Diablo IV Battle Pass Will Take 80 Hours to Unlock Everything
Apr. 13, 2023Diablo IV Battle Pass Will Take 80 Hours to Unlock Everything
Diablo IV will continue its predecessor’s seasonal model, though at 3-month intervals. Blizzard confirmed the estimated time it will take to unlock everything in the Battle Pass.
We were able to confirm yesterday that Diablo IV’s seasons will be3 months (90 days) in length. It won’t have any arbitrary timings, or oddly paced seasons this time around. 90 days is quite a generous amount of time, especially considering that you need to create a new character every season and try to level them up to 100.
However, PC Gamer has just reported that to unlock everything in each season’s battle pass, you would need to play about 80 hours.
Diablo III didn’t immediately start out with the increasingly popular season model in mind. Instead, it had a clear start and end point: play the campaign on normal difficulty, then on nightmare, hell, and finally, inferno. The Reaper of Souls expansion added a nearly infinite repayable system in the form of bounties and randomly generated Greater Rifts.
This isn’t the case for Diablo IV. Now, the team at Blizzard is designing the entire experience to have many live service elements. Some are even arguing that it is too much like an MMO, something similar to the likes of Lost Ark. The similarities are indeed quite apparent. Both games have a top-down perspective, have a point-and-click control scheme (at least for Diablo IV’s PC version), and both have extremely satisfying ARPG combat.
However, Diablo IV is incorporating these light MMO elements to expand its game world and give it a grander sense of scale, instead of trying to convert it into a full-fledged massively multiplayer experience.
Diablo and the ARPG genre as a whole has always been about creating extremely potent and deadly builds. Theorycrafting tons of options and then testing them out has been a staple of the genre. Diablo IV will still ensure every character can output massive amounts of damage, and they won’t be balancing with groups in mind at all.
As quoted by associate game director Joe Piepiora with PC Gamer, “One thing I do want to make sure it’s really clear is we’re not trying to create a situation where players feel that they must play forever. We want players who play Diablo 4 to play and enjoy the experience while they’re playing the game”
This is quite a refreshing take hearing this confirmation. Some games’ seasonal models create quite the FOMO effect (fear of missing out), especially if there’s too much content that needs to be cleared within a small amount of time. Time-gating content is also another aspect that has been heavily criticized in other games as well.
Like other games with the seasonal model, Diablo IV will also have a battle pass that is split up into Free and Premium (paid) tiers. Blizzard reiterated that boosts will always be available in the free tiers. The paid tiers will only contain cosmetic items that should not change the game’s flow in any way.
Diablo IV’s season will have players create a fresh character that they will need to level up from scratch. The journey to level 100, as well as collecting all 220Paragon Levelswill be just the start. Accompanying this adventure will be various meta-progression objectives lumped into what’s called a “Seasonal Journey”. Completing these objectives will grant “favor” which is basically just a fancy term for Battle Pass XP.
Playing the game normally while leveling up and completing the Seasonal Journey objectives will eventually unlock everything in the Battle Pass. This should take “roughly 80 hours worth of time”. It is also much more likely that players will be able to fully unlock the Battle Pass contents even before they reach the max level.
We do know that seasons won’t be available immediately at launch. They will start a while after, though there are no concrete plans just yet. There is also a lot to keep players busy in theendgame, ignoring the seasons altogether. Aside from collecting Paragon Points, players will also be on the hunt for the variousLegendary Aspectsin theCodex of Power. Nightmare Dungeons, Helltide Invasions, and even PVP are also just some of the activities planned for Diablo IV’s endgame.
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Auberon
Writer at Fextralife. I really like vanilla ice cream.
