» Fri Jul 16, 2010 2:56 pm
Personally, I'm really hating the direction DLC seems to be taking games. I know it makes a boatload of money for everyone involved, but it has some serious issues.
First off, developers used to give out FREE content expanding updates to their game. Often times it wasn't much, but still enough to feel as though the developers were actually giving a care. If they put enough work into something, they would release it as an "expansion pack", which would be priced lower than a full retail game, but without the expectation of earth-shattering originality. I was fine with this model, and Bethesda themselves used to follow it back in those Morrowind days, where you could get all kinds of cool addons for free, but got charged for the big expansion packs. Now, even the slightest thing seems to cost money, and many games take this to ridiculous extremes. Bethesda seems to ride a line down the middle, definitely not putting too many important features behind a paywall, like Dragon Age, but they've also ceased giving out any more free content. Overall though, I'd rather have one big, well polished update than 5 half-assed updates that add up to around the same amount of play time.
Another major point for me, is that DLC increasingly tends to break the game world it's built upon. What's the point of scavenging the vast wasteland in the hopes of finding some powerful arms, when this cheesy four hour DLC will provide you with some of the best stuff in the game? I wish that DLC increasingly sold itself though increasing gameplay and a compelling seamless meshing with the original game world instead of appealing to collectors. Take Diablo II's expansion, for example. It made you actually want to replay the original game to take advantage off all the new features it had, in addition to the new content to play through. FO3's feels disjointed and amputated by comparison. The 5 mix and match mini-expansions seem to exist in 5 separate vacuums that are easily depleted. With the exception of raising the level cap, and the obvious ability to continue playing after the ending, I can't think of any other way they changed game mechanics. Furthermore, by overpowering your character, it actually makes the rest of the main game too easy, and thus hurts replayability. Features like FNV's hardcoe mode, weapon modding, and vastly increased crafting recipes would have been the perfect kinds of things to add through expansion packs to FO3 - something that doesn't just add new inventory in the end, but actually changes the way you play the game.
Basically, after playing F03's DLC, I have low expectations for New Vegas'. Some of FO3's was good, but some was just terrible. I personally enjoyed Point Lookout the most. None of it really felt like it meshed well with the main game, with the possible exception of Broken Steel. For a new game that already feels like a lower quality expansion, I can't help but wonder what the expansion of an expansion would be like.