Let's Talk About DLC

DLC, love it or hate it, it has become an expected part of almost every triple A videogame nowadays. For those of you who don't know what DLC is, here's a brief explanation: DLC stands for Downloadable Content, you pay more money for extra content for a videogame, it can range from new weapons & costumes or in some cases brand new levels entirely. DLC has become this creation that some gamers actually despise and I'm not going to argue with them, but at the same time I am still in support of DLC. I think the best videogame to talk about for DLC that shows the best & worst of it is Mass Effect 3.

When Mass Effect 3 was first released, there was already DLC released for it, quite unusual as DLC normally comes weeks/months after the game was released, the fact that this DLC was released alongside Mass Effect 3 means that it was developed alongside of it, it was part of the original game, and what was this DLC? It was a brand new character named Javik who was a Prothean...and people absolutely hated this and rightly so, because if you've never played Mass Effect, all you need to know are the Protheans are very important to the story, and the fact that there was now a character who could be on your team and was a Prothean was insane! And the fact that it was story based DLC released day one was absolute bullshit, that means that we've already paid full price for our game but now we need to pay between £5-£10 more to get the full story, which is utter bullshit, it's like paying to see a film at the cinema but then they won't play the last 10 minutes unless you pay an extra fee, fuck you, I already payed for the full experience now give me the whole thing! Now yes, technically you can play the game without the Javik DLC, but it's really in the same sense as you can also eat a pizza without cheese and it's still technically a pizza. Fact is, this DLC was made to be part of the game but EA (the publishers) got greedy and decided to release it separately to con fans into buying it because of course we would buy it because it's pretty fucking important to get a full experience of the game!

However, with that being said, there is a lot of great Mass Effect 3 DLC as well, as you probably know, a lot of people were not happy with the ending to the franchise, me included, it was the most rushed, half-assed, inconsistent piece of crap I've seen in a while. And the fans went insane with anger, we demanded a better ending, and Bioware (the developers) gave us what we wanted. They made an Extended Cut DLC, improving on about 80% of the problems with the ending and they did it for free. Which earned them the respect back from their fans. And even better, the last piece of story DLC that we got for that game Mass Effect 3: Citadel, is the best DLC I've ever played. Though technically it takes place before the ending, it was the send off that we all wanted for Mass Effect, it made us laugh, it made us cry and it was filled with great action, it was the perfect send off for the greatest videogame franchise of all time.

So overall, is DLC a good thing? I think it is, it's a great chance to give us more story and gameplay for some of our favourite videogames, yeah there are also other types of DLC for multiplayer that give us new maps, weapons & outfits but I don't really care about those. Honestly the only reason why DLC can be a bad thing is because publishers get greedy and make DLC for games that so obviously don't need to be DLC, especially EA...fuck you EA.

-Danny