Alright, I want anyone 18+ to picture this (or anyone who is versed in gaming history):

You have had Diablo II for a month or so and have pretty much done everything there is to do. You are starting to get bored when all of a sudden Blizzard announces a new expansion. Not only adding in a new act complete with 6 quests, new enemies, and new areas to explore, but also new characters, and improvements to the old characters. The expansion is going to cost around ____ (insert price here cause I don't remember thefactory cost), but you knew the money would well spent because the expansions in that day and time were of quality (except for Hellfire, we will forget all about that one though).

Someone may ask me now, "What are you trying to prove?" To which I would respond, "I am trying to show that back then when a game was extended through an 'expansion' you knew it would be quality and great."

What has started me on this rant, well it is a simple one: Dragon Age: Origins (One of the many games I am expecting, but will not be the only game I pick on here). A little while back BioWare announced on Day 1 DA:O was going to get DLC in the form of a new base, a new party member, and new armor. My response was as such, "WTF!" No, seriously, W... T... F!!! Even worse, they are charging for each one. I can understand the new area, and maybe the new sidekick cause he adds in some more dialogue and a side story, BUT THE ARMOR?! C'mon BioWare, have some decency and do what every other developer does, either wait 3 months to release the packs or package it all in a Super Limited You Must Have Definitive Collector's Edition (Yes I know they are doing that anyways, but it is not "exclusive" like most normal greedy game developers do with their games).

Oh wait, I did promise you BioWare was not going to be the only company with DLC I was going to pick on. Yes, another company recently got into the DLC spotlight, and their name be Gearbox Software. They recently announced (BEFORE the game's release) the first DLC, and an approx. release window, complete with pricing and what the theme is going to be (zombies). I can kind of understand this one, because maybe it was an idea they just thought of or were developing but did not have time to include it in the base package (which is what I am going to start calling the "vanilla" games now, because vanilla makes me crave Baskin Robbins for some reason). But to announce it before hand is like saying, "Wait, hold on to that $9 you were going to use to buy all that fast food or that 12 pack of soda, because we are releasing something new down the road." Once again, have some decency and wait a couple weeks after release to announce the DLC.

The other side of this is crap DLC. I am once again going to return to BioWare, but this time I will pick on their sci-fi epic Mass Effect (which I enjoy). For a game so great, with BioWare promising DLC approx every 3 months, all we get is one side quest (free to PC owners I might add) and a sub-standard arena (which seems to be the norm for all RPGs, because the normal enemies are paper to my blade or gun or whatever and I demand a confined space in which I fight an all-mighty dwarf with an exceedingly rare hammer and a below normal IQ, and all of this is wrapped around little to no story). Basically, if you are going to promise us something, at least deliver it, and make it semi-quality, because then I can trust you to deliver quality add-ons in the future.

Now with so many gripes about DLC, I always want to view the other side, see the positives of these things. DLC does seem cheaper at the time than shelling out $20-$60 for an expansion that might only have one feature that redeems it. So instead of buying a package with 8 crappy things and one good thing, the developer instead splits that all up so you can just skip to the one great thing and not have to waste money on the rest. DLC also gives the developers a chance to put in features that they either did not have time to implement normally (see the Borderlands paragraph) or about 2 weeks down the road thought, "You know what would have been awesome, if we could have implemented an arena into the game." Sorry, I just had to bring that up. One last plus is that while I do not like DLC on PC that much, it fits perfectly on console where you might not want to shell out $30-60 for an expansion disk or dl that takes up WAY too much space (also on PC about WAY too much space), but would spend $9 on that new area. Also, DLC knocks out the part where you have to keep track of that extra disk (I will not tell you how many times I have had to respend money to buy an expansion disk that either got damaged [Not by me, but by someone borrowing the disk] or lost).

Now there might be one person who might ask, "What are your thoughts on what developers should do then?" Well, my thoughts are this: Go back to decent expansions (and not the crap that was Red Alert 3: Uprising). Seriously, back in the day it was almost always expected that 2 months after release of an RTS, an expansion would be announced adding in new units, new powers, new campaigns, and new multiplayer maps. It was also always expected for many other genres (RPG, FPS,etc). Seriously, I would rather pay $30-60 on a product I could trust to add in a huge amount of new features rather than $9 on content were I have no idea how good it is or most of the fixes or features(take for example Fallout 3, where while some people enjoyed Point Lookout and Broken Steel because it catered to the game strengths, others enjoyed Operation Anchorage and Mothership Zeta because of the new weapons and that they got to shoot stuff without having to deal with story).

Since this is my first blog, I want to know your opinions on it: How can I improve, what was good, what was bad, etc. Who knows, I might make this a regular thing (griping about things that are becoming increasingly more common and sometimes taken to extremes in game development).