Overwatch 2’s tenth season begins today, April 16, and it’s bringing a new hero, a new limited-time event, and also a new way to earn Mythic Skins, the rare, customizable skins you can get through progressing through the entire premium battle pass. It’s a nice change for folks who haven’t bought every battle pass and missed one of these skins the first time around. However, now that the new system has rolled out, it’s quickly become clear how expensive catching up on these rare skins will be.
Let’s start with a baseline breakdown of how the new Mythic Shop works. This is a new tab on the Store page, and it includes Mythic Skins from previous battle passes that rotate in and out between seasons. As of this writing, Orisa and Moira’s skins are not available to earn and will return next season and two seasons from now, respectively. You can unlock any of the other available skins by using a new currency called Mythic Prisms. These are earned through the premium (paid) battle pass, or can be purchased with real money. These Prisms allow you to unlock the base skin itself, then gradually unlock customization options as you progress through the battle pass. By the time you reach the end of the pass, you’ll have enough Mythic Prisms to unlock a full Mythic Skin, just like you would have before the new shop was implemented.
In theory, this gives players who maybe missed out on previous battle passes (either by not buying the premium version or maybe not playing during that specific season) or those who are new to the game a chance to get Mythic Skins. But as of right now, it’s impossible to actually catch up on all the ones you missed without paying real money, as the battle pass only has enough prisms for one skin a season. So if you’re only getting prisms through the battle pass, have to make a decision between buying the new Mythic skin or previous one with the currency you earn while playing. There’s currently no way to afford more than one skin per season without using real cash.
If you want to buy a Mythic Skin outright, you’ll have to buy prisms in bulk, and they are not cheap. A 10 Prism bundle costs $10, but the next available bundle of 50 costs $39.99, and that’s not enough Prisms to buy a Mythic Skin. The Mercy one that launched this season costs 80 Prisms, and if you want to buy that, you’ll have to pay for the 100 currency bundle that costs $74.99, more than the average video game. Some do appear to be cheaper than others, but not by much. Hanzo’s skin has fewer customization options than others and is only 70 Prisms. Even so, this is far and away more expensive than how you used to unlock these skins, as the premium battle pass would typically cost 1000 Overwatch coins ($10), and you would get the Mythic Skin just by grinding it out.
It figures the monkey’s paw would curl when Overwatch 2 brought old Mythic Skins out of the vault. However, this does follow a much more popular move: no longer putting heroes behind the battle pass. Overwatch 2 is having to shift around a lot of its monetization practices, and I guess given the choice between heroes that cost money and expensive skins, I’d pick the latter. It can never just be a win with this game, huh? Still waiting to hear official word from Blizzard that they canceled the story missions, but I guess we’re getting the bad news out before the worse news.
