablo IV content starts at 51:24 with a worthwhile cutscene to watch. Before this time, they start with information regarding Diablo Immortal, which pertains to a new class called Blood Knight and new content being added to the game. If you also play Diablo Immortal, it is definitely worth your time to check that out as well.

Before I close this out, I want to point out something very cool that they confirmed in this developer update. One thing that a lot of players want is a game that doesn’t leave them too far behind with their constant updates and the struggle to keep up with players who play the game more than they are able to do. Well, to counter this issue and keep everybody on the same footing, each new Season will welcome a fresh start for new characters. This means that someone who just bought the game at the start of Season 4 and someone who has had the game since launch will have a very similar level 1 character. This benefit is great for adult gamers as they can get busy or play a different game and come back on a new season without missing a beat!

Diablo IV is available now for PC via BattleNet, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Season 1 update is set to launch on July 20th with the initial patch heading out on July 18th. If you’d like to learn more details on the upcoming update, check out Blizzard’s official blog.