MultiVersus is now soft-launched, available to everyone willing to spend 60 minutes watching streams to earn a Twitch Drop. For those willing to wait, Open Beta will officially begin for MultiVersus next Tuesday, July 26. But waiting for the Open Beta will have certain negative consequences pertaining to MultiVersus' pre-season battle pass. An analysis by current MultiVersus players is serving as a warning. Finishing the battle pass prior to Season 1 starting on August 8 is going to require some serious time commitment.
Like most free-to-play live-service games, MultiVersus features a battle pass with both a free track and a premium one. Players progress through the battle pass by earning experience in two notable ways. First, there's a trickle of battle pass experience earned by playing matches. The vast majority of the battle pass is earned through six daily challenges and three larger challenges. There's just one issue. To complete the pre-season's 15 levels of battle pass, Open Beta players will have to complete nearly all challenges, every single day.
Reddit user jbyrdab did an analysis of MultiVersus' battle pass, calculating the experience needed to complete its 15 levels as 13,500 XP. If MultiVersus players start on the day the Open Beta launches and do every single daily challenge, as well as the larger season-long challenges, they'll earn a total of 13,800 XP. A single day's XP is equal to 600, meaning missing just one will mean players have to make up the difference by playing matches.
Playing matches sounds like it's not so bad, on paper. MultiVersus fans wanting to complete the battle pass will be playing a lot of matches, after all. But battle pass XP gain in MultiVersus is very low and very slow. Plus, MultiVersus Open Beta players will likely already be needing the XP they gain through matches just making up for the daily quests they're unable to complete, as they can be quite difficult to complete.
There's also a deeper design question to ask about the MultiVersus battle pass. All live-service games have to establish whether they want players to be able to earn rewards with relative ease or if they want rewards to be rare and difficult to attain. It's a matter of both accessibility and monetization and, in MultiVersus' case, Warner Bros. appears to prefer to be more restrictive.
Whether it's feasible to complete MultiVersus' battle pass is unlikely to change anyone's mind regarding whether to play the Open Beta or not. Still, for those wanting to try the Super Smash Bros.-like fighting game, it's good to know what's involved before investing the time. The pre-season of MultiVersus is ongoing and ends August 8, when Season 1 will begin.
MultiVersus is available in Early Access now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.