{"id":60051,"date":"2026-02-28T12:01:58","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T17:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=60051"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:07:41","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T03:07:41","slug":"brief-thoughts-on-the-complicated-topic-of-dlc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=60051","title":{"rendered":"Brief Thoughts On The Complicated Topic of DLC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in my day the whole<\/em> game shipped on the disc or cart and it worked!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"r\/FinalFantasy<\/p>\n

I remember the first “DLC” I ever cared about. Halo 2’s expansion maps. I spent entire nights playing Halo 2 with my friend, his brother, and occasionally a third person. That’s right. I had 2 and sometimes 3 friends.<\/em> One of us went to the local used games store and picked up the add-on installation disc and installed them. It was a novel concept for us: adding new things to a game that had already come out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That was far from the first expansion content I had ever played. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, Sonic & Knuckles… there were plenty of times in the past I was given reason to revisit games. But this time felt different. There was no new story content or mechanics. There was just more maps. That “lack” of content came with a lower price tag and a physical disc that you could share across consoles, so it felt like you got more than enough for your dollar.<\/p>\n

The next generation really opened up the market for DLC. Maps, missions, characters, costumes, even armor for your horse! Memes aside I think simple cosmetics are a great example of where that kind of bonus content can go. As long as it was developed after the game itself was, I don’t mind throwing game developers a few dollars here and there to unlock some skins and outfits. I say all this even with the knowledge that when I was a kid there were plenty of codes and otherwise unlocked outfits, filters, and modes. Maps are fine too. I’m a sucker for exploring something I already liked in a new context.<\/p>\n

If I spend $60 or $70 on a game, though, I want the whole story to be on that disc or in that download. I don’t mind extra side adventures or questlines that push the story forward, but if the game gets a sequel I don’t think it’s fair to expect me to go back and buy the DLC from the previous game to have any idea what’s going on. I just finished Alan Wake II and the whole premise of the game relies on you playing both the Alan Wake DLC and a DLC mission from Control. Alan Wake is an excellent game but I REALLY didn’t care for the later released stuff. And I thought Control was great but I’m willing to bet there’s a huge amount of people that didn’t even know the games share the same universe. It feels like I’ve been given homework in order to try to experience a product and I’m not a fan. Thankfully, though, the days of cutting chunks of the games out to sell later as DLC has mostly gone away. The industry has seems to have come to understand what they can and cannot get away with.<\/p>\n

As for DLC characters, that has REALLY changed. I remember a time where I refused to buy Capcom games because of the on-disc DLC debacle on Street Fighter vs Tekken. Now most multiplayer games get new characters further down the line, so you can see a proper allocation of time and attention. It felt like the post-release market for characters went from a gross way to sell portions of that game that were already there to a great way to support the platform you’ve built. Many games even give you a way to unlock those characters for free just via regular play or grinding. I have the full roster of Rainbow Six Siege operators and I never paid a cent for them. I paid for cosmetics, but all gameplay related content is available with the game purchase.<\/p>\n

My favorite part of the post-release video game landscape is how devs of some games patch in new content for free. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, and Terraria all have content coming out many years after their release and it’s all free. With lots of indie games in particular it’s an almost expected feature nowadays. We really went from being asked to pay for the reattachment of a not-so-carefully amputated segment of a story of game, to a line of breadcrumbs from one game to the release of the next for no extra cost.<\/p>\n

Honestly until I got all this out on the page, here, I didn’t know how positive I’ve grown to feel about the proliferation of downloadable content. I don’t often go back to games to play more story or missions anymore. I kind have the same feeling that most people get when they hear about a new sequel to an old classic. That page has turned. There are plenty of exceptions. The Witcher III, the Souls games, and Resident Evil 8 are the most recent that jump to mind. But for the most part I just want to have an encapsulated full experience and move on to the next one.<\/p>\n

Discussing releasing a broken game only to try to fix it later with patches… I have thoughts and few of them are positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in my day the whole game shipped on the disc or cart and it worked! I remember the first “DLC” I ever cared about. Halo 2’s expansion maps. I spent entire nights playing Halo 2 with my friend, his brother, and occasionally a third person. That’s right. I had 2 and sometimes 3 friends. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[640],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethanirl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60051"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60066,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60051\/revisions\/60066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}