Post
by Cold Skin » Tue Oct 01, 2013 5:02 am
DLC is a great thing, but like any great thing, it can be used in "evil" ways.
But it's always existed, and it should be mandatory to keep adding things to your game once released. There's always ways to expand on things and make them better, so they should (transform Final Fantasy VII Advent Children into Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete for example, although in this case it is a re-released movie, but it shows what something can become once you've re-worked the points that the audience didn't like).
It has always existed, but before it was either "buy the whole game again full price and maybe another platform altogether or you won't have the extra parts of the story", or "you don't live in Japan? You don't get the extra content that maximizes the experience".
For the first case, see the Resident Evil series: you had to buy the new version to get it all, and for those who had Resident Evil 4 on Gamecube, you were screwed unless buying a PS2 and the same game full price again to have the new story content. If DLCs had existed back then...
For the second case, see the Kingdom Hearts series: until a few weeks ago, you wanted the Final Mixes with all the extra content maximizing the story and adventure? You just had to have the Japanese version cause no one else would get it. If DLCs had existed back then...
Back then, I would have gladly paid just a bunch of euros to get hours of additionnal content both story-wise and gameplay-wise. But you had to buy the whole game again or simply would not have access to it at all just because you were in the wrong country.
Now with DLCs, we can choose what extra work we are interested in and ready to pay for at a minimal price and just leave what's uninteresting. I'm pretty fond of that.
I don't agree with the pre-order DLCs thing because it was clearly already developped and could have been implemented on the disc data, so it is really something that's been "taken out" of the game to get extra money from us.
But for any element that was not ready at the time of the release and is extra post-release work by the developers that we're free to buy if we want to, I'm all for it. Expending on a work should be mandatory, cause a work is NEVER finished until you had feedback from reviews/customers and know what they liked and didn't like and what was possibly missing. Just like when you write an essay or anything: you can re-read your own writing as many times as you want, you'll never be able to get it 100% right until someone who was completely external to the process from the start has told you what felt good or not. You just need an external eye to have the whole view of how to improve on your work, and that's true for games too.
Plus, it happens to everyone that after you did something, you think "damn, I should have done that instead, that would have been even better" or "damn, I should have added that". And with DLCs, you can actually use those afterthoughts to correct/add what you want and make it even better, so why waste that opportunity?
