If you were looking at the Platinum payouts on Diablo 4’s battle pass and getting excited about buying a cosmetic from the shop with your haul, you’re in for some disappointment. Instead of offering a practical amount of premium currency, Blizzard has gone for a joke amount: 666 Platinum. Oh you cheeky devils. The real joke, though, is that 666 Platinum is useless—not even enough to buy the cheapest item in the shop.
Naturally, players ain’t impressed. Folks on the subreddit have a lot of choice words for Blizzard (cheers, GamesRadar) and who can blame them for feeling stiffed? “All Blizzard sells now is nostalgia,” writes one player. And there are more than a few comparisons made between Diablo 4 and Diablo Immortal.
As much as the broad battle pass model is one I have a lot of issues with, plenty of them do justify their existence, and their cost, by doling out enough currency to let you do a bit of shopping, or even purchase the next battle pass. If you put in the time to finish them, you get your money’s worth and even future savings. Not so here, however, where 666 Platinum is not enough to cover the cost of season 2’s battle pass.
As it stands, unless you want to save the Platinum for a later purchase once you’ve earned more in the second season, the only real use is buying battle pass tiers, speeding up your journey down the track.
Another issue is that Smouldering Ashes, the currency that unlocks seasonal bonuses, including XP buffs, is level gated. Even if you’ve unlocked some of this currency on the pass, you won’t actually be able to take advantage of it and select a seasonal bonus until you hit the required level. So, for instance, if you want the XP boost, Urn of Progression, you have to wait until you hit 62, massively defeating the purpose of an XP boost entirely. Looks like it’s impossible to escape the grind. It looks like some of the seasonal objectives are bugged, too, failing to acknowledge that you’ve completed them, and thus not doling out their rewards.
Diablo 4 is not some free-to-play game using microtransactions to make ends meet; it’s a hugely popular premium game being very, very stingy. At least this makes me feel a bit better about packing it in after I finally unlocked my horse.
