Some of you might of heard that you will be dying in Gears of War: Judgement?a lot. Epic Games is taking off the kiddy gloves and is going to really challenge the player in their next game (at least allegedly), countering the current trend of making a game beatable by anyone and appealing to newcomers. I really like this decision, because I would argue games are at their best when you play them on hard; it brings out the best components of the game, and challenges you to use all of the game mechanics to your advantage. Indeed, lets use the earlier Gears of War games as an example of how the hard difficulty can bring a game to its best. As a summary of Gears of War?s mechanics, you mostly take cover behind objects and pop out to shoot enemies; you have to quickly move between cover to get advantageous positions without exposing yourself to a hail of bullets?at least this is how the game is ideally played. When the difficulty is forgiving, you can probably get away with staying out in the open for a while, taking a shotgun blast to the face and surviving, etc.; in other words, there is no incentive for using the game?s mechanics to their fullest, and you can easily pass over using some of the more subtle aspects of the game to help you survive. On hard (aka Insane in Gears of War), this is not the case; take cover or die, and anything less than your best will bring you to the restart screen. On this difficulty, there is much more incentive to use features like active reload to take enemies down more quickly, close emergence holes (enemy spawn points) to bring fights to an end quicker, actually try to put distance between you and shotguns, etc. To put my point more simply, you get to experience more of the game (out of the interest of helping you get through the game) when you play on hard, aspects which one might have missed when they did not need to use them on lower difficulties. As an aside, I have also found when you first play a game on normal and then go to hard, you get use to playing the game a certain way and as a result fail a lot more when you move on to a higher difficulty; playing the game on hard first requires you to develop better strategies off the bat and get familiar with all the mechanics. In conclusion, embrace the pwnage, bite the bullet, and buckle down on hard if you want to get the most out of your game.

I have recently read an opinion article in Game Informer which attempts to defend the practice of working on downloadable content before a game releases and selling it the day that it releases. I will attempt to summarize his argument.

First, he claims that DLC is now a permanent, expected part of video games, and that instead of trying to limit it we should instead strive to make it better; and the writer claims that day-one DLC indeed makes DLC better, because working on the DLC alongside the game gives developers plenty of time to create good-quality, substantial content which can be delivered sooner rather than later. Instead of slapping together insubstantial, piecemeal DLC items months after the game releases (he explicitly mentions Oblivion's horse armor in regard to this point), gamers can get substantial, good quality content right at, or soon after the game releases. Second, he address the issue of timing DLC, claiming that gamers have no entitlement to content beyond a complete game just because it was planned; he uses an interesting analogy of no one expecting to get french fries for free when they buy a hamburger, despite the fact that the fries are already finished and ready to serve. Furthermore, he claims that complaining about DLC release timing will not stop developers from working on DLC before launch, only make them delay releasing it to give fans the illusion that content is not being withheld from them. Finally, he claims that launch-day DLC actually makes games better, and uses the example of the DLC character Zaeed for Mass Effect 2. He says that his option to buy this character before playing the game let the character seem more natural to the story when he played Mass Effect 2 for the first time; if he could have only bought the DLC after he completed the game, then the character would have just felt incidental and tacked-on. He is claiming that day-one DLC lets that DLC give a better experience through its virtue of being better planned with the story during development and being experienced during the first playthrough instead of in later playthroughs. He does raise some valid points, which I will address first.

Towards his first point, it might indeed be beneficial for DLC to be started earlier; more time lets it be polished more and released sooner. However, a caveat is just because something is worked on for a longer period of time does not mean it will be better quality; there is no reason a developer could not make poor, insubstantial DLC to be released alongside the game--either intentionally or unintentionally--just because they started working on it earlier. As for his second point, I also agree that gamers are not entitled to content just because it was made alongside the game; if they get a complete game, then DLC just acts as a premium package which adds to the experience instead of takes it away, the addition of fries with that burger. I would also say he is correct in his prediction that gamers' complaints over DLC timing will just lead to them releasing it later while still working on it alongside the game. However, the writer did not fully explore the implications of day-one DLC adding to the experience: instead of adding to the experience, day-one DLC necessarily takes away some of the experience from people who not buy the DLC, leaving an incomplete game without DLC.

The writer claimed that by virtue of the DLC being made alongside the main game, it can be better integrated into the main game's story and gameplay; however, it is exactly this planning of integration which takes away day-one DLC's additive quality and turns it into a subtractive quality for people who only buy the base game. I will use the writer's example of Zaeed for Mass Effect 2 against him. Because Zaeed was made alongside the game, he has a better, more fluid story which gave him a better experience in the game; however, this means that the main game had to leave room for Zaeed to be added and better fit into the story, leaving an incomplete story for people who do not get the DLC. Day-one DLC is a case of not being able to have your cake and eat it too, since a character cannot be added into the story and also be perfectly tailored to fit the story in a game with a complete story; the character can only be fluidly inserted into the story if space was left for that character, which is to say if that story was intentionally left incomplete. This also applies for day-one DLC gameplay additions (weapons, abilities, etc.); these games were built around including those DLC additions later, which necessarily means content was left out of the game to "add" (complete) the game later. Day-one DLC made alongside the main game in order to be better integrated into the game later makes it necessary to leave space within the game (either in story or gameplay) to add it later, which in other words means content is withheld from people who buy the base game to be sold later. This is exactly why most gamers hate day-one DLC: it leaves a game incomplete, and we pay the same price for a lesser experience.

Day-one DLC is not always like this; indeed, if the DLC was made after the game finished, it is then additional content on top of a complete game. I think the ideal DLC is that which wholly adds to the game without taking anything away, adding experience instead of completing it. For example, the DLC for Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas usually meets this criteria; they add separate stories and gameplay on top of the main game which already had a complete story and system of gameplay. The Liberty City Stories for Grand Theft Auto IV did the same thing. While day-one DLC can have this additive quality, it just seems too easy for a developer or publisher to cut content out of the game to sell it later; furthermore, if they try to make the day-one DLC more integrated with the game, then they inevitably make an incomplete game to finish with DLC. Keep DLC additive, not necessarily subtractive.