It's almost 4:00am EST (will probably be well after that by the time I finish even this "little" comment), so I'm going to (try and fail to) keep this brief. May come back to it and rant some more later.
The way I see it, in the old days, expansion packs used to be unexpected, and welcome, additions to an already good, or even great, but most importantly complete game. A year or three after you'd already played the game to completion and found everything, you'd be all like, "Oh, wow, <Game> is getting an expansion pack? Holy shit, that's awesome." Or, at least, I used to be that way, anyway.
Nowadays, though, it's like "<Game> hasn't even been released yet, and they've already announced the DLC/season pass/expansion packs? It's like they want to let people know that they're explicitly chopping shit out of their game to sell later (or maybe not even 'later,' in more and more cases, but on the same day as <Game> itself is going to release)." The smaller the distance in time between the release of the game and the announcement of major DLC for the game, the less excited I am for said DLC and, in retrospect, for the game itself, and especially if said announcement comes before the release of the game, and the farther before the release of the game, the farther my interest in said game plummets.
It's why I have not bought a single new game, on initial launch, at "full base-game price" since the original, "base-game" version of Skyrim back in November 2011. That is the very last game I ever bought at full price on its initial launch date. And after that, apparently, I ended up re-buying the whole game on Steam in July 2013, in addition to the Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn DLC/expansion packs, for the total, combined price of, Steam tells me, $24.61 USD, which was less than half of what I would have paid for the original base game, just by itself, just a year and a half or so before that. (I can't recall if PC Skyrim was $49.99 or $59.99 on initial release, but either way, $24.61 is still less than half of even the lower $49.99 amount.) And I remember that Dawnguard had already been announced in May 2012 or such, which was six months after the game was released, and then it came out like three months after that for PC (even earlier for Xbox360, I think) and even that was pushing it as far as acceptable lapse of time between game release and first DLC/expansion announcement, at least as far as I am concerned. I remember explicitly thinking (as I said in the above linked comment) something along the lines of "Hmm, well, I know I've already played a fairly good ways into the game so far, but I might as well just stop now and then wait for the DLC to all be released, since they already said that at least two more would be coming after the first one, and just start a new game then, when it is actually, finally a full, complete game."
...and then, to this day, after I played maybe roughly halfway through the game on initial release (I know that I'd completed Whiterun, Riften, Windhelm and Winterhold, and most of the sidequest shit in between, on the east side of the world map, and had been heading toward the western cities when I stopped), when I later got all the DLC stuff, the number of times that I've actually bothered to install the game and try to get back into it can be counted on one hand with fingers left over, and I rarely even make it to the first big town (Whiterun) and the first dragon battle before I just let it lapse yet again. I haven't touched any of the DLC content at all, even though I aborted my initial playthrough specifically to wait for said DLC, and, on the whole, just never really got back into it ever again, at least so far. Steam says I've played the Special Edition of Skyrim (which was made available for free to already-existing owners, so I'll give them that much credit, for what that's worth) for a grand total of 15 hours, which, in a game like Skyrim, is barely scratching the surface. Maybe someday, I'll go back and give it a real chance, but...
So, yeah, in this one example of Skyrim, at least for me, the DLC (and, more specifically, the early announcement of the DLC) actively harmed my experience with the game. If I don't ever give it a full playthrough, I would even go so far as to say that it completely ruined my experience with the game. If I hadn't heard within just a few months after the game was released that DLC was already on the way (and, let's be real, this was already well into the age where such DLC was expected for such a game, so I'd already known that something would be coming, even before they officially announced Dawnguard), I probably would have finished my first playthrough and been completely satisfied with the game, but... that is not what happened, thanks to DLC and greed of developers/publishers and my own increasing apathy for the modern video game industry and its bullshit in general. And that experience, again, along with the shitty DLCshenanigans of Batman: Arkham City, is why I finally and fully implemented and self-enforced that policy by which I've stuck, to this day, with so far not a single exception having been even remotely considered, much less made.
Now that this "short" rant is complete, for now, I'm going to bed. >_>; AlmostWell after 5:00am now... >_>;;
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-05-12 09:15 am (UTC)The way I see it, in the old days, expansion packs used to be unexpected, and welcome, additions to an already good, or even great, but most importantly complete game. A year or three after you'd already played the game to completion and found everything, you'd be all like, "Oh, wow, <Game> is getting an expansion pack? Holy shit, that's awesome." Or, at least, I used to be that way, anyway.
Nowadays, though, it's like "<Game> hasn't even been released yet, and they've already announced the DLC/season pass/expansion packs? It's like they want to let people know that they're explicitly chopping shit out of their game to sell later (or maybe not even 'later,' in more and more cases, but on the same day as <Game> itself is going to release)." The smaller the distance in time between the release of the game and the announcement of major DLC for the game, the less excited I am for said DLC and, in retrospect, for the game itself, and especially if said announcement comes before the release of the game, and the farther before the release of the game, the farther my interest in said game plummets.
It's why I have not bought a single new game, on initial launch, at "full base-game price" since the original, "base-game" version of Skyrim back in November 2011. That is the very last game I ever bought at full price on its initial launch date. And after that, apparently, I ended up re-buying the whole game on Steam in July 2013, in addition to the Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn DLC/expansion packs, for the total, combined price of, Steam tells me, $24.61 USD, which was less than half of what I would have paid for the original base game, just by itself, just a year and a half or so before that. (I can't recall if PC Skyrim was $49.99 or $59.99 on initial release, but either way, $24.61 is still less than half of even the lower $49.99 amount.) And I remember that Dawnguard had already been announced in May 2012 or such, which was six months after the game was released, and then it came out like three months after that for PC (even earlier for Xbox360, I think) and even that was pushing it as far as acceptable lapse of time between game release and first DLC/expansion announcement, at least as far as I am concerned. I remember explicitly thinking (as I said in the above linked comment) something along the lines of "Hmm, well, I know I've already played a fairly good ways into the game so far, but I might as well just stop now and then wait for the DLC to all be released, since they already said that at least two more would be coming after the first one, and just start a new game then, when it is actually, finally a full, complete game."
...and then, to this day, after I played maybe roughly halfway through the game on initial release (I know that I'd completed Whiterun, Riften, Windhelm and Winterhold, and most of the sidequest shit in between, on the east side of the world map, and had been heading toward the western cities when I stopped), when I later got all the DLC stuff, the number of times that I've actually bothered to install the game and try to get back into it can be counted on one hand with fingers left over, and I rarely even make it to the first big town (Whiterun) and the first dragon battle before I just let it lapse yet again. I haven't touched any of the DLC content at all, even though I aborted my initial playthrough specifically to wait for said DLC, and, on the whole, just never really got back into it ever again, at least so far. Steam says I've played the Special Edition of Skyrim (which was made available for free to already-existing owners, so I'll give them that much credit, for what that's worth) for a grand total of 15 hours, which, in a game like Skyrim, is barely scratching the surface. Maybe someday, I'll go back and give it a real chance, but...
So, yeah, in this one example of Skyrim, at least for me, the DLC (and, more specifically, the early announcement of the DLC) actively harmed my experience with the game. If I don't ever give it a full playthrough, I would even go so far as to say that it completely ruined my experience with the game. If I hadn't heard within just a few months after the game was released that DLC was already on the way (and, let's be real, this was already well into the age where such DLC was expected for such a game, so I'd already known that something would be coming, even before they officially announced Dawnguard), I probably would have finished my first playthrough and been completely satisfied with the game, but... that is not what happened, thanks to DLC and greed of developers/publishers and my own increasing apathy for the modern video game industry and its bullshit in general. And that experience, again, along with the shitty DLC shenanigans of Batman: Arkham City, is why I finally and fully implemented and self-enforced that policy by which I've stuck, to this day, with so far not a single exception having been even remotely considered, much less made.
Now that this "short" rant is complete, for now, I'm going to bed. >_>;
AlmostWell after 5:00am now... >_>;;