So, Assassin’s Creed III has new single player DLC coming, in the form of The Tyranny of King Washington, which is an entirely different plot built on the original game with new missions and other tweaks. It’s coming out in episodes, starting next month, for ten bucks a pop.
And it’s the latest in a very odd gaming trend, where developers appear to be putting entirely new games out under the guise of “DLC”. Call it a “sneakquel.”
Borderlands 2 just dropped Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt, which takes place on an entirely different continent, has all new enemy types and raid bosses, and some fairly serious tweaks to the game’s overall mechanics that make it a far different experience. Dishonored will be releasing a DLC following one of the main antagonists of the game through entirely different areas, with new weapons and new powers. DMC: Devil May Cry has an entire separate campaign with Virgil.
It’s even happening with games that ship complete. Mass Effect 3‘s multiplayer was an entirely separate game with only the thinnest of connections to the single player story. Call of Duty: Black Ops II turned “Zombie Mode” into its own game with different mechanics.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with DLC giving you more for your money, but these scan, an awful lot, like honest-to-God sequels, not expansion packs. So what’s going on?
First of all, this used to be fairly common. PC gamers will remember sequels that were essentially just a very large level packs and not many tweaks beyond maybe some graphical touches. And the mentality is making a comeback as publishers want more of your money without the costs of physically publishing something.
Secondly, we suspect a lot of this was content that got cut from the release due to time constraints. Game developers have a lot of ambition these days, and often budgets fall short of it. So, what better way to get the stuff you wanted in there than by getting your publisher to pay you to make it as DLC?
We’re not complaining, just noting the trend. But it is, nonetheless, very odd. Any other sneakquels that we missed?
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The one that springs to mind for me was in Fallout 3, the alien DLC where you spent the entire time on a spaceship with absolutely no connection to anything that’d happened before in the rest of the game.
Oooh, good catch. I’d forgotten about that one.
Undead Nightmare was excellent, and it killed most of the people you got to know in the initial Red Dead Redemption. These sorts of DLC show the good side of the add-on, why throw away a game for a brand new sequel if the developers can still mine some fresh, quality experiences from it?
Agreed. It’s just… unfortunate that they have to do that in the first place, I think.
Bungie sort of went the complete opposite direction and tried to sell DLC as an entirely new game in the form of Halo 3: ODST. There was some blowback, and Bungie caught some heat about it, despite it basically being a contractual obligation with Microsoft, but I really enjoyed that game.
But from the sound of it, it looks like Activision is pushing Bungie back into the model you’ve mentioned with Destiny- Retail games coming out every 2 years, and large DLC expansions coming out in the off years.
At times these are cut content, but in the case of The Tyranny of King Washington, it’s hard to make that argument seeing as it’s based on the idea of being an alternate history, instead of mostly sticking to what happened and inserting fictional elements as the Creed games usually do. And since this three-part DLC will cost less than a full game and deliver basically a second smaller campaign, I’m not going to complain. I always finish AC games wanting even more story to trawl through, and my playtime on each of them is well over 100 hours. I’m impressed that they fully committed to an alternate universe, with many important things being different, such as the Native American protagonist never receiving his english name or being formally inducted into the Assassin Order, to name two.
I feel like Spartan Ops on Halo 4 falls into this category. While it’s not something you pay for, it’s being released a chunk at a time. My major complaint with that, however, is that it’s not entertaining in the least. I’ll watch the cinematic episodes in between but I’m sick of playing retooled campaign maps that give me very little in the way of…I don’t know….anything at all? If you have double XP then Spartan Ops can be a huge booster, but that ends in a few days. I appreciate the effort 343, but just give me a pure sequel that is ALL about Crimson and Infinity or a movie, because the cinematic graphics are enough for me to pay $20 to see a full length feature.