Comments on: The Golden Age Of The Expansion Pack.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 31 May 2012 17:49:56 +0000

If that’s true then the Skyrim DLC should be the ideal. Unfortunately this is Bethesda, they of the infamous Horse Armour DLC and whose previous DLC “expansions” for Fallout all took place in isolated environments that were pretty much hermetically sealed off from the main game (and thus were entirely separate from it instead of augmenting and enhancing it). I’ll believe it when I see it.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 31 May 2012 17:47:35 +0000

Low production values, I guess. Do you need fancy graphics and animations? No. Voice acting? No. Writing? No. I guess that’s something I failed to consider when writing this piece; generating content for a modern game is, on the whole, a *very* complex business.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 31 May 2012 17:45:22 +0000

Yeah but I think Firaxis have kind of demonstrated that multiplayer isn’t a priority for them. Like, at all. ¬_¬

By: aosher

aosher — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:04:45 +0000

No seriously, strategy games still get expansion packs aplenty. Why is this genre immune to the decline in the format?

By: aosher

aosher — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:04:17 +0000

If we wanted to play Civ 4 multiplayer right now, we still wouldn’t be able to. The level of support the game got post-expansion was shocking.

By: jiiiiim

jiiiiim — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:03:29 +0000

Boooooo paying for things.

By: Masked Dave

Masked Dave — Thu, 31 May 2012 15:33:13 +0000

Skyrim DLC is supposedly going to be a large expansion pack style thing rather than bitty little things (they are leaving those to the mods).

The Enhanced Editions to the Witcher and Witcher 2 are sort of expansion packs meet patches, delivered for free. And in those cases (especially Witcher 1) they probably couldn’t afford to do it properly first time around.

Then we’ve got the new Batman DLC coming up which looks like it’s a proper expansion pack. A follow up story to the main game but still in the setting of the first, featuring the side kicks of the main protagonist and antagonist.

But then you seem to be mainly talking about multiplayer games, which there used to be a lot less of.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 31 May 2012 12:54:38 +0000

Point taken, but the TF2/WoW route is largely unavailable to developers who aren’t sitting on huge stacks of cash. If they want to make any large-scale changes to the gameplay past just tinkering under the bonnet here and there then I think an expansion pack is the only real way to go.

(Also I thought Civ IV got an appropriate amount of patching after BTS came out, but maybe that’s just me.)

By: Adam Benton

Adam Benton — Thu, 31 May 2012 12:38:44 +0000

But many developers stop supporting the basic game when the expansion pack is released. Civ IV was no longer supported after 1.6, when the expansion came out. Yet there were still bugs and stability fixes on later patches, they were just never applied backwards.

Whilst I get what you’re saying about drastically altering the gameplay an expansion pack isn’t needed for that. Just look at TF2, which is just as unrecognisable from its original form as WoW is yet they haven’t released expansions.

I’d rather keep improvements to the gameplay separate from content updates so people will be able to play a good quality game regardless of the amount of money they invest.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Thu, 31 May 2012 11:39:39 +0000

The flipside to your Diablo 3 example is that you’re then asking the consumer to download a bunch of content they haven’t paid for and can’t use themselves. But then I think a lot of strategy games (CoH?) do that anyway.