Downloadable Content – The Good, The Bad, The Horse Armour

Back in the days of yore, if video game developers wanted to add more to their title, it would be released in the form of an expansion pack. It would contain nearly an entire game’s worth of content and cost half the price of the standard game.

As with most aspects of the video game industry, it changed. As internet speeds increased, companies decided to sell smaller add-ons online. Something we call DLC.

DLC comes in all shapes and sizes and can vary from map packs, storyline expansions and even something as simple as cosmetic changes and skins.
As DLC can be very different, it also means that the public opinion of DLC varies as well.

We have the good DLC; Downloadable content which is priced fairly and offers you enough content that you feel like your money is well spent. Then there’s the bad; which is a bit harder to explain.

Bad DLC can be thought of in many different ways, there’s the fact that the content may be decent but the price you pay for it just isn’t worth it e.g. some portions of Fable 2 & 3 DLC. Though some could consider any DLC as bad depending on your views on downloadable content.

Lastly there’s what I’m simply calling ‘The Horse Armour’ or ‘The Ugly’ which is basically DLC that you pay for despite the fact it could have simply been unlockable content e.g. some forms of cosmetics (alternative costumes) or something that doesn’t actually add anything to the game.

As most DLC is made of bad and horse armour, this means the good DLC stands out like a beacon of hope on the video game industry. We have shining examples such as The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC which added another 6 hours of single player story onto an already lengthy campaign, though it felt like story that should have been kept in with the main campaign; the addition of more The Last of Us was very welcome.

Another example is The Prepare to Die content on Dark Souls. Dark Souls is already a very lengthy game (I’ve clocked in over 50 hours on one character and still haven’t finished the main story arc) but the DLC gives you a new story that explains a bit more of the story behind Artorias; a great warrior whose name was thrown about a lot in the main story of Dark Souls.

Both of these DLC packs cost roughly £10 each and gave you as much content as some full retail titles, it offered you more of a game you had explored enough and that’s a great thing.

Note: I know you’ve gotten the jist of what I consider good Downloadable Content but another I wanted to mention was Dragon Age: Awakening which actually felt like an old PC expansion pack. It added new weapons, armour a whole new storyline which introduced an array of new characters and brought back some old. It was a fantastic piece of DLC at a modest price of £15.

Now I’ve talked about what makes good DLC, I’ll head on to what I consider as bad DLC.
Bad DLC is a bit more difficult to explain as what I consider to be bad DLC could be what others find as fantastic DLC; it’s funny how opinions work.

One thing I have considered as bad DLC is map packs; only in certain conditions and circumstances. Basically map packs that cost near the same amount as a storyline expansion and if the map packs don’t offer anything more than a new playground to shoot your peers. Some map packs offer a few new game modes which is fine, it feels like you get some actual new content from the purchase.

I’m a bit biased to the map pack ideas due to being a Battlefield man up until the release of Battlefield 3 as during the times of Bad Company 2, Dice claimed that they wouldn’t charge people for the map packs, this mean everyone could use them so the new content isn’t limited to a few people. Sadly this is no longer the case as Battlefield premium now exists.

Another example is if the content deliver much for the price asked. This includes episode one of Bioshock Infinite’s Burial At Sea. Though added a nice amount, it was fairly short for the £11 price mark and only seemed worth it if you planned to buy episode 2, in that case I recommend the season pass.

Lastly is the ‘Horse Armours’ of DLC’s. Horse Armour being a DLC released for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It cost roughly £4 and simply added armour for your Horse, the armour didn’t do anything; it just looked nice. The DLC became a bit of an in-joke for the gaming community.

Many DLC’s have come out since then, they’ve been completely cosmetic, they add nothing to the initial gameplay and are simply there to squeeze a bit more money out of the players. Examples being the Batman skin pack for both Arkham City and Origins, these things cost but they feel like an item you should be able to unlock through progress in the game; a feature developers seem to be using less in order to create more DLC.

 

So what did I miss? What’s your favourite or least favourite video game DLC?

My Experience with Dark Souls

As Dark Souls II hits stores on Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 next week, I thought I would take a look at my experiences playing the first game in the series and how I overcame the game’s difficulties and learnt to embrace my mistakes instead of hating the game for it.

When I first played Dark Souls; nearly two years ago, I wasn’t a fan. The game seemed cruel and unusual, it didn’t hold my hand or give me any tips. I couldn’t tell if I accidentally went to a part of the game that was too difficult for my new character (e.g. The Graveyard) or if the game was just brutally difficult in general. I played it for a few hours but when I reached an enemy names ‘Bell Gargoyle’; I gave up, the game bested me and I had enough, but something kept dragging me back into it. I was determined, this game made me feel like a fool and I wasn’t about to let it beat me.

This guy, seriously. Fuck this guy.

I decided to do a bit of research into some of the game mechanics before setting off on another horrible journey into Lordran. I know that’s something you shouldn’t do before playing and that the real joy of Dark Souls comes from overcoming things without help but when I wasn’t enjoying the game simply from the gameplay, I thought I would do a bit of cheating.

This time, my experience was very different. I learnt to take my time, be patient and learn from my mistakes. I learnt that getting angry at Dark Souls just caused you to make stupid mistakes which would then make you angrier and therefore making even stupider mistakes. Best of all; I learnt that when it got too much, I would walk away, but I would come back to it.

That’s the great thing about Dark Souls, nothing is spoon fed to you, not even the plot of the game. I decided to take its brutality as a lesson rather than a punishment and it made the experience that much better and learning from your mistakes made overcoming the challenges the game introduced so satisfying.

Even though I have learnt to love Dark Souls; I can understand that it’s not a game for everybody, because for the first 6 months I didn’t consider it a game for me either. When I recommend it to people I always end my recommendation with “You may want to try it first” or “You may want to get it when it’s on sale” because even though I grew to like it, it was mainly down to patience I had for it; a patience, I know most don’t have.

I have convinced some to give it a go, a friend of mine visited to give it a test play. I couldn’t stand to watch him face the game as blind as I did, so I helped him out for the first part before letting him go into the game alone. After a few hours he claimed he was done but by the time he left, he wanted to play more; he was hooked.

One thing I have never learnt from Dark Souls but always told myself to learn was to never be cocky. There will be a point in the game when you have just defeated an enemy that took you so long and made you so frustrated that when you finally defeat it; you can’t help but feel invincible. Here’s the kicker; you’re not, definitely not in Dark Souls. I have defeated so many enemies in this game to big up my Dark Souls ego only for me to be cut down by a basic enemy because I got too big headed and full of myself. One day I’ll learn from that mistake, but it’s probably not this day.

I may sound like a man who knows a fair bit about this title, I’ve actually yet to complete it but I’m still playing it and taking those break whenever it gets too much for poor old me, but by holding it off, it makes my return to the game feel spectacular. Also it means my wait for Dark Souls II is a lot shorter because I still have to finish Dark Souls, actually I think I’ll go do that now.

Note: I won’t be doing any writing on Dark Souls II for a while as I’m waiting for the PC version, but when the PC version is going to be released, I will probably write another Dark Souls based article on that.

There’s Something About Flappy Bird

I believe that app stores such as the Apple Store and Google Play stores are giant cesspools, most of what you find on there will be cheap knock offs of existing games in order to make a quick bit of cash, or mind numbly dull and terrible tap-a-thon titles; but it seems a Smartphone game can be released that’s so infuriating that even the game’s creator decides to pull it from the app store.

Image from thesource.com

If you can’t tell what I’m talking about yet then why haven’t you looked at the title of this article? It pretty much tells you, failing that I’ll be nice enough to let you know; I am talking about ‘Flappy bird’.

Flappy bird was actually on the app store long before it reached its peak popularity but was discovered over Christmas, which is when most apps become popular due to the fact all the boys and girls are given tablets and smart phones by jolly old Santa Claus.

So Flappy Bird took off… like a bird! (sorry) It went from being almost unknown to an app phenomenon overnight. Soon everyone knew what Flappy bird was, and if you didn’t then you were clearly out of touch with modern society or took the elaborate life decision to spend your life under a rock, on the moon or in Peckham.

In fact it’s popularity could be seen everywhere, I even noticed its popularity when I went to a lecture at my University and noticed that in the dark room of the lecture hall, everybody around me was looking down at their phones and tablet indulging themselves on the Flappy phenomenon.

I asked people what Flappy Bird was like instead of downloading it myself and trying it out because to me it was a trend and I’d be damned if I was going to get myself absorbed into another one of those. The reactions I received from people ranged from a high ranking “Yeah, it’s alright” to a less than friendly “It’s shit, mate, don’t bother”.

The strange thing was even those who hated wouldn’t stop playing it, in fact I had one friend telling me how much they hated the game WHILST they were playing it, and afterwards they continued to play it for another 20 minutes (I know some dull people).

I saw Flappy Bird as some incredibly inferior, smart phone equivalent of Dark Souls. Ok, it’s nothing LIKE Dark Souls, but people’s attitude towards its difficulty was. They would hate how difficult it was but there was no chance that they were going to give up and when they reached a high score they were happy with, they would enter a state of euphoria and happiness similar to the effect of hard drugs (don’t do drugs).

Then suddenly, the happy (or should I say Flappy? No? Ok.) times were gone. People were quite verbal about their hatred of Flappy Bird by posting complaints on everyone’s favourite hate vent; the internet (it’s my vent too!). Sadly the creator of Flappy Bird didn’t take the insults and hatred towards his game very well and decided that if that was the case then nobody could play it. He announced one day that he would remove the game from app stores and then the next day he did exactly that. In other words, he pulled a ‘Phil Fish’ by exclaiming that he ‘can’t take it anymore’.

Sadly nobody in the world knew what IT was.

Perhaps getting a tasty $50,000 a day from advertising on Flappy Bird was something he realised he didn’t want, or it could have been the fame that comes with creating anything moderately popular on the internet, or maybe it was us. Yes, us. The consumers who reacted negatively because a free game was difficult or not our cup of tea even though it had a clever video game mechanic and was an interesting take on the old ‘helicopter game’.

Though it could also be the fact that even the creator got fed up of everyone around him playing Flappy Bird…

My money is on the latter.

My Top 5 Games of the Last Generation

As my first post for this ‘bound to fail resolution’ I thought I would start it off with something easy.

As we know, whenever the new consoles are released, something magical happens on the internet. It’s that magical time of the year when most video game news sites immediately consider the previous console generation dead and therefore create a list of what they think were the best games of the previous generation. These awards are considered far superior to your bog standard ‘IGN GOTY award’ as it’s me recognising a game as so brilliant, it isn’t the best game of a singular year but instead the best game of nearly 10 years. I’ll also remind you that this list isn’t in any particular order, these are just the 5 games from the past 8/9 years that I really fucking loved.  So before I babble on about things that aren’t necessary, let’s start off the list at beginning, or as others call it:

#1:

The Last of Us:

Yes, the first game that came to mind when I was writing this list was Naughty Dog’s post apocalyptic masterpiece of 2013. A lot of great games came out in 2013, but nothing impressed me as much as this. I’ve been a fan of Naughty Dog since the Crash Bandicoot games on the original PlayStation but these days the Crash series is barely worth mentioning since Activision got their mitts on it and pretty much ruined it with Crash of the Titans and Mind over Mutant, but despite losing the Crash series, Naughty Dog have continued to impress me with new IP’s such as the Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider-esque series of Uncharted (which only just missed being in this list due to The Last of Us). Though most of the IP’s Naughty Dog has made have been brilliant, The Last of Us truly stood out. With stunning visuals that I couldn’t believe the aging Playstation 3 was capable of, a fantastic soundtrack and some of the best developed characters you could ever see.

I could write an entire article on The Last of Us, alone, but I’ll try to keep it short. All I can say is, I highly recommend it, the story is fantastic and have you hooked from the beginning. It’s not often that I play video game until I realise that it’s been 6 hours since I started playing and the only reason I want to put it down is because I felt like I should eat, or sleep or some stupid human need that prevented me from playing the absolute shit out of this game.

Graphically amazing with a beautiful storyline.

#2:

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition:

I’m not usually a person who enjoys difficulty in their game, one of the reasons I felt disappointed with Uncharted 3 was due to it’s crazy difficulty curves, but Dark Souls managed to keep me hooked despite making me angrier and more frustrated than any other game. This is due to the fact that whenever I was killed, no matter how brutally I was cut down, splattered or incinerated by the creatures or environment of this game, I never blamed the game for it, and that’s where the game gets it right. It always makes it feel like it’s your fault rather than game being unfair.

Dark Souls also happens to have one of the deepest and best developed worlds I have ever seen in a game. The story of the game is hidden beneath layers of lore and history.

The art of Dark souls is also beautiful, the design of some the characters and locations are incredibly detailed and some are even stunning to point of awe.

I don’t think Dark Souls is for everyone. If you can, pick it up for a cheap price, give it a go and if you can survive 4 hours in that game without completely hating it and everything about it, then I suggest sticking to it and you may have one of the lengthiest and most challenging gaming experiences out there.

You’ll die, die and then you’ll die again… but you just might love it.

#3:

Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 1:

This was the first game I had played by Telltale, my friend gifted it to me through Steam as I told him that I hadn’t played it and didn’t really intend to, I wasn’t a fan of point and click games but as he gifted it to me, I thought I would give it a go.

I played through the game and by the end, I was crying. Actually crying.

I’m not one who usually shows emotions to forms of media, as I’m used to the idea that it’s not real, but there was something special with The Walking Dead, the emotional impact it has, you feel for the characters and really care about them throughout the story, it’s gameplay is the usual that you would expect from a point and click game, as a game it’s not hugely entertaining but as a device for storytelling, it’s near perfect. I recommend series 1 &2 to anybody, its deep, emotionally impacting and has one of the most gripping stories in video game history, once you get past the slow first episode, you’ll be hooked to the end.

#4:

Red Dead Redemption:

Rockstar have released plenty of top selling, critically acclaimed video games throughout this generation, mainly from parents worst nightmare that is The Grand Theft Auto series. Though I recognise the series as entertaining with a good story, no Grand Theft Auto title has made me as satisfied as their Western adventure which was Red Dead Redemption. A beautiful land, and unlike Niko Bellic, I found John Marston to be an incredibly likeable character with honest intentions, the man just wanted his family back except he wasn’t as vocal about it as Harrison Ford or Liam Neeson, he would mention it in brief passing but would still help those in order to help himself.

Riding around this spaghetti western landscape on your horse with no name felt calming and gave a larger sense of wonder than you would get when driving down the motorway on any Grand Theft Auto game.

If you never picked up Red Dead Redemption, and have a few days of your life you want to waste away in front of your television, I couldn’t recommend this title high enough.

Lastly on this list we have:

#5:

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:

Oh don’t act so shocked, after writing a lengthy blog on how much I loved this game, you can’t possibly shocked that I put this in my top 5.

Well, before people get out their internet pitchforks and their rude words, I best explain myself.

I gosh darn LOVED this Zelda title! Despite the fact that on the Wii, the textures were so horribly compressed that it made my eyes bleed, the story, soundtrack and aspects of the gameplay made it all worthwhile.

Taking Hyrule back to the very beginning was great, it was also the first Zelda title since Wind Waker that made Zelda an incredibly important character. The story was simple yet it hooked me quickly, the idea that Zelda was a damsel and you had to save her, though done before, was done well in this title.

It was a linear game, which caused some complaints but I didn’t care too much as most of the Zelda titles I played (other than Wind Waker) felt linear, Skyward Sword was also home to some of my favourite dungeons and bosses.

If you want further reason as to why I loved this game, check out some of the other blogs as this is not the first time I have mentioned this title.

Aside from some of the game play elements, this was an awesome game.

So those are my top 5 games of the last generation, though this generation isn’t actually over, but a new console is out now so whatever comes out on previous generations will possibly not get the attention they deserve, I’ve already pre ordered Dark Souls 2, despite the fact it won’t be on the shiny XBONE or PS4.

Anyway, why don’t you share what you’re favourite games of this generation in the comments below, who knows, I may actually care to see what you have to say.

BYE!

MrGSeff