#core experience

Business News Bundle #10

  Americans May Start To Attack German Luxury Sector Dominance At Detroit Auto Show Foreign manufacturers, mainly German, may have dominated the luxury sector for years, but finally Americans are cranking up competitive automobiles…  the U.S. domestic manufacturers have built a firm base from which to launch an attack on the premium sector, but it will take time and money. – Hans-Werner…

First off if you haven't read it yet, this is a response to Bruce's morning post on DLC, go read it.

Allright let me get this straight here.  There's a lot of things I hate about video games and there's a lot of things that I love.  One of those things that I absolutely hate is Downloadable Content, a.k.a DLC.  I understand the positive uses of DLC to help renew interest in a game, but there's a difference between putting out DLC to keep sales up a little longer...from withholding content from a consumer.  I also understand that game companies run on a tight schedule and don't always have the time to get everything out before release dates a lot, but that is no reason to charge for content that couldn't be included.  If it comes down to it I would rather a company scrap their whole DLC project and instead focus on making the core experience of the game better.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="286" caption="How many of these came out again? 3?"][/caption]

Now if DLC for a game is made from start to finish entirely after the project is complete and they put some people from the original project back on to keep producing content, I am perfectly fine with that.  This technically can be viewed as a separate game/purchase since all of it's contents were produced after the main release.  But it seems that more and more developers have come up with the strategy of : Let's withhold this from the game and just make some money from it later.  And Bruce is right, if we as consumers don't like this scheme, you have to stop injecting it with your money and xbox live points.

People Can Fly, the developer behind Bulletstorm, in my opinion is extremely brazen for announcing their DLC ON launch day.  Seriously?  Obviously content was withheld from the game for the sole purpose of a greater revenue increase.  I would like to know for sure if they had already finished the maps they are going to put out later or if they're actually working on them right now.  I'd like to think they're working away, but that's the hopeful side in me coming out.

I had my last straw with DLC when Ubisoft decided to release two expansion packs for Assassins Creed: 2.  While I enjoyed AC2 immensely, what disturbed me was that some certain areas of the city were for some reason inaccessible.  When I finished the game, two main memories were vacant on the chapter select screen.  Although the game was a decent length it did feel a little bit short.  DLC was released three months later that occupied both of those empty memory spaces.  While I can't find the exact quote, I did read a statement from the development team upon release of the DLC that said the reason why those two memories were not included was because they felt it made the game too long.  If anything, the DLC for BOTH of them only took me about two hours to do. Two hours is not a lot when comparing it to a near 15 hour long game.  So basically content was pulled directly from the game just to be thrown out later.  Mind you, in these chapters important characters and mechanics were introduced, many of them carrying over to Assassins Creed: Brother Hood, such as Leonardo's Flying Machine.  There's no reason to pull completed content from a game unless it's pointless or not fun, and neither of those things applied to the the levels that were  released in the DLC.

I seriously doubt that this post will cause worldwide DLC-cide, so it looks like I'll just have to sit on the side as everyone plays their new maps.