One of the few games to earn a 5/5 star rating on Game Rant this year is that of Gears of War 3, the latest release from Epic Games which rounded out the trilogy. While we love the game for its trilogy-concluding story arc, co-op modes and multiplayer, we cannot say the same about the DLC plans they and Microsoft Game Studios have put together.
A $30 DLC season pass for content that wasn’t clearly revealed up front, combined with $45 worth of… in-game weapon textures had a lot of fans of Gears of War 3 understandably upset, but the two faces behind Epic, Cliff Bleszinski and Rod Fergusson, explain why pre-planning DLC is necessary.
Fergusson and Bleszinski were interviewed by Game Informer where Fergusson shared his thoughts on the matter:
“What people need to understand is that extra content is something that you have to plan… There are people who think that the first day of DLC development is the day after you launched. That’s not the way it works. A lot of it is that you have to prepare and plan and manage your resources and your people and everything to allow for that.”
No one can question the logic behind this. The game needs to be designed up front to support DLC and development time does need to be spent accordingly. This however, isn’t hitting 3 key points that people are complaining about and the definition of “extra” seems to be at odds with what is “new.”
- Pre-planned DLC that’s included on the disc amounts to an incentive for publishers/devs not to include everything the game offers in the retail version of the game. Semantics aside, stuff’s left out to charge for it separately and this happened already with Gears 3. This is the biggest hump fans have difficulty hopping over in accepting DLC, especially with the high prices they’re charging.
- Where’s the talk of charging for weapon skins? Weapon skins! How much money and hours of development time does it cost to add a texture to a gun? In Call of Duty: Black Ops, players can unlock a load of textures for any of the weapons (and players didn’t have to pay for each)… Yes, weapon skin textures are purely cosmetic, but labeling it “optional” when it’s on the disc and so miniscule is a tough pill to swallow. Did we mention that they’re weapon skins and that the discounted price of all of them in bulk is $45? That’s right, Epic and Microsoft are charging more for all 21 weapon skins than the price of buying Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. It’s optional though.
- Not being honest up front. The first DLC for Gears of War 3 is already out, titled the ‘Horde Command Pack‘ and we gave it a weak review. Why? One of the reasons was because not only are all of lot of its content and Horde Mode upgrades on the disc, but a lot of it is used in the game’s campaign. It’s not “extra” and that’s an example of #1 where stuff was taken out to charge for it separately. The bigger issue is that when Epic revealed the pricing of the DLC season pass, but not its content, they neglected to mention that the maps this first DLC pack will be coming for free to everyone anyway for regular multiplayer, meaning players paid for free maps to use in just the co-op modes… but not the other? They’re the same maps. Free DLC is great and there should be more of that but why wasn’t this told to the players beforehand?
DLC is a tricky issue. On one hand it serves as a platform for expansions of games and as Cliffy B and Rod point out, a great way to fight against used game sales from a developer stand point, but in reality, it’s caused a ton of problems and it’s given rise to day one DLC and a ton of content charged for separately that in the previous console generation would be included in the retail game.
If you bought the Gears of War 3 season’s pass and the All skins bundle – we’re talking the discounted prices of each – then you paid $75 on top of a $60 game. That’s the biggest issue of all and this isn’t the only game doing it.
In other related news, the second Gears 3 title update is now available which adds spectator mode and tweaks a few things – don’t worry, it doesn’t cost anything.
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Follow me on Twitter @rob_keyes.
Source: Game Informer
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Crazy! The prices are way too expensive but people will buy anything and thats why it’s not slowing down and almost every game that comes out is doing it. Me, I don’t pay it any attention. I buy my games brand new and most come with some sort of free DLC if you preorder, that’s good enough for me. Anything after that I don’t care much for.
Call of Duty is a pefect image of what companies do. They make crappy games then people buy them even though there overpriced.
Then they charge like 10 bucks for like 3 maps that are released every few months
I use to be a die hard Gears fan but when they did crap like this I wont lie I almost didn’t buy the game. I had to think about it! I mostly go out and buy gears stuff because I love it and loved how they treated us in the past but for all the features they told us was new then making us pay for it I really got pissed off and almost didn’t buy the game. Then giving free stuff equal to half of the Horde Pack that honnestly should only be 5$ for the extra characters since the maps are free. Also pissed me off. They are digging there own grave in this matter.
I usually just wait for the greatest hits/platinum edition. It usually has all the exra stuff included. That’s what I did for Gears 1 & 2
DLCs are way overused in almost every game nowadays. While some additions are legitimate bonuses and worth spending the couple hundred MP for, most of them aren’t. With that, the prices for these DLCs are jumping up ridiculously high as well, like with Gears 3 and any Call of Duty map pack you’ve ever seen. These companies should rethink their strategies with the DLCs and rethink them quick, or else they could lose popularity as fast as they gained them. The only studio I can think of that uses DLCs they way they should be is Bethesda, which has been doing it since Morrowind. They release a game fully functioning and large enough on its own not to need anything extra, and then they add huge bonus content a few months afterwards for a reasonable price that one does not need to enjoy the game, but can purchase for dozens of more hours of entertainment. And for those that don’t buy the DLCs then can wait a year or two for them to be added to the CD and sold as one complete unit. Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 had a different but still decent way of handling their DLCs. Much like Gears’ Season Pass, customers who preordered the special edition of ME2 got a code along with the game that they could input and would be able to download all the DLCs for free as they got released to the market. The game costed about $10 more than a regular one, but it was well worth the extra content that sometimes you didn’t even realize was extra because you had downloaded it in the beginning and ran across it in the game hours later.
Bethesda? May I remind you of the infamous Horse Armor?
We can really only blame ourselves for the prices of DLC nowadays. Companies know there’s money to be made by holding on to finished content until after the game releases, and they can get away with charging as much as they want because people keep paying it.
I felt really ripped off by Gears 3′s Season Pass because they announced they would be making the content in it available for free a month later after the content was out, and, as Rob stated in the article, my review reflected that
I do know one thing, im probly going to shell out 10 bucks for whatever Skyrim DLC comes out just because the game is sooooo awesome lol
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