Bruh, with this being an RPG, wouldn’t this be bordering P2W territory?

Yeah, it's one of the main concerns people have about the game right now from what I've seen on Youtube. Though Blizzard has promised that Diablo 4 won't be like Diablo Immortal, that it won't be pay to win and that the battlepasses will be for cosmetics only, putting 4 day early access on the Deluxe and Ultimate edition is effectively the same as pay to win in an RPG with PvP. It gives Deluxe and Ultimate edition purchasers a 4 day headstart on not only leveling, but hunting for best-in-slot legendaries and rares for min/maxing your build.

It's a shame that we have this giant "is it pay to win or not" shadow looming over the game. The early previews have been overwhelmingly positive on the game itself, from the depth of the RPG elements and character builds, to the art design and graphics, to the story, to the size of the game and amount of content it has, to the fun of the combat, but everybody is terrified they will renege on their promise of no pay to win and go full Diablo Immortal on us post-launch. And then they go and do a boneheaded move like putting early access into a multiplayer RPG.

Honestly a game launching with a £60 price tag for the standard edition having a battle pass system to monetize you is a complete joke.

Yeah. I understand them wanting in on the battlepass money that so many other publishers are getting, but it's an RPG, we don't really need a battlepass in an RPG, even if it is cosmetic only like they promise.

Think of the executives man! How else you think they're going to be able to keep up with their multimillion-dollar mansion payments???

Diablo is an ARPG. Battlepass makes a lot of sense.
You are getting a full game for the 70$ price tag. You will get more content in the base game than probably the majority of AAA games coming out these days...

I'm not sure why people find anything wrong with that. Battlepasss (or Seasons in Diablo) are here to have a constant stream of new content.
And you are paying ONLY for cosmestic stuff.

I do not think think having a full game with so much content at 70$ is a joke at all,. Seasons/Battlepass are here to support the future contents and this is more than welcome if you like the game knowing that it will keep getting new stuffs years after years.

It is like people prefers to pay 70$ to get the full game (like you do with Diablo 4) and then nothing else... Of they are offended if the developper is also adding battlepass/season to support future content... I have hard understanding that :) 

I don't have a problem with battle passes in general but if they wanted to go that route of monetization's and microtransactions then it should launch as a f2p title much like Path of Exile and not at £60 and infact Path of Exile 2 will be launching late this year or early next year with a full 7 act campaign and they monetize by selling cosmetics and battle passes without requiring a £60 price tag so I think it's fair to call out D4 for doing both.

Why is that? Other than "principle" I do not understand why they should have gone one way of another? 
They go both ways... Free to play games are usually lacking the base content and/or the base game is really lacking a lot of things until you put in money for quality of life that should have been there from the start...

Here you are getting a full game for 70$. Like any other game that are fully priced out there. 

What is wrong with also adding a way for the game to get new content in the future with battlepass (and only for cosmetic because everything else will be available for that base 70$ price anyway)? 

If the base game would not be full, with a full campaign, fully playable online, getting new content for "free". I would understand, but you are getting all of this for the price you payed and you do not need to pay anything else for that.

POE monetization has nothing to do with what Diablo 4 is doing, you are comparing apples and oranges. First, POE campaign will probably not be close to the production of Diablo 4. Second, you pay for way more than cosmetic in POE, this is not at all the same kind of monetization. And I have hard time calling this a "free" to play game. It is more a "pain to play until you pay" game to me :)

I guess I can see both arguments. On the one hand you do get a rather large game to explore for that $70 price tag in Diablo 4, it would be pretty silly of Blizz to give that away for free. Blizz is claiming 40-50 hour to hit level 50 and finish the main story, but that is not the extent of the game, just completing the main story and hitting level 50 will only show you like half of what the game has to offer, there will be plenty of dungeons left to explore in the end game, renown levels to earn and a paragon board to fill out for additional improvements to your characters skill tree and stats. Blizz says there are over 150 dungeons in the base game, and those dungeons can each take 20-30 minutes to explore from what I've heard from alpha testers, and you only are forced to do a set number of them for main or side quests, the rest are solely optional dungeons you can explore for both Codex of Power options for your build customization, and loot drops, including a higher chance of legendary drops from the bosses (each dungeon has a boss now unlike in Diablo 3).

The battlepass model seems to be for the core players, the long term players who will want to stick around for years to come, more so than for the more casual players who just want to see the story, maybe do some of the endgame content, and then move on to other games. I can understand Blizz wanting to monetize those long term players to fund the development of both future seasons of cosmetic battlepasses, but also to help fund the the likely singleplayer expansions that add new story and new playable classes. Diablo 4 is afterall essentially an MMO lite, complete with an always online persistent world where you can run into other players while out questing and group up with them or fight them if it's a PvP zone on the map. Between the two ways that Blizzard could have funded long term Diablo 4 support, a battlepass system, or a monthly payment like WoW, I definitely prefer the battlepass system.

On the other hand, it does look pretty shitty when you compare it to PoE 2, which is going F2P with a similarly large campaign to Diablo 4. They are using their cosmetics to fund the game being F2P to start with, unlike Blizz who is doing both B2P (buy to play) and cosmetic battlepasses.

That's why Xbox needs to own it, to fix it and save the gaming industry.