Diablo 4’s Battle Pass Will Take You Longer To Finish Than Most Video Games

Diablo IV is as much an online MMO as it is a single-player experience, as we learned first-hand during the game’s massive beta. That’s a good thing or a bad thing depending on both your preference and how well Blizzard can pull it off. Games-as-service require a lot of support and the constant addition of new content to keep the player-base happy.

Unlike Diablo III, the new game is launching with a Battle Pass, the hot trend in gaming right now ever since loot boxes—a trend Blizzard popularize start with Overwatch—became too controversial to sustain. We can all thank Epic Games and Fortnite for the shift.

Every Battle Pass is different, of course, and one of the main concerns gamers have is just how long it will take to grind one out. Personally, I think if you really enjoy a game and play it a lot, even very slow Battle Passes are more than doable. The trick is when you play multiple different games-as-service titles at the same time. Now you’re juggling Overwatch 2’s Battle Pass and Fortnite’s Battle Pass and Warzone 2’s Battle Pass and Valorant’s Battle Pass—and yes, I’m just listing off some of the games I play personally. I may or may not have Battle Passes for all of these . . . .

Well, Diablo IV’s Battle Pass is something of a juggernaut. It will be challenging for casual players to complete, to say the least. Blizzard is clocking the time it takes to finish the Season 1 pass at 80 hours—longer than it takes to complete most single-player games.

“Right now, the battle pass, when you’re figuring in completing the season journey alongside doing other content in the game, you’re looking at roughly 80 hours worth of time invested to complete the entirety of the battle pass,” associate game director Joe Piepiora told PC Gamer. “To level a character to level 100 could take a little longer than that based on how you play.”

Players will likely finish the Battle Pass before reaching level 100 and the endgame, Piepiora notes. Of course, you can also just play the story campaign and not worry about the endgame, he says, adding that “we’re not trying to say the only way to play Diablo 4 is to engage with the endgame and go all the way to level 100 with every character you ever make.”

I sure hope not! Put me in the filthy casuals pile when it comes to Diablo titles. I enjoy them a great deal, but no matter how good Diablo IV is, I find the gameplay loop too repetitive to level up all the characters to max level or play through the campaign that many times. I have to have time for all my first-person shooters, after all!

Will I invest in an 80-hour Battle Pass? That remains to be seen. Frankly, in a game all about killing monsters in order to get better (and cooler) loot, I’m not sure I even like the idea of a Battle Pass. It sort of feels like you’re paying for the same thing twice. But I’ll reserve judgment until launch. A seasonal model can definitely give a game a longer, more robust lifespan so a Battle Pass may just be the price we pay for greatness.

Diablo IV releases on June 6th, 2023.