The Butcher has been terrifying Diablo players for three decades now, famous for randomly sprinting up to players and slaughtering them in the middle of dungeons, but soon he’ll be a lot less scary… because you’ll be able to control him.
Announced today during Blizzard’s developer update livestream, Diablo 4’s new season is titled the Season of Slaughter. As it turns out, that’s an apt name for a season in which one of the big highlights is that you can “become The Butcher.”
“As The Butcher, you wield brutal powers that for decades have inspired terror,” Blizzard says in an accompanying news post. “Cleave through monsters, charge fearlessly into the fray and unleash a hail of hooks to drag your prey to a bloody end.”
There will be a few different ways to embody the Butcher in Diablo 4’s new season, starting with the seasonal questline, A Taste of Power. That’ll kick off in Gea Kul in the seasonal realm and give you “a sampling of the carnage you’ll experience while playing as The Butcher.”
There’s also a new Helltide event on the way with a consumable called Meaty Offerings, which can be used on the new Shrines of Slaughter to activate your Butcher powers and draw in hordes of enemies for you to kill and earn seasonal rewards from.
The Butcher is also coming to the Fields of Hatred PvP zones, and this is by far my favorite implementation of the otherwise fairly gimmicky feature. Every kill will increase your Savagery meter, and at the end of the ceremony, whoever has the most Savagery gets to take on the Butcher’s Idol. If they win, they become the Butcher and get to run around slaughtering everyone.
Finally, there’s the new Slaughterhouse activity. Blizzard is staying fairly tight-lipped on this because, in its words, “some things are best left to be experienced firsthand,” but it does say you’ll play “as the Butcher for the entire run. From the first step to the final blow, you’re unleashed upon your enemies to do one thing: slaughter everything in sight.”
As killing things in rapid succession seems to be the prevailing theme of this new season, it seems fitting that Blizzard is also implementing a new killstreak feature in Diablo 4 for the first time. Killstreaks will be broken down into five tiers: Killstreak, Carnage, Devastation, Bloodbath, and Massacre, with the chance to earn experience and seasonal reputation based on how many enemies are slain in a killstreak.
All of that kicks off on March 11.
Ex-Diablo 2 lead character artist says “there’s no way you could ever” give the iconic ARPG a new act: “Would it be in a location that Diablo 3 or Diablo 4 has already fleshed out?”
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