Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard has revealed more details on Diablo 4’s post-launch experience, including upcoming battle passes and seasonal cosmetics.
It had to happen sometime: Blizzard Entertainment’s latest developer livestream went into detail on Diablo 4’s live-service features, including upcoming seasonal content, battle passes and in-game shop purchases. Each Diablo Season will not only bring new battle passes and meta changes, but, “a new gameplay feature and questline,” too.
Diablo 4’s post-launch content will be added through new Seasons, giving players battle passes to grind through along with new features, game balance changes and regular updates. Season 1 will only launch a few weeks after the game’s release, in mid-to-late July, and you’ll need to complete the campaign to join it. Each season will introduce new story content with new characters, one new gameplay feature, challenges, legendary aspects, changes to the meta and quality of life improvements.
Each Season will be supported by what Blizzard calls a ‘Season Journey’. The Season Journey is essentially an in-game page that shows the player all the objectives they need to tick off to level their battle pass. Completing all the objectives in a single Chapter will give the player seasonal rewards, such as crafting materials and legendary aspects. These objectives also reward varying amounts of Favour, which is just a fancy name for battle pass XP.
Unsurprisingly, the battle pass comes with both a free tier and a premium paid-for tier. You’ll have to shell out extra money for the Premium Pass to unlock the premium tier of battle pass rewards, which then gives you access to premium currency for the shop and seasonal cosmetics. The free track will contain Smouldering Ashes, an in-game resource used to gain XP, Gold and Obols through Season Blessings. This actually affects gameplay, which is why Blizzard has placed it on the free tier.
The in-game shop will house additional cosmetics, including even more armour and weapon styles, and its content will rotate periodically. So far, Diablo 4’s live-service content seems very much in line with Overwatch 2 - down to the way its shop works. You have one last chance to play the game before it launches during the Diablo 4 Server Slam this weekend, which is now available for pre-download.