Despite what the title says, this will be mostly about the cosmetic skin system, but as it is my habit I’ll go off-track to comment other aspects.
The shop skins, that you buy for real money, are very expensive in Diablo IV, but also of an excellent quality. I don’t like all of them, but some are really a wonder, something that for me has unparalleled artistic quality. Those that I don’t like aren’t poorly made, but just not matching my preference and style. But this is, unambiguously, one aspect where the game excels and is above any other competitor. No matter how good Path of Exile I&II can be, along with all the other titles, no one comes close. I also especially like the gritty and gloomy overall aesthetic of the game. The texture of the floors, the light shining. The style of the tooltips themselves, something that in a loot-based game has your attention for most of the time, aesthetically look so good to me. I like the look and style of this game a lot more than its gameplay.
Problem is that, for me, those cosmetic skins have zero appeal. Blizzard will never persuade me to spend even a single dollar (more than I’ve already spent for the very basic version of the expansion, and that was a good move, because I didn’t buy the game until last September when it was heavily discounted on Steam and bundled with the first expansion. So they got me onboard and made me buy this one expansion at full price, rather than wait another year for another significant price reduction). In a loot based game, I want the look of my character to reflect the items I find. I want, ideally, to start using poor scraps and see the character evolve in power, but also in its “visual might,” as I find better and more powerful items. The visual progression is a fundamental part of a game like this, just as the stats written inside those items. You can sacrifice it, but it needs to be done consciously, knowing the significance of what you’re losing.
From my perspective, the game as it presents itself to me, I wouldn’t use those gorgeous skins EVEN IF THEY WERE FREE. I don’t want to start a campaign, a new character, with it looking like an ultimate god. It feels WRONG. It robs the progression these games are based on.
I’m also a weird and I suppose uncommon type of player because I’m naturally immune to addiction and gambling. Not because I have a strong will to flaunt, but merely because it always required me very little effort to resist these. My brain is simply wired differently. Even worse, I seek my challenge and enjoy slowing gameplay down, rather than speeding up. All these free to play and gatchas out there indeed fall within my interests. I’m not a snob and will gladly play some Genshin Impact, ZZZ, Endfield and so on. ZZZ I’ve played recently and sunk a few hours. The game strongly pushes you not just to get new characters, but also all those materials and power ups that make the whole structure of the progression in these games. But since these games are generally designed, until very much later, to be PISS EASY, and in order for me to hold my very own attention, my overall strategy is to NEVER USE ANY MATERIAL. In the case of ZZZ meaning to repeatedly trying to EXIT the forced tutorials (*), because I just don’t want to level up. And so I went through the first part of the game, with missions starting to climb to level 20 and above, but my party of three being still level 1 and utterly unequipped.
(*)
This is really out of this world to make sense. Have you noticed how all these free to play gacha FORCE you into unskippable, unending tutorials where all the screen is blacked out, so that you are forced to click on that very button left out they want you to press. OVER AND OVER (Arknight Endfield, 20+ hours of tutorials). And then you’re thankfully free, you inadvertently press a button on the UI because you’re looking for something, AND ANOTHER LENGTHY TUTORIAL TRIGGERS, and you start spamming ESC trying to GET THE FUCK OUT, and you can’t, you have to go through the tutorial, making you irritatingly, compulsively click as fast as possible to get out, please let me out of this hellscape, no you have TO READ THIS. It makes no sense, these game companies print money, yet they are objectively in the STONE AGE of game design. It’s so simple to improve these systems and still guide players. How it’s possible that this is a thing, in commercial products, in 2026?
And it was fun. Because even if this was just an introduction, it already required me to figure out how to play rather than smashing buttons, to figure out a certain rotation of combos. Until eventually I reached a stage where I was able, despite the very frantic nature of the gameplay, to survive more or less indefinitely (just need to avoid damage entirely), but doing close to zero damage to a boss. This is precisely the signal I wait for, to start climbing up the progression. My default strategy is TO AVOID all built-in progression until I smash against a wall that I cannot climb by simply playing better, and start using what’s available to go higher just enough that the game stays challenging, but doable. You can imagine that, playing this way and always consuming the bare minimum, leaves you SWIMMING in materials. The game never reaches the point where spending money becomes desirable.
If it was for me, all free to play games would be dead. But again, not because I’m campaigning against them, not because I’m adamant of not spending any money… It’s just how I play. If it’s free to play, I can get the most out of the game, AS LONG I don’t spend any money. Because spending money equals disrupting the game loop itself that I find fun. It makes things WORSE.
Last September, when I bought Diablo IV, I started playing following the same philosophy. Loot would drop, the character would gain skill points, but I would use that loot and allocate those skill points only in the case I reached a wall in difficulty. And I found MANY. The game (that I set to “hard” as soon as possible, I tried a level above that too but(**)) was plenty challenging and early bosses required me preparation. This despite me knowing the game being very easy throughout its campaign. I suppose I’m not that awful, so the difficulty was caused by my character spending most of the early game without equipping anything at all…
(**)
I’ve seen other players complaining about this, so it’s likely true. But it seems like Diablo difficulty curve is really flat. If you pick an higher world-difficulty, everything levels to that standard. Problem is, it seems way too “flat”. Not in the sense that the gap between one difficulty and the next is too steep, but that every single monster seem to pose the same challenge. You can get two-shotted by a random monster on a road. A “good” difficulty behaves like a wave, it can stay moderately high, requiring effort, but it cannot be simply flat. It needs going up and down depending on the monster types you face, to then climb more with bosses (***). If it’s too flat then it either feels too irritating, or just plain boring. You need to weave a modulation there.
(***)
About bosses, due to my way of playing, bosses I faced during the campaign, even early on, were a real challenge, to repeat 20 times or more and sorting through the inventory to improve certain aspects. If the boss dies on the first try then, objectively, it has been a waste of development time. Of designing it, the work going into animating it… A standard monster can die easily, because you encounter more of them, you reuse them. But a single boss encounter needs its spotlight. Ideally, you spend an handful attempts to observe what the boss does, the patterns it goes through, if it has phases. After you observed the boss, then more attempts are needed to figure out your half of the deal, your strategy, how to use your very own toolkit. Elaborate a strategy, figure out what works and what doesn’t. Then, third phase, after figuring out the strategy you will need more attempts to execute it properly. To develop a familiarity and “perform” it well. A good boss makes you go through all three phases. It is never frustrating, no matter how many attempts, because you are never out of options. The frustration shows up if you can’t figure out what to do, and still fail. But as long you see a path, walking it is THE FUN. If the walk is a shortcut, then you’ve missed the whole show.
But we were talking about skins. While playing I was wondering… Since the cosmetic skins have zero appeal to me, the only solution would be to integrate them into the actual game. But of course this would disrupt their whole purpose: to earn real money. The simple fact that a ton of skins have cycled through the game, across several seasons and years, their very high quality and sheer amount, all indicate that this isn’t merely Blizzard being “greedy”. Without that incoming money those skins simply wouldn’t exist. The money is the fuel that makes this process work, in the way it does work.
Is there a better way, then? Of course there is.
The design goal, here, is that whatever solution you contrive, it cannot disrupt the system already in place. You cannot make those paid skins less desirable. You cannot compromise even the FOMO that powers the system, because those skins are available for a limited time, and this creates an important past of the compulsion to obtain them. You cannot delay the purchase indefinitely. If you design a better system, then, you need to preserve all this (unless, of course, you rebuild the whole scope).
So here’s my solution: as in the case of Marathon, my idea would be about adding options, rather than removing or adjusting those already in the game. But doing so also means avoiding a conflict between these new options and those that already exist. The idea is that, whatever option you add, it needs to avoid “sharing market” with the current ones. If they avoid the overlap, and so if the value of paid skins is left as it is, then great!
My idea is that EVERY skin piece that ever appeared on the shop, now enters the game loot pool. You can tweak those drop values to be very rare, whatever. But they all have a potential to drop as items while you play, within or outside a season. The benefit of this is obvious. Without the work of even a single artist, you would have massively expanded a potential loot pool. You can go wild there, do whatever you want. But at the same time, it’s dumb. Of course you can do that, but it directly disrupts what I’ve just stated: no one will ever buy skins anymore in the shop if they can be obtained in the game for free…
But here’s the point. After you solved the design knot upstream, everything unravels quite naturally and quite beautifully. Follow me. In the current system you have a sort of armory panel. Whenever an item is dropped and acquired, you unlock its cosmetic look, so that you can then freely apply that same visual look to any new item you want to use that shares that slot. If you buy a skin, obviously, you’d have unlocked the corresponding cosmetics, so that you can then freely apply at any point of the game. If then our goal is to avoid sharing market with paid skins, then let’s simply do it. The rule would be: any item that drops in the world and that uses the visual appearance of a shop skin, is LOCKED to that physical item in game. This means you cannot reuse it. After your outlevel that item, even in the chance that its own randomly rolled stats were good, you’ll have to discard it because you keep progressing further. If the drop rates are rare, then good luck even finding and equipping a matching set. You’d have to sink hundred of hours into the game to have something actually “good looking.” Even then, Diablo works in season of 2/3 months. Being limited to use the look of a dropped item means that this is character bound. Even if you managed to complete a whole set of items that look as you’d like, with decent stats, all that would be achieved on that one character. You’d have to do it all over again for every single new character you create, every time you go into a new season.
It is easily proven that this cannot impact the desirability of the paid skins. Enabling ALL previous shop skins at once, to drop, making those rare drops, means you just realistically will never find what you want. You’ll always end with mismatching parts. Buying a skin would still make it properly available, would preserve its value. These two systems wouldn’t overlap.
But more than this, you open brand new paths to sell things meaningfully. Add generic single-use items, that you can buy for real money, that will “generify” the cosmetic on a item you find. Foe a low price, even if it’s $5 (tho, I’d put it lower, like $2, to make it an almost thoughtless process). Use this special item and you unlock the “cosmetic” visual of the object that dropped, but now you get to apply freely that cosmetic, so that you can transfer that look to a better item, when you find it. You first need to acquire it as a drop, spend $5 or whatever to turn it onto a cosmetic to freely apply, but this continues to be CHARACTER LOCKED. Only valid on that one character, for that one equipment slot. You’d have one more thing to sell, you’d let players acquire “cosmetics” coming from all previous shop seasons, and you’d have made it RENEWABLE, because as long players play, they’ll join new seasons, make new characters, and spend a few dollars here and few there to unlock specific cosmetics on that single character being played. Repeating this over and over and over. Blizzard having stuff to sell over and over, at zero development cost.
It doesn’t invalidate the current paid skin system, because if you don’t find the new character-bound single-item cosmetics appealing, then you still have the option of the paid shop skins, that you buy once but that will always be available even on new characters. Unlocked at any time, rather than having to wait a very rare actual drop.
All three classes of players benefit from this:
– Current system players, still have a motive to go in the shop and buy new paid skins, since this is the only way to have them unlocked permanently. Preserving the same FOMO, since once the skin is gone from the shop, even if it drops in the game, is still very, very unlikely to obtain, and requiring hundred if not thousands of hour, if you want to obtain that specific piece.
– New system, something that looks cool drops, and you can pay a small amount to turn it into a cosmetic, bound to that single character that randomly obtained the drop. As a renewable system that encourages purchases through the whole lifespan of the game.
– All other players who never spent a dollar on cosmetics, the totality of Diablo players since this includes the previous two pools, get a massively expanded loot pool with much greater visual variance. It’s like a giant game expansion that costs NOTHING, to both players and developers, as it’s built with assets that are already in the game but largely not used.
Everyone wins massively. Blizzard gets even more money, because tons more players are likely to spend a few dollars on single specific items, rather than having to decide buying only complete, but also very expensive sets. Those sets still keep their full value, since the overlap is simply not there.
Those skins are too good to be left at the margins of the game. These ideas pull them back into the core of the game without endangering the shop.
Everyone’s comes out happier.
Having written all this, I can now launch the game and play. Plan is to make a new character, necromancer, and start all over again at the beginning of the first campaign, and take my time with it. Having the game a bad reputation for being “too easy”, I got the idea of a necromancer without minions. This before I found out that the class is also designed to support this option explicitly. In my mind this was secondary. If playing without minions is counter intuitive for the class, this means the game was going to be quite a bit harder. That I would manufacture my own challenge. So be it, bring it on :)
P.S.
I forgot to address two additional points:
1- You can fine tune the system so that shop skins stay exclusive to the shop for a season or two before entering the game pool. Better preserving that exclusivity.
2- There’s also the other way that this could be criticized. Not as a convenient option, but even a more greedy one, since cosmetics would turn to single-slot single-character. Again, this is a new option offered. If you want to ignore it, nothing changes from the current state of the game. But if a cool looking item drops, maybe you accept paying a small fee to have it active as a cosmetic, even if it’s limited to that one character.
Expanding this system, I’d have three tiers:
– The single-slot, single-character-bound item, it drops and you convert to cosmetic for a small fee, like $2-5
– The shop skin, as it is right now, for a whole set, unlocked permanently on all current and future characters.
– Another option to convert a dropped item into cosmetic, like the first tier, but so that it unlocks permanently on all characters. Balancing it so the price of acquiring a full set, using this third option, would be greater than the shop complete skin bought when still available. So, if used, this third option would take more money for the same result, so without competing with the second option, but also opening the way to acquire cosmetics that aren’t on the shop anymore for an higher price. But STILL conditioned by the fact you have to have these dropping, FIRST, as an in-game item. You can’t just unlock the cosmetic until it has dropped at least once. And maybe you play for 200 hours and that one thing you want just won’t drop. Preserving almost entirely the FOMO of acquiring as set as long it’s available on the shop, but still capitalizing on the fact that you still have a chance of acquiring it later.
Game design is the art of hitting ALL your targets, all bonked squarely on their head.
