At gamescom 2024, there was all sorts of fresh information about Vessel of Hatred, the first DLC for Diablo 4. As part of an announcement, it was now known that you will soon be able to test Season 6, which starts at the same time.
What kind of announcement is this? Adam Fletcher, Global Community Development Director for Diablo at Blizzard, announced a livestream on the X.com platform. A “campfire chat” will include new information on the changes to the progression system in Diablo 4.
A few hours later, Fletcher announced in a repost on X that they would also be talking about a PTR for Patch 2.0, the Vessel of Hatred DLC.
Community Manager Lyricana then posted a correction on the Diablo 4 forum: To clarify: There will be a PTR for Season 6, but not for VoH content, but for permanent features that will be coming to the base game.
This could include, among other things, the group search, which will be a permanent feature in Diablo 4 with the expansion. According to Blizzard, the changes to the level progression and the progress of players in the world in general are also permanent.
During gamescom 2024 in Cologne, there were also a whole series of new announcements about the expansion. Some of them are presented to you in the video:
Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred shows the new features and the new region Nahantu in the video
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What is a PTR? A PTR is a so-called public test realm. This is a version of a video game content that is publicly accessible in advance and has limited functionality. For example, cutscenes, certain NPCs or features may be blocked.
The goal of a PTR is to identify bugs and problems early on, to explore server capacities if necessary, and to give developers proper user feedback. The whole thing is similar to alpha and beta testing, with the difference that PTRs are mostly used for live service games that have already been released.
There were originally no PTRs for Diablo 4. Seasons 1 to 3 were released completely untested by the players. However, a PTR was announced for Season 4. This was well received by the community and the developers said they learned a lot from it. After a long period of uncertainty, a PTR was finally announced for the current Season 5.
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When can you test the season? Vessel of Hatred will be released on October 8, 2024 – just under 1.5 months from now. Season 6 will start at the same time, making Season 5 the shortest yet. The PTR will certainly go live some time after the release so that the developers can process the feedback.
However, a specific launch date is not yet known. According to Adam Fletcher, more detailed information will be available on August 29th during the livestream mentioned above.
As soon as there is new information, you will of course read it here on MeinMMO. But as already mentioned, there were a whole series of announcements for Vessel of Hatred during gamescom. Among other things, Blizzard shows you your 4 new best friends in Diablo 4.