DLC

[Suicune's Fire]

Are you a fan of downloadable content? Do you prefer that the whole game comes on the disc without any extra content?

I adored Shivering Isles DLC for Oblivion, and most/all Mass Effect (1, 2 and 3) DLC. Don't know if having the Ultimate edition of Dragon Age: Origins counts, but that too! Personally I like DLC when it adds another layer of awesomeness to the game. If it's some crappy extension that was released for the sake of more money-grabbing, then no, it sucks. xD Obviously.


What are some of the best DLCs you've played, and what are some of the worst?

[Elbub]

Cosmetic DLC can go crawl back into the hole it came from, and fester there. I'm looking at you, Oblivion Horse Armour. You started this...

DLC that actually adds additional content? Well, didn't we just refer to them as expansion packs back in the day? I tend to love them, but they do get the pricing wrong sometimes. The Sims is the worst offender for this; "Here's 1/10th of a finished game; that'll be £30 please!"

I loved the Deeper Dungeons from the original Dungeon Keeper, but that was before DLC was known as DLC.

For all my previous bashing of the Sims series, I owned and loved all the 'DLC' for the original and second game. Again though, theye were physical expansion packs...

I own all the DLC for games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and : New Vegas but... I always want to complete as much of the vanilla game before exploring the additional content. And I never complete the vanilla game (or in the case of New Vegas, completing the game actually ends it too).

For a second there, I was struggling to think of any actual games that I had played the DLC on. Somehow forgetting the 815 hours (+ then some with offline time) I have on Civilization 5 and all its DLC... I think then my favourite has to be Brave New World, but obviously Gods and Kings was great too, plus all the reasonably cheap individual Civ packs.

[Neo Emolga]

I usually play through the original vanilla game before deciding to buy DLC, unless it's a game I KNOW for sure I'm going to play a lot of. As for best DLC, nothing really comes to mind. Most of the DLC stuff I'm come across is pretty passable.

Worst DLC... map packs. Problem is if a server is using new maps and you don't have them downloaded, too bad, you can't play on that server. So unless you keep up with the map pack releases, you will find yourself quickly excluded from a lot of servers, which isn't fun.

[Teddiursa of the Sky]

Worst DLC... map packs. Problem is if a server is using new maps and you don't have them downloaded, too bad, you can't play on that server. So unless you keep up with the map pack releases, you will find yourself quickly excluded from a lot of servers, which isn't fun.

I agree with you about the issue of splitting the player base. It's a problem that even some of my favorite games have, like Battlefield. But at the same time, I understand why they often have a price tag. All the man-hours spent designing and building a level can't go unpaid, so I don't really have an issue dishing out money for it most of the time.

Cosmetic DLC can go crawl back into the hole it came from, and fester there. I'm looking at you, Oblivion Horse Armour. You started this...

This is another instance in which I see why it is charged -- labor is involved in making that stuff. Plus, I often times support cosmetic DLC since it helps supplement the bills and makes DLC with deeper content cheaper than it otherwise would have been. Grand Theft Auto V is a great example of that as well. They are able to make so much free content because they charge for more insignificant, largely cosmetic things.



Independently, I'd also like to mention some misconceptions about "day one" DLC, which are also quite pervasive in the gaming community. I mean, of course there are occasional instances in which the content was actually carved out and sold separately, but most of the time it is the product of mass production of physical copies. A game typically goes gold months before the actual release date, so cut content or new ideas surface and are worked on in the ensuing months.

Suicune's Fire brought up Mass Effect, so I'll use that as an example (since that's one of my favorite game series of all time). There was a day one DLC called "From the Ashes" for Mass Effect 3. If you were to peruse the vanilla game files, you'd see that some of the content for the addition was already present. Some. Of course gamers were infuriated, but many of them ignored interviews in which it was explained. The character Javik was cut from the original game because of time constraints and issues concerning the actors they wanted to play him. Long story short, all is not what it seems.