Bethesda’s $2.50 horse armour DLC for Oblivion turns 18 this year – a realisation which made me feel like I was about to spontaneously crumble to dust and be blown away on a breeze.
There’s an entire generation of gamers to whom it would be very challenging to explain why the launch of this seemingly innocuous add-on was such a pivotal moment for the industry’s development; why for the best part of a decade afterwards, an eye-roll and a snorted exclamation of “horse armour!” was a devastating put-down to almost any DLC plans.
Attitudes have undoubtedly softened over time, especially in younger cohorts who have grown up with most major games having paid-for add-ons of various types, but there is still a conventional wisdom which says that more “hardcore” consumers, and older consumers, really don’t like paid-for DLC in general.
That’s an oversimplification of the attitudes involved, but it’s not entirely unfounded – at least, it’s certainly in line with what we see in online discourse around game announcements. If you listen closely you can hear an audible groan rise from the server farms of Discord and Reddit whenever a game is announced alongside details of its add-on content season pass, as has been common practice for the best part of a decade now.
The horse armour won, in the end.
The assertion made by the loudest detractors – and clearly believed by a not insignificant chunk of the audience – is that complete games are having parts sliced off them and repackaged as DLC, with the true, full game that we “should” have been getting at launch only eventually being sold as some kind of Game of the Year edition further down the line.
It’s a narrative that tickles the two foundational prejudices of the internet’s self-styled angry and/or bitter gamers – that publishers are greedy, and developers are lazy.
The robust and generally well-founded pushback to this narrative from developers is straightforward – that while they generally have ideas for DLC in mind before a game launches, it’s not the case that content which actually exists has been cut out.
There are storylines and scenarios and concept art, yes, but actually building those sections of the game is a task that doesn’t get properly underway until after the launch. There’s a plan for future expansion, not a chunk of finished content being locked away by greedy business bosses.
An unfortunate wrinkle in the otherwise robust fabric of that counter-argument is that while this scenario is usually the case, there have undoubtedly been situations where DLC planning has been rather less pure-hearted – and it only takes a couple of cases of the DLC model being abused to convince some consumers that a giant business conspiracy to defraud gamers is unfolding behind every launch.
I’m not sure any developer other than FromSoftware could get away with this kind of thing; the fact that they do, and to rapturous praise, is worth looking at
Some high-profile games have launched in pretty awful states – very obviously lacking large amounts of planned content or features, with huge technical issues, and so on – but nonetheless accompanied their launches with expensive season passes and high-profile promotion of DLC roadmaps.
A few bad apples can spoil the whole barrel, and it doesn’t take too many of those cases to make a certain segment of the audience – the more hardcore audience that’s more plugged into these online discourses – sour on DLC as a broader concept.
Yet even at that, saying that these audiences don’t like DLC is a vast over-simplification of a much more nuanced set of views. Case in point: Elden Ring’s DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, is arguably the most talked-about game of the month, having earned soaring review scores and fantastic word-of-mouth from exactly the kind of hardcore audience who supposedly don’t like DLC and paid add-ons.
By the conventional wisdom, this is an add-on that shouldn’t even exist, let alone be so popular. Instead, it appears to have been crafted as a love-letter to the hardcore fans of an already pretty hardcore game; you need to have defeated an optional boss in Elden Ring who is tough to find, let alone defeat, even to access the new content.
I’m not sure any developer other than FromSoftware could get away with this kind of thing; the fact that they do, and to rapturous praise, is worth looking at.
Context matters, of course. Some kind of plan did exist for Shadow of the Erdtree all the way back when Elden Ring launched – there are plenty of loose ends in the original game that are clearly meant to be tied up in a future expansion – but nobody could argue with a straight face that a game of the scope and scale of Elden Ring was incomplete or had seen content sliced off to create a…
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