It costs £88,000 to fully upgrade your character in Diablo Immortal
An analysis discovers that upgrading requires Legendary Gems that F2P players can't get.
It costs £88,000 ($110,000) to fully upgrade a character in Diablo Immortal.
That's according to Bellular News (thanks, GameRant), which has calculated that to fully max out a character, a player would need to spend over $100,000 on microtransactions, as it's seemingly not possible to do so without spending real money. You can check out the full breakdown below:
Players in Diablo Immortal have three progression pillars: XP level, equipment level, and Legendary Gems. The first two are pretty standard fare in any RPG-type game, but collating Legendary Gems can be a costly and convoluted process as the way you get them is randomised and often exceedingly rare... and right now, it seems as though F2P players cannot earn them at all.
Furthermore, as Legendary Gems aren't even a guaranteed drop for those prepared to pay for boosts and cannot be bought outright, players have to battle the odds of unlocking them through Legendary Chests, which are essentially loot boxes.
First announced at BlizzCon in 2018 - after which it kicked off a fan backlash - Diablo Immortal takes place between the events of Diablo 2 and 3, adapting the classic dungeon crawling formula of its predecessors for mobile devices - which, among other things, means a free-to-play monetisation model based around in-app purchases. Consequently, this week's long-awaited launch of Diablo Immortal was scrapped in both Belgium or the Netherlands, due to the countries' laws around loot boxes.
"Diablo Immortal will not be available in Belgium or the Netherlands, and will not appear on Battle.net or the Belgian and Netherlands App or Google Play Stores," an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Eurogamer earlier this week. "This is related to the current operating environment for games in those countries. Accordingly, pre-registrations for the game are not accessible in those markets."