@AzulCrescent I miss back when there weren't really DLCs but instead you got expansion packs. Because they were so separated they had to be basically a whole game in themselves. You spent 1/4th the cost of the game and got maybe 1/2th of the content of the game new with extras that carried over into other things.
But on the subject of DLCs, remember Dragon Age? I always felt like that was the peak of the current system. At that moment they really slammed it home how bad it had gotten. You step out after this epic prologue and you're ready to try to save the world, then suddenly some random dude runs up, demands you save his family because your parents owed him or something, but first you have to pay real money, so here's a clickable link.
Like they just gave up all pretense.
@nazokiyoubinbou @AzulCrescent BF1942 and BF2 expansion packs were cool, it was more of the same, but with twist. 1942 got jetpacks, helicopters and cruise missiles. 2 got night battles and vehicular combat focused maps.
@squarenessie @AzulCrescent For me the big stuff is things like RPGs. Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion, etc. They added on whole other campaigns or continued story lines or etc while also adding in other content that carried over even into the base game.
Now DLC for most games is a new outfit for a character (useless cosmetics) or a box of healing items (pay to cheat.) *Sigh*
@nazokiyoubinbou @squarenessie @AzulCrescent Oblivion is funny because it's both an example of great dlc (Shivering Isles) and terrible dlc (horse armour)
@kodymo @squarenessie @AzulCrescent The horse armor DLC was pretty famous. It's actually the first game I ever personally knew of that had the examples of really obvious money-grabbing DLC.
However, Shivering Isles is an expansion.
I realize the differentiation may seem subtle. In a way they're the same thing except where you can buy physical copies of expansion discs to add on to the base game (Neverwinter Nights did this for instance.) I guess the only *true* difference is of scale, but then, regardless, Shivering Isles is officially billed by Bethesda and the community as an expansion pack, not as mere DLC.
@nazokiyoubinbou @squarenessie @AzulCrescent imo there's no clear difference between expansion pack and dlc, dlc is just the modern name for it. Digital distribution methods have changed what's feasible to sell so publishers can sell many smaller "expansions".
Few people would go out and buy 50 dlcs individually if they had to buy them as a disk from a shop
@kodymo @squarenessie @AzulCrescent You're kind of erasing a pretty important distinction then.
Fine. I'm talking about the DLC that is bigger than the other DLC, not the DLC that is smaller than the other DLC.
But seriously, Oblivion is actually a good example because Bethesda and the community both call the horse armor DLC DLC and Shivering Ilse an expansion and the differentiation between the two is pretty clear and distinct.
@nazokiyoubinbou @squarenessie @AzulCrescent yes, if you distinguish between horse armor and Shivering Isles it's a pretty distinct difference.
Taking another Bethesda game, Fallout 4, as an example, it gets a lot more murky. Far Harbor and Nuka World are definetely expansions but what about the Automatron DLC that only has a short-ish questline and robot building mechanics. Going further, there's the vault building DLC with a quest and, well, a vault you can build yourself
@nazokiyoubinbou @squarenessie @AzulCrescent imo this is a "when do grains of sand become a pile" kind of problem
@kodymo @squarenessie @AzulCrescent Perhaps so, but when a grain of sand leaves your hand virtually empty while a pile requires multiple bags to carry or you'll break your back, I think it's important to differentiate between the two.