DLC WTF - Remastered Edition

A couple of years ago I wrote about the prices of DLC, in DLC WTF. Put simply, I couldn't understand why Activision was making £60 million from each Call of Duty Ghosts multiplayer map, despite their annual profits going down as a result -- yet Take Two Interactive were releasing GTA V Online content for free and making a mint.

With various debacles going on all over the place, I decided to dip back into the subject. After all, some of you may have read that and asked “there’s been more than one debacle?” Indeed there has, dear reader. Funnily enough, happening in close proximity to one another...

The most recent one that has people riled up is the DLC for ARK: Survival Evolved, titled Scorched Earth. The game is still in Early Access and reportedly has bugs and missing features that mark it as far from release. The developers decided it was a great idea to create an entirely new area, with new creatures and items, and release it to compliment the main game. The base game is £22.99 and Scorched Earth is £14.99, which is cheaper than getting up to date on World of Warcraft. Of course, Blizzard have actually released them out of beta...

The game was due for full release in June 2016, but one of the developer's old employers decided that the work was done in contradiction to a non-compete which he signed. It was settled out of court for $40 million. This is no small amount (unless you release a Call of Duty multiplayer map…), so it would appear that Scorched Earth has been developed to help pay off the millions.

So, at least they have visible costs associated with the DLC which is admittedly a large area, and apparently actually finished. Square Enix don’t have the same luxury of having an excuse. Their folly was releasing single-use DLC for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided -- one weapon pack for one save file is £3.99. This is something that the Tales series has been doing since the Xbox 360 though. And, at least, they aren’t (yet) charging for costume changes.

Unlike the hundreds of pounds worth of digital fabric that Ninja Team have pumped out for Dead or Alive 5: Last Round. From the low price of £14.99 you can have a full set of specifically themed costumes -- better yet, go whole hog and buy a season pass. They’ve made it even easier by releasing five of them (only on consoles) with each costing £73.99. Yes, yes that is over £350 for all of the different outfits in the game. So far.

It kinda puts into perspective the DLC (which isn’t releasing in Europe) for Gal*Gun: Double Peace, which costs $90 and lets you see through the girls’ clothing. Or the one for Hadean Lands that is literally just a PDF priced at £26.99.

One game that has had something of an ongoing DLC complaint is Fallout 4. Bethesda announced that its season pass would be increasing in price by £15, six months after the game came out. This was coincidentally announced when they released the news of what some of the DLC would be. With the release of Nuka-World, the final DLC for Fallout 4, you only have to look at Metacritic to see that the critic scores have been middling at best, and only the first couple of DLC have better than Mixed Steam user reviews -- hardly an inspiring sight to behold. I was certainly disappointed that there were only two new story additions, compared to the four from each of the past two games.

Just Cause 3 also had an iffy season pass -- its Air, Land & Sea Expansion Pass recently wrapped up and received a similar reception. In fact the Bavarium Sea Heist DLC only has a single critic review -- and it’s the one I wrote myself, with the one before that only having two critic reviews! In all, it wasn’t a great season pass, and it appears that the majority of critics didn’t see it as worth their time from the content of the first part.

Sometimes, however, the controversy doesn’t relate to the content of the DLC. Batman Arkham Knight was released pretty much broken on PC -- so much so that they pulled it from sale on Steam as well as other sites. It spent something like eight months being seemingly completely remade before it was released back on sale, which meant that whichever team was working on the season pass content was otherwise busy. The game and season pass both went back on sale, not that it was too well received with complaints of not being worth the money, or having too many skins and not enough long story missions.

With all of these, you may wonder why people still buy DLC -- it’s going to be okay at best, and a joke at worst. Special editions that don’t come with the actual game are another topic I could talk about for a few paragraphs, showing that it’s not always the downloadable content that you have to watch out for, and I haven’t even mentioned microtransactions.

No doubt there will be another DLC article in my future, but don’t worry I won’t make you preorder it...