Nostalgia and rose-tinted spectacles are rife in all walks of life, but there are few places where it happens more so than in the video games industry. This is perhaps due to the fact that it’s such a fast-moving industry that you can be in your twenties and still feel nostalgic for “the good old days” and how much better they supposedly were.
Nine times out of ten, of course, nostalgia is proven wrong when you actually go back and play the things you were so nostalgic about. Things move on for a reason.
But I’m firmly of the opinion that the previous console generation is always going to be looked back on as a “golden age” that is going to be very difficult to top, however good the games might be, and however beautiful the HD graphics of today’s games might be.
The reason for this, to me, that games from then were finished. Now we have the blight that is DLC. Now, the arguments in favour of downloadable add-ons for games are many—extra content adds life to a game and keeps it relevant long after release. It gives developers the opportunity to show that they’re still “supporting” a product. And it allows for other, smaller developers to use an existing base as the means for some creative risk-taking—see Bioshock 2’s “Minerva’s Den” as an example.
But at its worst, DLC is a cynical money-making exercise designed to get people to pay for their games twice—once to buy the thing in the first place and once again to purchase all the “premium content” that should have been included with the game. Premium content, let’s not forget, that very often is actually on the game disc and is simply “unlocked” by purchasing an access code.
This isn’t the only negative side to DLC, either. Narrative games suffer considerably from this whole “oh, let’s add a bit here, add a bit there” structure. There was a time when you would start playing a game, go through its story, beat it and be satisfied. Now, it seems, there always has to be “a little bit more”. There always has to be an “exclusive epilogue chapter”, or some “side missions” or “the shock return of a beloved character!”
Rather than seeing this as a good opportunity to get more of the games I love, I see this as reason to not pick up a copy of a hotly-anticipated game on its original release, because it’s almost inevitable that there will be some “extra bits” sold separately down the road, and that these will be bundled into a “Game of the Year Edition” or similar even further down the road.
This is what was supposed to happen with the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. I was quite keen to wait for this rather than picking up any of the DLC for the Xbox version, so that I could play the “definitive version”. Sure enough, the PS3 version was announced as having “all” the DLC included with it. Nice. Except now they’ve announced some more, because Mass Effect 2 is big business and people will keep funnelling money into it.
ARGH. What this means in practice is that when you buy a game these days you’re essentially purchasing an unfinished product. With the speed at which some of this DLC magically appears, it’s clear it’s been worked on alongside the “main” game and so it would have been very easy for it to simply be included in the price of admission. And with some publishers like EA already withholding content from those who have purchased a game pre-owned, the whole situation just strikes me as more than a little objectionable. Games are too expensive anyway, and to start charging even more for them is just… well, wrong.
Unfortunately, there are too many people out there invested in the DLC debacle to mean we can ever go back. Are you happy with that?
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I’m struggling to come up with a coherent argument for DLC really. I’m not too bothered about the ME2 DLC as it has been mentioned before that a further chapter would be coming and I feel that it is so far from the release date it can’t have been some unfinished content surely?
The one that’s wound me up good and proper was the announcement for DLC for Bulletstorm on Tuesday – The game wasn’t even out here yet and they were adding ‘content’ – that made me angry and also I reckon will now be a GOTY only purchase 🙁
I’m bothered by the Mass Effect 2 stuff because Jesus Christ that game should be finished by now. I want it to end. You (not you personally) can say all you like that you “loved it so much that you want it to go on forever”, but do you really want to be playing the same game for all eternity? I certainly don’t. I would rather the whole thing was delayed and EVERYTHING was put into it from day one.
The Bulletstorm DLC is annoying, yes, but it’s far from an isolated incident. Day-one DLC is sadly nothing unusual these days.
In that case I wonder if DNF will get any DLC – surely they must have everything in it by now?
You’d hope, really, wouldn’t you? I anticipate a “Titty Pack” at the very least.
DLC is turning everything into a sandbox game, ala Sims. Which is ok, except where it’s not.
Like you said, some games are just better when they have a definite ending – the FF endings wouldn’t be half as moving or satisfying if they weren’t, y’know, endings. A new game in the series, sure, but not going back to the same game, same characters, and trying to stick something new into it to make people play it more. That’s just like grafting wings onto a cat to make it ‘better’.
For what it’s worth, I loves me a sandbox game. (Wow for nearly 5 years? Why yes, thank you Blizz, have my money.) But games like ME2, in your own words, should really be finished by now. It just feels a bit like a cynical attempt to get more money from people by publishing half-finished games. Or is that too cynical, even for me?
MMOs are a whole other beast. They have to do two things: never end (who’s going to keep playing if they can “finish” it?) and justify their subscription fees. The amount of content they do provide as part of the subscription fee is, in most cases, very good. Some would argue that the expansions themselves should be provided gratis (and some MMOs, like City of Heroes, do) but in WoW’s case, there’s a lot of extra content there in the expansions.
But absolutely—not all games are or should be sandbox games. Mass Effect 2 should tell a story and then finish. Leave it open for a sequel, sure. I like sequels. But don’t keep bolting extra bits onto my story for the sake of making money.
Actually that’s a good point about ME2 – my first play through alone clock in 54 hours over 3 days – more than enough when you consider that’s less than £1/hour!
In order to influence people, you have to realise that they don’t think that they’re wrong.
Sensei Chad.
Were the PR department at EA asleep on the day they announced the Bulletstorm DLC? All they had to do was wait a few days/weeks and the backlash would have been nowhere near as bad, I don’t see how announcing it on the day of release helped anything.
I try not to buy any DLC unless it’s on offer, or for a game that I really enjoyed and desperately want more of. I almost always feel bad for doing it though, since I’m effectively justifying the the publisher’s decision to hold back the content.
I didn’t buy Case West on principle though, after Capcom’s press release effectively saying, “Ha! Thanks for all the money for Case Zero. Y’know, that demo we made you all pay for? We certainly plan on doing that a lot more now! MONEYMONEYMONEY!”
Oh, God. I have no idea. You would think they know that people get pissed off by that sort of shit by now. And they probably do. They just don’t care. Probably.
DLC can be a great thing – it can sustain the life of a game and on one level ensures that more money is put into the studio rather than into shops like Game or Gamestation – I’d rather Bungie had my cash to be honest.
There is also an argument that says that a truly great story (be that game or movie) leaves you wanting more, the key to DLC is that it delivers a valued experience – new and interesting elements of the story (if that actually works, there are so many occasions where they dont) rather than spinning out same old, same old.
You can also argue that it gives studios a chance to test the waters for an expanded universe aspect or for an innovative gameplay element.
DLC can also be a pile of old wank.
I think its the amount that we are expected to pay which is up for debate – after all noone moans about having to pay for more Aps to their phone, or another book a series.
Really, do you resent paying for a whole new experience to a game you enjoy?
I was trying to work out what bugs me about the “wanting more” argument because it’s a sound one. And I figured it out. This is my personal opinion, though, and I know for a fact not everyone feels the same way—hence the success of DLC.
There are two things that bug me about it, in fact: firstly, that just because you’re left wanting more doesn’t mean you should get more. There’s an old saying that I can’t remember that basically says things left unsaid are just as powerful as things you do make explicit.
Take Dragon Age, for example. I won’t spoil the ending for those who still haven’t played it, but there’s a certain element of ambiguity about several parts of that game’s finale. And those things are better as an unresolved story—particularly as one of the pieces of DLC 1) spoils the fuck out of said ending event, which was genuinely surprising when it first happened and 2) resolves said story in a particularly cack-handed, lame manner that is very disappointing from a studio like BioWare who are usually so good at storytelling.
Mass Effect 2, also. I think the thing that bugs me there is that I’ve already beaten it, then all this other crap comes out and I’m expected to what, go back and play it again? I do want to at some point, yes, but feeling obliged to because “HAY THERE’Z ALL THIS COOL NEW STUFFZ THAT U CAN TOTES BUY”? No. I want to go back and play Mass Effect 2 because it was already a complete game in its own right without the need for all these little side stories. Sure, I hear some of them are great. But as I said, I’d rather they were either there in the first place or they saved them for a sequel… or even an expansion pack.
See, expansion packs used to be a good deal. To continue on the BioWare theme, the Baldur’s Gate series each had expansion packs. These weren’t crappy little bits of DLC. These were 40-hour extensions to the story, like quasi-sequels. They were worth the money because they added something substantial to the game rather than what we have with the piecemeal approach we get now—the equivalent of a child writing a story, coming to the end and then breathlessly babbling “And then this happened and then this happened and then this happened” ad nauseam and charging you £10 per sentence. Proper expansion packs are rare these days—but they do still occasionally happen. I’d describe Borderlands’ DLC as expansion packs, and Dragon Age: Awakening is most definitely an expansion pack.
The above, I think, is my main problem. If I want more of a game, I want something substantial. I don’t want four new maps for £15. I don’t want two hours of gameplay that doesn’t integrate very well with the existing story for £10. I don’t want my ending to come months after I’ve bought the fucking game. If I want to extend my experience and am willing to pay money for it, I want to spend £15-£20 and be provided with something that is at least half as long as the game itself. Because that’s what we used to get.
Let’s not even start on map packs. Play an FPS on PC and you will never need to pay for a map pack because the community out there is so talented that they produce commercial-quality offerings and provide them for free. Play the same FPS on Xbox and you’ll be paying £10-£15 for a few extra maps—a premium on the fact that “the developers made them”. And not even that in some cases—L4D on PC has completely free DLC and updates, yet you have to pay for them on Xbox. Double standards much?
DLC should be a good thing and I want it to be a good thing—downloadable full games in particular are one of my favourite things about this console generation, and I always used to purchase expansion packs for favourite games “back in the day”—but at the minute, DLC’s pricing is totally unreasonable and what you get for your money is generally pretty shocking.
Unfortunately, though, enough people are paying for it that publishers now believe they’ve found the “sweet spot”. All the fucking idiots paying £15 for Call of Duty maps are the worst offenders.
/soapbox 🙂