I don't know that DLC for story-focused games can ever fully work to the game's advantage. Certain games work because everything was designed around everything else. We don't often talk about cohesion in games, but it's important. Have you ever thought to yourself that not everything in a game felt like it went with everything else? As if the level design team did their thing, while the art guys did their thing, and the guys that do the shooting mechanics did their thing, and so on? Sometimes things just don't come together, and the game suffers for it. If you ever get that "this just doesn't feel right" vibe from a game, that lack of cohesion is often the reason why.
Part of what makes games like Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain so awesome is that clear effort went into making every element complement the whole. Isolating a single element in a game so reliant on context is a recipe for mediocrity. Multiplayer maps in a shooter, new modes in an action game--things like that work when they are bolted on, if done well. But consider Heavy Rain. It's so reliant on the organic motion of the plot, the relationships that develop, the way multiple story thread wrap around each other. Mass Effect 2's characters get a chance to grow over the course of a 30-hour adventure, not just in their introductory and loyalty quests, but through dialogue during your downtime. In both games, the pace, the plot, the gameplay--they all work together as a whole experience.
Take any single aspect out of context, and suddenly it isn't special. In fact, it might seem a little mundane. You've upset the equilibrium that the game as a whole possessed. A good architect would never just bolt on a new second-floor bedroom sticking from the side of a house if someone needed more space. That would look ridiculous. But that's what a lot of DLC feels like. You take a beautiful thing, and then you staple something to it and mess up the very structure.
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