I just finished playing the new downloadable content for last November’s Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, entitled “The Da Vinci Disappearance,” and while it was highly enjoyable, it got me wondering about the implications of DLC. It seems nearly every single game sees a DLC release these days, sometimes mere weeks after the game’s retail release or even on the same day. Like videogames in general, DLC seems like a struggle between the artistic vision of creative teams and executives’ desire for heavy pocketbooks. DLC is undoubtedly a money-grab—no one would deny that its primary purpose is to milk as much cash as possible out of consumers, but that doesn’t mean it entirely lacks integrity.
Really, it depends on the quality of the content. “The Da Vinci Disappearance” is a good example of DLC done right: it comes with ten new single player missions, two new hidden areas, four new characters for multiplayer plus a new map and two new game modes. At $9.99, that’s a pretty good deal, especially compared to the dismal DLC releases for Assassin’s Creed II. “The Battle of Forli” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” had pretty neat stories but were plagued by a host of bugs and excluding a silly springboard thing Ezio could use to jump farther, didn’t provide any kind of new gameplay. They also felt like cheap ploys for extra revenue, as they were the “damaged memory sequences” Desmond was unable to access in the retail game. “Da Vinci” is more of a one-off story that is cool but unessential to the overarching narrative of the Assassin’s Creed universe, and gives players a hint at what’s happening to Desmond following Brotherhood’s cliffhanger ending. Plus, they come with a truckload of new achievements, which in my opinion definitely raises the quality of a DLC release (though many critics think achievements are in and of themselves a cheap and useless ploy).
Then there’s the issue of map packs. On the one hand I like map packs because they give me a reason to jump back into a multiplayer experience I may have otherwise stopped playing. For example, it’s been at least a month since I played Halo: Reach, but I will likely be playing it for several more weeks once the “Defiant Map Pack” is released next Tuesday. Map packs keep a game fresh by adding more variety, and my only qualm with them really is pricing. Though Halo’s map packs always come with a host of wacky new achievements, you only get three maps for $9.99, roughly three bucks a map, and they’re often nothing more than reworked locations from the single player campaigns. Considering these things sell like hot cakes, I highly doubt Microsoft and Bungie wouldn’t be able to make a profit if they priced these maps at $5-7. A worse offender is Call of Duty, whose map packs cost $15 and offer no new modes or achievements. Though technically the cost per map is no more expensive than Halo’s as COD’s come with five instead of three, both Modern Warfare 2 map packs came with only three new maps and two maps from COD4, which felt like a huge rip-off at such a large price tag.
The problem is there’s really no reason for publishers to change their DLC business plans because consumers (like yours truly) buy them even if there isn’t great value. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard whiny tweens complaining about how crappy the new COD maps are on Xbox Live, even though they buy them every single time. If you’re so confident the game’s new maps will suck (which to be fair, they usually don’t), why do you keep shelling out for them? Activision could care less if you’re disappointed; all that matters is you buy the thing. Then there’s DLC like the recent “Severed” add-on for Dead Space 2, which pretends like it’s a bargain by only costing 560 Microsoft Points, but lasts less than two hours. My point is that as great as some of these downloadable add-ons are, they rarely seem to be fairly priced.
Halo and Call of Duty are hardly the worst offenders. My biggest pet peeve is “fake DLC,” content that requires a download to unlock but is actually pre-packaged with the game. Bioshock 2 gained some infamy for just such an offense: its first add-on was discovered to already be on the disc, as the actual download was nothing more than a few kilobytes. Splinter Cell: Conviction tried to dupe players into thinking they were getting free, weekly gun and gadget unlocks in the weeks immediately following its release, which was cool, except that all that content was already on the disc. As much as I like getting new weapons, it felt sort of disingenuous to label something as downloadable content when it’s technically anything but.
In general, I think it would be nice if more games offered small, free DLC packs. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood handled its DLC very well I thought—its first few downloadable releases were free, single maps and new game modes, and software updates also added alternate versions of existing maps. This made “The Da Vinci Disappearance” feel much more reasonable as it was the first time Ubisoft was actually asking its players to pay for new content.
DLC comes in all shapes and sizes, and the truth is, if you really want to avoid getting cheated out of your hard-earned dollars, you need to do a little research. There’s a lot of crap out there, i.e. Dead Space 1 & 2’s essentially useless gun and suit skins, which while often cool-looking, are ridiculously overpriced. Now that DLC has evolved into a viable source of revenue for publishers, there’s likely to be more great add-ons, and even more lackluster ones. Do your homework and you’ll avoid snoozefests like The Force Unleashed’s Tatooine level. Those guys couldn’t even make fighting Obi-Wan’s ghost exciting.
Post contributed by Alex Hilhorst. Questions for the author? Send an email to monco60@earthlink.net. Follow him on Twitter: @thehilblog.
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