The Saboteur
The Saboteur may have been a fun action romp set during World War II, but it also had one of the strangest DLC situations any game has ever run into. In the game, the player often finds themselves visiting a cabaret where the women are, well, less than clothed. There is no nudity however, unless the player downloads and installs the Midnight Show DLC, which renders all women in the club completely topless. It also added brothels to the city which allow the player to hide among, yeah you guessed it, more topless women.
The Midnight Show was available as a free download to anyone who bought the game new and $3 for anyone who did not. It came off as an odd way to incentivize players to purchase the game brand new or to defer people from pirating the game. In the end, it didn’t really manage to do either and is instead remembered as that one time EA made players spend money to see nudity.
Evolve
With Evolve moving to a free-to-play model, many of the game’s shortcomings have been recently brought up once more. One of the most predominant points of these discussions are the issues the game had with its DLC. When it originally launched, there was a large focus on the copious amounts of DLC available for the game, and not in a good way. Not only was Evolve a full $60 game, but all of its day one DLC added up to be over another $100 on top of that. And, for a game with a bare bones structure and a painfully small amount of game modes, that’s just bad form.
It isn’t unheard of for a game to have that much DLC, however having it released on day one can easily intimidate a player already spending $60 for the base. At no point should anyone purchasing a game feel as if what they’re buying isn’t enough to satisfy them. Maybe if Evolve had done things a bit differently, it wouldn’t have left such a sour taste in so many mouths.
Asura’s Wrath
It was a long standing fear that one day a game would be released that forced players to purchase the ending through DLC. Unfortunately, this fear was realized when Capcom came out with Asura’s Wrath. Asura’s Wrath’s controversy stemmed from the fact that the game’s “true ending,” actual words from Capcom, was delivered as a form of DLC with a $6.99 price tag.
Needless to say, the gaming populace was not happy and nor should they have been. Not only did Capcom release an unfinished game, to which they themselves acknowledged, but they also forced owners of the game to purchase it in order to finish Asura’s Wrath’s story, effectively bringing the total price of the game to $66.99. It isn’t exactly clear why Capcom made the decision to sell the ending separate from the game. Perhaps they wanted to setup a sequel, but ending up deciding against it. Unfortunately we may never know, but the ends don’t justify the means and Asura’s Wrath certainly suffered for it.
Dragon Age Origins
The Dragon Age series is no stranger to unlocking additional quests via paid DLC. In fact, Dragon Age Origins was about the first time Bioware implemented it. However, this doesn’t mean it wasn’t without some big flaws. Much of the DLC for the game came in the form of quests you can obtain from speaking with various NPCs. The issue rose from the fact that speaking with the NPC without having unlocked the DLC will actually prompt the player to buy it. This wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if the game didn’t place a marker above the NPCs’ heads and actively try to get you to come inside their store instead of window shopping.
One of the largest strengths of Dragon Age Origins was its ability to capture a player and completely immerse them within an expansive, ever changing world. A game immediately stops being a form of escape when a villager, who is supposed to give you, a mighty hero, a quest, instead reminds you that you aren’t actually a hero, but working for minimum wage at a graveyard shift in an hour.
Street Fighter x Tekken
On-disc DLC, our old and much debated about friend. Will you ever cease to be the cause of controversy? Well, if games like Street Fighter x Tekken continue to be released, the answer is, without a doubt, no. Street Fighter x Tekken was the subject of some serious discussion when it was released for many reasons, the prime one being that that disc was sold with 12 characters worth of DLC already on it.
Capcom tried to quell some of the controversy by claiming that the fighters were placed on the disc in order to prevent “incompatibility issues,” but that doesn’t really make much sense. Characters could be patched in with ease, and the former statement just comes off as a weak way of covering up the fact that they tried to squeeze as much money out of the players as much as possible. If the characters were already finished upon the game’s release, they should have just been included in the game itself.
What other games do you think handled DLC horribly? Leave a comment and let us know! And while your at it, why not check out some DLC we thought totally improved their games.
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