Blizzard has detailed its post-launch plans Diablo 4 experience in a verse live stream And developer blogfocusing on seasons, battle passes (including prizes), and the shop.
The takeaway is that it all sounds pretty standard for a live service game, with one twist: there’s a heavy focus on seasonal content which, following Diablo tradition, can only be accessed by starting a new seasonal character. Weirdly, Blizzard doesn’t go out of its way to explain this, perhaps assuming it will be taken to be read by the Diablo community, but it’s been confirmed in previous conversations.
Seasons within Diablo 4 will be quarterly, with the first coming in “mid to late July” – a few weeks after the game’s June 22 launch. You must complete the game’s campaign on one character before you can access it. The season introduces new questlines separate from the campaign story, as well as new gameplay features that will transform the experience of leveling up and developing your new character – all exclusive to the season and at the end of the three months. However, your seasonal character will be moved to the Eternal Realm at the end of the season, where it will remain playable. Each season also brings standard patch content such as balance changes and quality of life improvements.
Taking you through each season is a seasonal journey akin to Diablo 3s, which is basically a series of achievement-style objectives to complete, organized into chapters. One change here is that you no longer have to complete every objective in a chapter to progress to the next, allowing you to pick and choose based on your play style. Objectives reward you with things like crafting materials and legendary aspects for the Codex of Power (which enhance your character’s abilities in the same way as legendary loot items) – as well as Favor, the level-up resource Diablo 4the battle pass. Battle passes also refresh every three months, timed to new seasons.
Linking seasons and battle passes in this way is noteworthy, because while Favor can be earned in other ways – by completing quests, grinding monsters, participating in world events – it seems to make a reward for goals in the season’s journey to the seasonal playstyle of repeatedly starting new characters (as opposed to grinding the endgame) is at the heart of the game’s long-term post-launch reward structure, and the optimal way to play.
As for the battle pass, it has three versions: free, premium and accelerated. The free version has 27 levels and rewards players with cosmetic items and Smoldering Ashes, a resource that can be spent on XP and gold boosts, and other bonuses for your seasonal character. These boosts come with level requirements and are only available through the Free Battle Pass.
The premium battle pass has 63 additional levels that reward you with cosmetics unique to that season and platinum currency to spend in the game store. The accelerated pass is the same, but allows you to jump forward 20 levels and comes with a special cosmetic. The premium and accelerated passes cost the platinum equivalent of $9.99 and $24.99, respectively.
The store only sells cosmetic items to customize your character’s appearance. These are all established Diablo 4‘s dark fantasy aesthetic and, unlike the cosmetic rewards available through the battle pass, are often class-specific, allowing you to “further enhance the fantasy of your choice for your character,” as Blizzard put it. Blizzard showed examples of purchased armor cosmetics that had a different look to Legendary armor earned through gameplay, but weren’t necessarily more (or less) impressive. The store’s inventory is constantly changing and your purchases are available for every character of that class on your account, and across different platforms.
I’m not mad that Blizzard seems to be steering players towards starting new season characters by putting so much emphasis on them in the game’s post-launch content and battle pass rewards. Rolling new characters to explore different classes and builds is definitely one of the most fun ways to play Diablo. But with the focus elsewhere on a persistent MMO-style world and a meaty endgame, there seems to be a tension between two playstyles here. It will be interesting to see how the Diablo 4 developers resolve this collision.
If you want to try the game for yourself, there’s one last open beta test this weekend – which Blizzard is calling a Server Slam. This is when the Server Slam will be available.