News Thoughts on Expansion Packs

Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction was a great expansion pack. It seems the late 90's and early 00's were the golden era of what people expect in a expansion pack. Whole new levels, new characters, new enemies, a continuation of the original story.

 

I dont mind free expansions but paying £8 for 3hours extra game play *cough* oblivion *cough* is awful. Some DLC's/expansions like ancorage or the pitt in fallout 3 you get more out off but its boarderline if its worth it. Personally I game on PC for extra content like mods and fixes for games so i don't have to buy expansions to get more from gaming. It just reaks of developers chancing their arm for easy cash.

 

I definitely miss proper expansion packs, whilst DLC is nice it doesn't always add enough to be worth the price, especially if it's just a few more missions or something similar.
Personal favourite out of expansion packs is Brood War, new units, rebalancing, whole new story and characters. In fact most RTS expansion packs I've played have added a lot to the game (Yuri's revenge being another favourite!)

 

I don't buy EA products because of their way of doing expansion packs. They cripple the games to sell the content later, once you're already comitted. Lame. (And I'm not even talking about The Sims and the 200 expansion packs for each version.)

Lately, Creative Assembly is doing the same. Empire: Total War was a buggy steal. I gave up on them so no wonder I didn't buy Napoleon: Total War, which again made me feel robbed for being similar to the Win7 vs. Vista fiasco.

 

I like expansion packs that add to both single and multiplayer (spoiled by relic with dawn of war 1) but some companies like to market there expansion packs as stand alone games (looking at you ubisoft with Vegas 2)

The key is pricing if a full game is £20 - £30 then an expansion needs to eb about £10 - £15 not £20 - £25 else it fails. DLC to me just means extra maps, weapons or people not fundamental changes. An expansion pack should also fix problems in the original if not already patched and not create more.

 

Expansion packs are awesome. Throne Of Bhaal was a great way of finishing off the Baldur's Gate story. Whether they come in a box or as DLC isn't really an issue. For me the big issue is whether the original game is long enough. An expansion pack is one thing, but episodic gaming is quite another. (Episodic gaming sucks as the game you pay for is way too short to start with.)

 

Greetings!

NTW is way better than ETW. 7, in comparison, is just marginally better than Vista.

 

Another vote for yuri's revenge, i wasted my younger years on that game!

 

Some expansions are good and some arn't. I know with the Bioware games I always looked forward to the expansions and was blessed with things like Throne of Baal, Shadows of Undrentide, Heart of Winter ect..

 

A few mentions of Yuri's Revenge here but I didn't think it added all that much really. It was fun to play (and Im thinking of giving it a run through again, now its been mentioned) but not as good as the original game by some margin. Also, the yuri units were too powerful and nobody would play against them online -it was even worse than using france (because of the grand cannon)

Back to the main article; I also found blue shift to be bland. especially as a lot of the features were trimmed down from the original game (e.g. fewer weapons) but it wasn't a bad game overall. There were elements of opposing force that I didn't really like, such as the underground sections in the pitch black trying to fight those massive things!

 

Throne of Baal was also an amazing expansion.
And lets not forget the Wow expansions, they did add a lot to the game (i guess it's an eternal topic about what ppl like/don't like about them).
I'd say Blizzard has managed to create mostly superb expansions. Lets look at their track record:

Brood War: Great
Lord of Destruction: Great
Frozen throne: Great
Burning Crusade: Great
Wrath of the Lich King: Great

It tells me that they are dedicated into making their games better, not to just push out an expansion at any cost. I hope their development mentality will not change into Activision's 1 release-per-year-no-matter-what.

 

Core Contingency.

Krogoth Mission.

That is all.

 

I think the move to broadband plays the biggest role in this, when OF/BS was released i doubt many people had broadband (i know i certainly didn't) so expansion packs had to be good enough to stand on thier own (so to speak)

 

I agree with everything in your post except this...
you sir obviously have no knowledge of the amount of PC games out there...

just in Casual games alone the console market gets easilly eclipsed...

and yes, Flash games are considered games...

 

I don't mind if it's DLC or a full expansion, as long as it satisfies my 3 golden rules.

1) The original game needs to be good in the first place. I am not happy if they release some mediocre game that only ends up being good once you 'expand' it. This was my main criticism with C&C Generals. The original was pretty lame, but it got really good with the Zero Hour expansion added. But at that point I had basically bought two games.

2) The price needs to be right. If all it does is add a few more hours of gameplay then I only want to spend 99p or something. And if I pay full price for an expansion pack, it better give me good value, or I'd be better off just spending an extra £5 or so and buying a whole new game.

3) It needs to be worthwhile. My problem with DLC is that most of it is a waste of time. At this point the price isn't even important, I just want to know that it's worth having. An example is Dragon Age: Awakenings. That was 'ok', and worth a play through I suppose. But Witch Hunt was a piece of crap that I finished in about 2 hours. It wasn't even worth me spending the time to install it.

With all the crappy Dragon Age DLC, I personally would have preferred them to have none of it, and just put all their efforts in to one really nice expansion that gave me a lot of stuff, and I would happily have paid more than all the DLC cost put together.

My favourite addon: Ballad of Gay Tony for GTA4. It was really great and improved on the original game quite a lot.

 

Dude, did you write this article ten years ago?

 

i was referring to commercial games and non-indie games. pc probably has more than triple the amount of games over all other systems COMBINED