DLC At Launch

Warty Goblin here, ya'll.
I was reading my usual round of gaming news the last day or so, and noticed that Bioware's Witcher wannabe, Dragon Age: Origins is getting a bunch of free DLC at launch. Well, free if you buy the game new anyways. Presumably the DLC will be tied to an account of some sort, and people you may sell the game to are simply SOL when it comes to their free goodies.

I'm generally in favor of free stuff, so I was a bit surprised at the degree of irritation I felt about this. It's not the blatant attempt to kill off the used games market. I really don't mind that, to my mind the secondary market-particularly when it is reselling relatively recently released games does the industry no favors.

No, what irritates me is the notion that the first thing I do after installing a game is download and install some more of the game. I just bought the damn game. Said game comes on a disc, which I just inserted into my computer and installed. Doing so should obtain for me the entire experience for which I paid $50. The only thing I want to be downloading right after installing is the Day 1 patch, and honestly I would prefer that not being neccessary either.

This is not to say that I have anything against ditigal distribution. Far from it, I think it is the future of the industry, but if I choose to buy a game in a store, I should be able to do that. Not whatever fragment of the game the publisher decided to entrust to DVD, the entire damn thing. It would be the equivilent of buying a game from a digital download service, and then being forced to drive to a Gamestop to pick up a disc with some 'free bonus missions' on it.

Also, I object to anything that comes pre produced and included with a product as free. It's not free, it's part of the thing I just paid for. Making me download it doesn't make that any less true. Oh sure, in DA:O's case, they charge you for it if you don't buy a new copy of the game, but the people who buy the game new are still buying the DLC. It's included, not free. I'll accept that DLC is free when it comes out fifteen months after the game, can be downloaded by anybody, and isn't tied to any sort of account. That's free.

Now I'm not the world's largest fan of DLC to begin with. See, back in the day we had these things called 'expansion packs.' Here's how they worked. You gave $30 to somebody or other, and they gave you a product. Not just any product however, this one went with a base game, and expanded it. That's why it was called an expansion pack.

There is, on the surface, something appealing about DLC. It's lots of cheap little bits of game! But that is just my problem. The expansion pack offered often quite sizable editions, entire new campaigns for shooters, factions for strategy games, and new storylines for RPGs. Maybe none of these would be as long as that of the original game, but they were often better polished, more focused, and provided the definitive version of the game. DLC seems to provide little bites of content, a quest here, some armor there, a new companion somewhere else. There are exceptions- Bring Down the Sky for Mass Effect was a sizable sort of quest, but the vast majority I've seen are just a random bunch of new things. There's none of the focus and refinement-let alone the scope- of a good expansion pack.

In conclusion, let's have more expansion packs, less DLC, even less marketing wank about 'free' and a return to things you buy in stores actually being in stores.