It was 2001, in case you’re wondering.

Nobody really does expansion packs any more. The expansion pack has always been a decidedly PC phenomenon, and ever since the next-gen console hordes slashed and burned their way onto the digital market the concept of expansion packs has pretty much withered on the vine. If you buy some extra content for a game these days, there’s a pretty good chance it will look something like this

An extreme example. There are some sterling efforts tarred with the DLC brush out there which are well worth the money (Diggle Gods for Dungeons of Dredmor, Rise of the Samurai for Shogun 2, Old World Blues for New Vegas) but on the whole the rise of DLC means paying a small amount of money for a smaller amount of content – a new skin, say, or perhaps some new items or weapons. Easy for the developer to create, easy for the publisher to monetise, and full-blown expansion packs have fallen by the wayside ever since this concept of selling improvements to a game piecemeal became technologically feasible.

I think this is kind of a shame. I don’t necessarily look back on expansion packs as being any better, qualitatively, than DLC – they may have offered a more full-fat experience but they counted more than their fair share of lazy, shallow moneygrabbers amongst their number (Quake mission packs I’m looking at you) – but I do think they offered something that DLC can’t hope to replicate: the ability to roll out a detailed and comprehensive update to a game to everyone who is still interested in playing the thing. The big problem with DLC (particularly for multiplayer games) is that it fragments the playerbase. A developer has to cater for every combination of DLC out there, from the miser who refuses to buy any (hi Jim) to the obsessive who absolutely has to own every piece of content associated with a game (hi… well, me I guess). This is impossible. Somebody ends up being locked out of future updates or features, and this is usually the person who only gave them enough money for the base version of the game.

The reason this is more than a little bit insidious is that high-speed internet has brought us a development paradigm of “release broken, patch to working state”. Now more than ever it’s very much the case that the game you shell out your hard-earned cash for isn’t the final product. You’ll have to wait another year or two while this iterative patching process happens and the game is gradually shaped and polished based on developer experience and player feedback. Sometimes this is the natural evolution of a game – WoW is almost completely unrecognisable compared to what it was eight years ago – but more often it’s because the game was pushed out the door early to coincide with a publisher-dictated release date or marketing window. And my problem here is that while the extra polish is desirable in many cases and necessary in all of them, it can’t be done properly when everybody is running different versions of the game. It simply can’t. It’s a logistical nightmare. Somebody is going to get left behind, and this simple fact makes it less likely that developers will make the serious changes to their game that might be necessary.

What got me on to thinking about this was – fnarr – Diablo 3. Nobody could possibly call Diablo 3 rushed or broken, but it does have some serious balance issues at the higher difficulties. That’s fine. Nobody was expecting Blizzard to get things 100% right at the first attempt, and so they’ll have to refine their game to improve the more vestigial components (crafting) and fix the difficulty of the later Hell levels and the entirety of Inferno so that there are less one-shot player deaths. But the thing here is, Blizzard is one of the few developers left who still uses the expansion pack paradigm, and so they can do this far more easily than if they doled out these improvements piecemeal as DLC. Any vital mechanical changes that ensure the game plays more smoothly can be patched in, while the more drastic additions that might require altering the basic fabric of the game can be saved for an expansion pack to ensure a common base for development and make sure everyone’s on the same page.

If you want some concrete proof as to why this method is a good idea, you need look no further than Diablo’s predecessor, Diablo 2. It’s difficult to recall given the ten-year time gap, but on release Diablo 2 was just as unbalanced – if not more so – than Diablo 3 is now. It took two or three years of patching punctuated by the release of the Lord of Destruction expansion to mould it into its current state of excellence. LoD gave Blizzard the excuse to make fundamental changes to the game that weren’t necessary, strictly speaking, but which improved the playing experience immeasurably and which could be delivered to everyone at once.

What I’m trying to say here is that the expansion pack provides a medium for the really revolutionary stuff – the things that only occurred to you after you’d finished the game, or which seem like a really good idea now that you’ve seen how players react to it – that simply isn’t possible with DLC. DLC is addons and shiny gewgaws, not fundamental alterations to the game structure, and that’s because they need to sell DLC to everyone. It can’t be a comprehensive improvement; the scale simply isn’t big enough. Multiple pieces of DLC isn’t a solution, either; DLC can’t require other DLC in order to function, because that would piss people off in addition to reducing the potential market for it.

So what are we left with now that the expansion pack seems to have been supplanted by DLC? What do we have when developers don’t need to sell you a CD in order to give you more than a couple of hundred megabytes of patching? It’s not pleasant. Anyone remember Elemental? The first one was so bad that they’re having to make it again. I’m not sure an expansion pack would have particularly worked in that case because the stigma attached to it was so great, but it certainly would have been more elegant than having to remake the entire game. Napoleon was basically an expansion pack for Empire that fixed all the problems which the CA had the cheek to sell as a full-price game. Even Blizzard are more about standalone episodes these days than they are iterating a single product, and it’s only the upcoming release of Gods and Kings for a game which needs it (Civ V) which provides a single dying ray of light. The expansion pack is dead, and the DLC maggots infesting its corpse are not an acceptable substitute. Golden age ended.

The post The Golden Age Of The Expansion Pack. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.