The whole downloadable content thing is a touchy subject, in practice it should be good. Think about it, you get more content for a game you already love but most fans have been finding stuff like ‘pre-order DLC’ to be more of a rip off due to forcing users to investing in a game that hasn’t been reviewed or that we don’t know the quality of the title.
SEGA’s Creative Assembly announced that the Chaos race, a important fraction in the Warhammer universe, would only be unlocked if users pre-ordered their Total War: Warhammer video game. This obviously pissed off fans, since most Total War fans trusted Creative Assembly back in 2013 when Total War: Rome 2 (which had similar pre-order deals) smashed pre-order records; sadly the game had a bad launch. Creative Assembly did the same with Total War: Attila and Alien: Isolation, offering big pre-order exclusives that many fans felt should have just been part of the base package.
In a interview with Eurogamer, Game Designer for Total War: Warhammer Rich Aldridge tries to explain why they decided to put Chaos as a pre-order race. According to them if they didn’t get it out as pre-order content, they would have to charge later on as DLC. As much as I dislike pre-order DLC, it isn’t as bad now considering that Steam offers refunds on pre-orders if you dislike the game. What really ticks me off is all the DLC they are planning after the release. Is it too hard to buy a complete game for $60 dollars and not get nickel and dimed at every turn?
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Wow that dislike bar is crazy.
Back in the day if you bought a game, it was a complete experience. Now you buy a game with forcibly cut content to make way for DLC and, frustratingly, the great majority of people doesn’t give a rat’s ass about it. Here you see the reaction of the vocal minority, but I ASSURE you at least 70% of them pre-ordered anyway and will pay for more DLCs.
You always see violent reactions to greedy DLC (as if theres non-greedy DLC these days…) but the practice doesn’t seem to be going away, in fact it’s only getting worse, meaning there’s enough suckers buying into the “invest in games you like” scam every time. Truth is that there’s just far too many stupid people that don’t see the bigger picture and are fine with being ripped off, most commonly using the argument that “we should be able to support games we like and DLC/microtransactions are a good way”, which I can’t even begin to describe how utterly moronic this is, especially when the game has a price tag to begin with.
Case in point: 3 thousand likes on that example shown in the post. At least 3 thousand people are, presumably, fine with being ripped off.
Well, to be fair, devs and companies who aren’t in the business of ripping off customers put DLC as an addition to their game to increase longevity. A lot of games nowadays don’t support modding (Bethesda game being some of the big ones), so DLC is alright provided it’s not complete BS.
I’ve always been on the fence about pre-order DLC, though.
For expanding content post release, I feel that old school larger scale expansion packs would have been much better than the current DLC practices…