Last week, BioWare revealed that their final DLC for their successful RPG, Dragon Age: Origins, would put a final conclusion on the epic quest began in the original game. While this sense of finality is something that you rarely see in games these days, but it’s interesting to note that the true conclusion of this retail game is only possible by purchasing additional content. What was once a means of extending supplemental experiences through online maps and costumes, downloadable content has become the norm, with less and less games being simple standalone experiences and essentially requiring some form of post-release extension.
While expansion packs have been available for PC games for a very long time, they were typically reserved for RPGs, strategy and sim games, and occasionally for first-person shooters. Expansions are available today much in the way they’ve always been, giving players a way to extend their gaming experience at a somewhat lower cost than a full-on sequel.
The upcoming Witch Hunt DLC for Dragon Age: Origins will conclude the game’s storyline, but comes at a price.
However, somewhere along the way, the experience was even further condensed, with developers offering even smaller boosts of content for even less money. DLC started innocuously enough, with map packs for shooters (and offerings like the infamous “Horse Armor” DLC for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion), but as the technology evolved, enabling more gamers to have broadband connections and more access to online content, it seemed like every game had some form of downloadable features, regardless of genre or audience.
Offering an extension of gameplay elements beyond the disc and not charging an arm and a leg for it is definitely a great thing. However, a problem comes when these same features are included on disc, requiring the player to purchase what essentially amounts to a code to unlock content that they technically already have. Large-scale titles like BioShock 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 shipped with content already on the disc, but only those who paid separately for the DLC could access it. This obviously rubbed a lot of gamers the wrong way, who believed that since they were paying for the disc, they should have access to all that it contains.
2K’s Bioshock 2 was under fire for featuring unlockable DLC on the game’s disc.
Still, this isn’t common, as the vast majority of downloadable content is created and released after a game’s launch, and thusly, not on the disc. However, it seems that a lot of games releasing bank on the fact that DLC will be available later on. As a result, we get incomplete stories and online components that don’t become fully fleshed out until you’ve purchased a few maps and extra modes. Granted, this isn’t always the case, but it is a trend that’s developing among games.
In a time where you can go online and watch webisodes by characters from your favorite TV show or partake in interactive viral campaigns for upcoming movies, audiences have proven that closed-off entertainment experiences are ending, and a cohesive universe outside of the original media is becoming a necessity. This is certainly becoming the standard for video games as well, as we are no longer content with what we get for our initial purchase, and must extend our experiences, be it with new episodes and story elements or even just costumes for our characters. However, developers shouldn’t rely on this when creating their games, as by dropping a good 60 bucks per game, we should be entitled to a complete experience.
