Boris Mann’s Personal Blog

Mar 2011

On pre-launch DLS in Dragon Age II: "The mistake is the appearance of greed, of swindling your initial customer. "

The mistake is the appearance of greed, of swindling your initial customer. When additional content came out a few months after the release it at least gave the impression that the developers had just kept on making the game after it was finished out of sheer momentum. Revealing that entire chunks of plot, quests, characters and abilities are being deliberately designed in order to not include them in the game just seems like a “fuck you” to the customer. Before DLC was an option, such content would either be artificially held back until it was really too late for people to have it for their first play of the game, or more likely just be contained in the game. Now it’s dangled in front of us, with no other message than, “Sure, you can spend only the £35/$50 on this game, but look what you won’t have.”

I have to agree with this. I am a HUGE fan of DLC, especially in the way it has been done recently in the DA series.

But, I want to see the core game come out with DLC over time that can extend the lifespan of the core game, rather than this nickel-and-diming.

UPDATE: I had a comment from someone within Bioware get to me that says, in essence "the linked article is mistaken about how downloadable content gets made". It would be great to hear from Bioware directly, via, you know, a comment or something :P The message from me is, regardless of how the DLC is made (or the planning & resourcing for it), from a marketing / user experience perspective, I feel like I'm being nickel and dimed.