I think I’m officially getting old, because I still remember a time when it wasn’t a given that a newly-released game would have some manner of
DLC
. Ever since the mid-2000s, though, you’d be hard-pressed to find a major new release that doesn’t have at least a couple of premium add-ons.
For the most part, this doesn’t bother me; most DLC is easily ignored, and larger, more substantial DLC can be worth the extra investment.
However, over the years, there have been some DLC marketing decisions that have rubbed myself and the gaming public at large decidedly the wrong way. These can include locking off features that should otherwise be included by default behind a paywall and having the audacity to charge money for effectively nothing.
I’m not a marketing person. I don’t claim to know what goes into these decisions. But for these particular DLCs, it’s hard for me to imagine any other motivation than sheer greed.
Please note the following entries are only about crummy DLCs, and have no bearing on the quality of the games they belong to.
Horse Armor
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first: you know it, you hate it, it’s the Horse Armor. For $2.50, you get access to two sets of armor for your horse in the original
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
. What did this armor do? It increased your horse’s health a bit. It didn’t actually provide any increase to their damage reduction stat, just more health, and only up to a cap of 750 points.
The only real saving grace to this legendarily crummy DLC is that, if you bought the retail disk for the Knights of the Nine expansion on the PC version, you got it for free. If you were playing on Xbox 360, though, you had to cough up for it separately, no exceptions.
To this day, the term “horse armor” has become a shorthand term for pointless, cash-grabby DLC and microtransactions. It’s not the price or content that annoyed everyone, but rather the audacity to charge extra money for such a tiny, pointless addition to the game, back
before such practice became commonplace
.
Red Orbs
Devil May Cry 5
In most of the Devil May Cry games,
Devil May Cry 5
included, Red Orbs were your primary currency for purchasing items, upgrades, and new moves. You could get more than enough to get everything you needed to beat the game from just killing enemies and getting good rankings, and if you needed more for Bloody Palace or something, they were easy enough to grind up.
As with other games around the time, though, someone at Capcom thought they’d tempt us with a way to “skip the grind.”
Alongside Devil May Cry 5’s regular DLC, you could also purchase bundles of red orbs directly from the Steam store in set increments. $1.99 got you 100,000, $3.99 got you 200,000, $5.99 got you 300,000, $9.99 got you 500,000, and a hefty $19.99 got you 1,000,000.
Putting aside the relative ease of just grinding up orbs in-game, 100,000 of them buys you maybe two endgame-level moves. It’s just not a worthwhile investment from any angle. Besides, skipping the grind means playing less Devil May Cry 5, and why would I want to do that?
Easy Fatalities
Mortal Kombat X
Landing a Fatality
in a Mortal Kombat game is meant to be a badge of honor, the cherry on the sundae. Part of the appeal back in the arcade days was that the inputs were passed around largely by word of mouth, so if you pulled one off, you were the coolest kid in the room. Fatality inputs have persisted into the modern games, but
Mortal Kombat X
offered a somewhat unpopular shortcut.
In Mortal Kombat X, one of the reward types you could uncover in the Krypt was Easy Fatality tokens. These tokens could be spent at the end of a match to perform a Fatality without having to perform the input. This was already kind of lame, but what really cranked up the greed-o-meter was the fact that you could purchase lump sums of Easy Fatality tokens as DLC.
Thirty of these things ran you $4.99. Frankly, I genuinely cannot wrap my head around the idea of paying to skip a completely optional, bragging-rights-only mechanic. Why would they even give us the option after going to so much trouble to make the Fatalities in the first place?
Frame Data Display
Tekken 7
Consulting frame data in a fighting game is a great way for high-level players to hone their skills and really figure out what makes their favorite characters tick. In many newer fighting games, you can toggle on frame data displays in training mode at your leisure.
Tekken 7
was not one of those games. No sir, you wanted that extra practice benefit, you paid $2.99 for it.
Installing the Tekken 7 Frame Data Display DLC allowed you to turn on simple and detailed frame data displays in practice and warm-up modes. This showed you the timing of frames and moves and colored character hitboxes which, again, was a feature other fighting games released around that time included by default.
Tekken 7’s Frame Data Display DLC not only locked what is a fairly essential feature for high-level play behind a paywall, it didn’t even come out until two years after the main game. If it had been free, it might’ve been a nice little surprise for the playerbase, but I guess someone at Bamco forgot their lunch money on a particular morning and didn’t feel like driving back home.
Invincible Pack
Saints Row: The Third
Back in an older era of gaming,
cheat codes were something you uncovered yourself
and entered in via button combinations on a title screen. They were fun little extras for when you didn’t feel like playing too seriously.
In the original Saints Row trilogy, cheats could be activated by punching numbers or codes into your in-game cell phone when you wanted to make the game even sillier than it already was. In spite of them already being there, they decided to try to sell cheat codes to us again in
Saints Row: The Third
.
The Invincible Pack in Saints Row: The Third added a handful of cheat codes to your cell phones, including invulnerability, unlimited ammo, and dumb effects like bigger explosions. Putting aside the fact that paying for cheat codes kind of runs against the spirit of using them, there’s a big problem with these particular cheats:
they were already in the game
.
While some of the cheats in the pack were unique, the main ones like invulnerability and infinite ammo could already be activated in the vanilla game. In other words, you’re paying for a feature that you literally already have. If that ain’t pointless greed, I don’t know what you’d call it.
Gald Packs
Tales Of Arise
I remember when I first played
Tales of Arise
, I was constantly running up against Gald shortages in the early game. I regularly had to make choices between new gear, restocking items, and staying at the inn. You know what would’ve fixed that? More Gald drops from enemies. You know what
doesn’t
fix that? Telling me to just buy more Gald with real money.
Alongside other miscellaneous DLC like item bundles and free levels (which I’m also not thrilled about), Tales of Arise offered four individual packs of Gald you could purchase for $1.99 a pop. Each pack gives you a lump sum of 100,000 Gald, for 400,000 in total.
The store description for these packs reads, “for people who don’t want to worry about saving money,” but managing money is kind of a bedrock element of just about every RPG ever made. If you don’t want us to worry about money, how about just making battles more rewarding instead of trying to squeeze pennies out of us?
Mann Co. Supply Crates
Team Fortress 2
For those of you too young to remember,
Team Fortress 2
wasn’t always a free-to-play game with a gigantic in-game store. It used to be a standard one-time-purchase multiplayer shooter. You bought the game, you got some random weapons and hats every now and then, and that was all. Then, everything changed when the Mann-Conomy attacked.
The Mann-Conomy Update of 2010 introduced the longstanding bane of my existence, the Mann Co. Supply Crates, which became the primary means of getting new items and cosmetics in TF2. Rather than items, you’d now get crates from random drops, which contained a set assortment of stuff depending on its series number.
To open a crate, you needed to purchase a single-use key from the in-game store, which cost $2.50 a pop, but you couldn’t add less than $5 to your Steam wallet, so you always had to buy two even if you only needed one.
Even when you finally got a key, you had no way of knowing whether you’d get anything halfway decent from a crate until you opened it, and you usually didn’t. If you want to get technical, this is more of a microtransaction than DLC, but it was a substantial change, and I absolutely hated it.
Wasteland Workshop
Fallout 4
Picture this, if you will: you have a child that asks you for a new game, something fun and deep that they can get really invested in. Instead of that, you dump out a big tub of greasy Duplo blocks in front of them and say, “There, play with that.” Also, you take their allowance in exchange. That’s kind of what
Fallout 4
’s Wasteland Workshop DLC was like.
Wasteland Workshop was Fallout 4’s second add-on pack after the Automatron pack, which wasn’t particularly substantial itself, but that at least added a questline and recruitable robots. By contrast, the Wasteland Workshop added… stuff. Just more stuff you could set up around your settlements, plus quasi-interesting mechanics like being able to capture creatures and make them fight each other.
I get the intent of these and the other workshop packs;
the whole settlement thing was a big part of Fallout 4
, and Bethesda really wanted to promote it. Unfortunately, nobody cared about the settlement mechanics beyond the aspects the game forced you to. There was no particular impetus toward spending money on a part of the game that you went out of your way to avoid dealing with.
Mirrors Of Mystery
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
As with any Borderlands game, the main appeal of
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
is getting a lot of loot and shooting stuff. Of course, both of those come with an unspoken assumption that you’re getting up to some cool quests and meeting likeable NPCs. The four Mirrors of Mystery add-ons add neither of those.
These four add-on packs, $9.99 a pop, add four… mini-quests, let’s call them. Each one is set in a gaggle of small rooms, ending with a boss fight and interspersed with some random gear and weapons that aren’t in the base game. Each of these mini-quests takes about ten minutes to complete, after which you’ve pretty much seen all of it. Forty bucks for forty minutes of gameplay, if you’re lucky. It almost makes a perverse kind of sense.
The only small saving graces are that the fourth pack, Shattering Spectreglass, adds a new character class, the Brightcaller, and that cleared packs get added to the Chaos Chamber as new randomized rooms. Neat, but definitely not forty bucks of neat.
Master Vacation Bundle
Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Whenever you complete a lengthy game, the possibility of a New Game Plus is meant to entice you into doing the whole thing again with the help of your endgame items and boosted stats.
It’s supposed to be a reward, a little incentive to go around one more time. In the vast majority of games throughout the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series, New Game Plus is included by default, but for some mysterious reason, Sega decided to wall it off for
Infinite Wealth
.
Infinite Wealth’s largest DLC pack, the Master Vacation Bundle, includes various odds and ends such as a bonus dungeon, extra outfits, some mini-game resources, and so on. This is all well and good… actually, no, it’s not, considering this bundle costs $19.99, but it’s not the main problem.
The main problem is that buying this bundle is the only way you can access New Game Plus. If you wanted to start the game over with all of your stuff carried over, it was either fork over $20 or get lost.
As an extra insult, the Master Vacation Bundle also adds several achievements to the game, so for those who like 100% stuff, coughing up that $20 is basically mandatory.