Diablo 4 Season 1 brings new "decaying abominations" and the first battle pass on July 20th
Season Of The Malignant starts this month, new hot priest included
Diablo 4’s permanently dark and dour world is doing the impossible in Season 1: getting even worse, somehow. The first seasonal update called Season Of The Malignant is coming on July 20th, developer Blizzard announced in last night’s livestream. The game’s first season brings another hellish threat from everyone’s nemesis/crush Lilith, a new questline, characters, powers, the first season journey, and yup, the first battle pass.
Check out the announcement trailer here:
The new questline takes place after the events of Diablo 4’s main game and introduces the “decaying abominations” called Malignant Monsters who are quickly spreading across Sanctuary. The beefcake holy man in the trailer above is an all-new friend named Cormand, an ex-priest who joins you against the new threat and teaches you how to destroy them.
You see, elite-level monsters will have a chance to spawn as partly corrupted Malignant Monsters that are more powerful than usual. After defeating them, a fully corrupted and even more powerful variant spawns, before dropping one of 32 Malignant Heart items that can be socketed into amulets and rings for special effects. You can farm for the infected baddies in the new “highly replayable” dungeons, although that replayability probably depends on how badly you want those shiny hearts. You might stumble across the new boss Varshan The Consumed while down there, too.
Diabloers should note that you can’t use pre-existing characters in the new season and will instead need to make a new demon-slayer. As long as you’ve completed the main campaign once, you can just skip the campaign, get your mount immediately, and retain all previously discovered Altars Of Lilith. Though, you can bring your Season Of The Malignant character into the eternal realm (aka the normal game) once the season is over. Phew.
That all sounds slightly convoluted, but Blizzard explains their thought process in the season’s blog post. Essentially, separating seasonal realms and eternal realms lets the team “create crazy, fun season themes in a vacuum, without needing to worry about balancing it with the mechanics introduced in past or future seasons.”
Blizzard also detailed the game's controversial first battle pass that includes 90 tiers of cosmetics and XP/gold bonuses. 27 of those tiers are available to everyone for free. The rest will cost you £8.40/$10, and there's an option to skip tiers for £1.80/$2 as well. The "accelerated" version includes 20 tier skips and goes for £21/$25. But that just sounds like you're paying more to play less, which Diablo 4 probably encourages with its grindyness anyway.
"Part of the reason it's so easy to play hours of Diablo 4 in one go, staring unblinkingly at the centre third of your screen until you feel your eyeballs turn into raisins, is that it's very well made," our AliceB wrote in her Diablo 4 review. Although, "whether you'll feel good afterwards is another question."
If automatically clicking to kill demons does make you feel good, check out our interactive Diablo 4 map to find almost anything in the game.
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