In defence of the cosmetic whales | Opinion
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On the whole, Diablo 4 has had an incredibly positive response. People like the visuals, the storytelling, and the gameplay, and there’s a strong sense that the series is back on track after the ill-judged (at least from the perspective of long-time fans) Diablo Immortal mobile title.
The reviews are positive, the community is mostly happy – there’s just one fly in the ointment, it seems. That’s the existence of a single tab in the game’s menus, 'Shop', wherein you’ll find a set of cosmetic items (armour, mounts, and the likes) that the game is happy to sell you for between $10 and $20 a pop. There’s some lovely, well-designed stuff in there, but without forking over the cash, you can look but you can’t touch – dressing your character up in those fancy duds demands a surcharge over the full-price game you just bought.
Nobody seems terribly happy about this. There are plenty of articles and forum threads about it; some enterprising person on Reddit figured out that buying all the cosmetics Diablo 4 offers on day one would set you back well over $300, more than five times the price of the base game itself.
The whole situation is spiced up a little by the fact that reviewers weren’t given access to the in-game store prior to launch, so they couldn’t include any assessment of the store and its pricing in their conclusions. The reasoning for that isn’t entirely unfair, in that all the items in the store are purely cosmetic and don’t impact gameplay, so you could argue that they ought not to change how the game is reviewed.
Still, that situation has contributed to a sense that the store’s pricing is something sneaky that has been slipped into the
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