105-Minute Queues Mar Diablo 4's Best-Reviewed Expansion

An 84 on Metacritic, glowing write-ups from Game Informer and ComicBook, two new classes, and a campaign reviewers are calling one of the series' best in years. Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred should have been a victory lap for Blizzard. Instead, a chunk of the playerbase spent launch day watching queue timers tick past the hour mark.

Blizzard acknowledged the problems on the official Diablo account on X, confirming that some players couldn't access the expansion at all. On Reddit, one player reported being booted mid-cutscene and thrown into a 105-minute queue. Others hit error code 300008, which timed out login attempts entirely. Xbox users had a separate headache: Deluxe Edition content and Platinum purchases weren't showing up in-game, with Blizzard directing them to the Xbox storefront to manually claim their items. A quest called "She Sleeps Within You" also had a progression blocker that Blizzard's workaround for is literally "quit and reload until we patch it."

About two hours after the initial statement, Blizzard said fixes were rolling out and that affected players should see improvement. Some did. Others posting several hours later said servers were buckling again under the load. The pattern is so familiar at this point that Diablo fans on Reddit were joking about which login error screen is their favourite. I get that online launches are hard, but Blizzard has shipped enough of them to fill a decade. At some point "we're investigating" stops being an acceptable first-hour response for a paid expansion from one of the biggest studios on the planet.

The frustrating part is that Lord of Hatred seems to deliver. Reviews praise the Paladin and Warlock classes, expanded skill trees, a level cap bump to 70, and an overhauled endgame with 12 Torment Tiers. On Steam, the expansion pushed Diablo 4 to a 2026 peak of 29,998 concurrent players, just edging past the Season of Slaughter record from mid-March. That's a modest bump compared to Vessel of Hatred's 87 percent surge in October 2024, though the number could still climb over the coming days.

Lord of Hatred is available now on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox for $39.99, which also includes the previous Vessel of Hatred expansion.