Diablo 5 announced.

Diablo 5 was announced on September 12, 2026, during the opening ceremony of BlizzCon 2026.
I've been wanting to try this Ghost platform for quite some time and thought this was a good occasion, since I have have many opinions about and experiences with the franchise. I have played since D1, Day 1.

Let's break this down a little first. Diablo 5 is scheduled to launch in Spring 2029, which will inevitably be delayed, but that aside. The important element here is the fact that Diablo 4 was only released in early June 2023. This means that these two releases are not even 6 years apart. For reference, there were almost 12 years between Diablo 2 and 3 and almost exactly 11 years between Diablo 3 and 4. What does this mean? What is Blizzard Entertainment telling us without actually telling us?
That Diablo 4 is FUBAR. It can't be fixed. It's a complete and total train wreck. It can only be abandoned. It can't be saved. There's lots of reasons floating around on why Diablo 4 is such a disaster and I'll add my own impression, but briefly. Because it all boils down to one main thing: it's convoluted. It's designed by people who like spreadsheets. You need a PhD in computer science to figure out what the hell a pair of boots is doing. You need to scroll up and down and left and right to navigate a skill tree that is many things, but not intuitive. And then you get to the Paragon Boards which are so fucking stupid I can't even find an eloquent description to tear it down. Blizzard admits they didn't listen to players at all (and that they'll do better, honestly, with D5), but these are design principles that are thought up and implemented long before even an alpha tester gets their hands on it.
Besides, remember the last time Blizzard listened to feedback from the community? When people were observing (and disliking) the fact that Diablo 3 had abandoned the original dark gothic core theme for something bright and cartoonish? That's right, they went out and designed the excessively cartoonish Whimsydale level. "Diablo 3 isn't cartoonish! This is cartoonish!"
This is not a fluke. This is a corporate decision, all the way to the top. Passive aggressive taking the piss, investing time and resources. But then they returned to the dark gothic theme in Diablo 4 without even an apology. We were right: one of the few things D4 got right was the incredible graphics and halfway decent character design. But they never apologised. Or gave us a Doomsvale as one. The insult stayed.
So that's my experience(*) of Blizzard listening to the community.

Anyhow, Blizzard has promised they will listen to the community from the get go this time around. This is probably good news. Apart from the fact that this community isn't representative for the gameplay I would like. And blizzard caters to this community, because it caters to a thinly veiled gambling addiction.
Let's be clear here, Diablo 3 is a cleverly disguised casino once you reach a certain level. It's great fun, still, up to a certain point where the only way to improve your gear is gambling.

After a certain point you play Diablo 3 purely to get gamble tokens.

Let me explain this for those of you who don't know this game. Feel free to scroll down if you're already aware of this.
Gambling happens in three stages.
First you spend bloodshards at the merchant Kadala to gamble for an item type like a sword or pants. Which is usually a magic or rare item, with a 10 (or 20)% chance for a legendary. The odds of getting something decent are slim. You'll need to farm more bloodshards. Rinse and repeat. You'll eventually improve your gear enough to progress and, to be fair, at this stage the gear can also still be found while playing the game. And you are progressing into increasingly hard gameplay, rewarding you the bloodshards, so it's not exclusively gambling. So far, the game is still reasonably fine.
During this time you'll save the rare items in your stash because, at the next gamble level, you will use death breaths to generate a legendary from that rare item. The legendary still comes from a pool, so odds for a good one are still slim, but better than at Kadala.
The last and final stage of gambling is when you have a legendary that you are definitely wanting to use, but the roll on it isn't perfect. Some stats are much lower than they could be. A stat on the item might be completely useless for your class or play style. The rest of the game is now grinding, farming for gamble tokens to re-roll these items (you use the best and keep a second one to improve). You are at a difficulty ceiling. Improvements to gear are miniscule. It's no longer a moderately challenging game, it's pure spreadsheet optimisation. One percent here, one percent there, crawling ahead.

I elaborate on this system because that is the root cause for the failure of Diablo 4. From the get go designing a game that caters to this late stage addiction. The people in charge of design and coding jerk off to spreadsheet optimisation. The manager and ultimately CEO understand spreadsheets. They love these Powerpoint presentations. They understand them. And they completely forgot about the fun and challenge of gaming to get there.
They've never frenzied the fuck out of a stack of champions, watching out for that animation that precedes a blow that would kill the barbarian instantly.
None of them are gamers. And I'm gong out on a limb here, the loudest people in the forums aren't gamers either. Or they wouldn't spend so much time shouting on forums. They are internet keyboard warriors, and I'd venture not even 1% of them had that heart stopping moment when they heard 'Fresh Meat!' for the very first time.

I'm a gamer. I'm an old school hardcore gamer. And I'll use this space to talk about gaming in general, and keep a close eye on Diablo 5 development.

(*) This is not completely true since a player suggestion to dismantle legendaries with better attributes as source for the stuff you could subsequently imbue was implemented, but that Whimsydale experience still trumps it all. So far at least.