The state of DLC/Expansions in single player games in 2021

Naramsin 2021-02-15 10:44:37 UTC #1

Hey guys, what do think about SP DLC and its current state?

I’ve always been a huge fan of additional content for games (mission disk, expansion campaigns etc.) that now is called broadly DLCs.

Back in the day we have things like i.e. additonal campaigns for Tie-Fighter. Blizzard was a powerhouse with things like Brood War and Frozen Throne but even for D3 they released Reaper of Souls. Shooters like HL got Opposing Force etc.
Bioware has strong presence of good stuff since Throne of Ball till Trespasser DLC in DA:I which is 2015 I guess.

Most recent good stuff I can recall is Blood and Wine DLC for Witcher3.

Rockstar had two pretty good DLCs for GTA4 but nothing for GTA5 and RDR2.

Bethesda also got a record of always delivering additional stuff for their games though imo it was always kind of mixed bag.

Anyway, I feel like in recent years this model of robust additonal SP content is on decline? I mean, sure Paradox/Firaxis strategy DLC is holding strong bbut in big narrative games?

Kiril 2021-02-15 15:46:17 UTC #2

I think one of the big problems with DLC is with The Gamers™ The crowd that finish a game in a weekend and then demand more and if its not there in a couple of weeks move on to the next game, this makes the big guys like Rockstar go after the new events in multiplayer instead of trying to sell a new story again.

There is also a massive amount of noise around free DLC, how a dev is meant to keep adding to a game for free for years after and that I think makes some devs scared of charging for a DLC.

The third issue that I feel DLC has is that Steam doesn’t care about it, its very hard to find DLC unless you follow the game or happen to look around the release of it.

Has there been any big narrative games out recently enough that could have DLC? Doom Eternal has its Ancient Gods expansion. The Assassin Creed games always have DLC, to mixed success but usually add in a region or change things up.

Naramsin 2021-02-15 16:03:09 UTC #3

I agree that most publishers don’t see financial gain in robust SP DLC these days for amount of work and cost that is required to deliver top notch stuff.

Audience that plays game like Stellaris or Civ usually sticks to it for months/years so it’s both hungry for more content and being on a lookout for a new stuff.

Big SP games has atrocious level of completion as it is, so to sell that stuff is probably unfeasable.

Naught Dog tried some semi-stand alone format for some Uncharted games, no idea how it fared for them.

DLC for Dishonored is pretty good and my kind of stuff but Death of the Outsider as a stand alone add on for Dishonored 2 is great as well.

I have not played Ubisfot game in years so no idea what is their model.

LexW 2021-02-15 17:08:43 UTC #4

From what developers have said, this is pretty much spot-on. With single-player CRPGs, action games and so on, full-on expansions usually don’t sell well enough to justify the work in creating them unless the game is absolutely huge in sales, or the expansion is so well-reviewed that it moves a lot of copies. Smaller or mid-size DLC still seems to be pretty popular though - at least for games that sell well like AC. I think there’s probably still a market if you can plan enough DLC and get people to buy a “season pass” to get it all, but unless you’re very sure your game is going to succeed, there’s a degree of risk associated there.

That said I dunno if developers of these games always account for the fact that DLC continuing to come out can keep a game in the headlines, especially it’s pretty serious stuff.

Whereas with evergreen games like Stellaris yeah, you can just keep selling bolt-ons, and people will come back to the game when they come out, because people don’t buy them as “play once” games anyway.

Re: Ubisoft their general model is “season passes”, where they box up a certain amount of content and dole it out over a few months. Usually less than an old-fashioned expansion’s worth. They also do stuff like use the same engine and most of the same assets to quickly put out spin-off games with the FarCry series, most of which are basically what old-school expansions were in scope (i.e. 50-80% of the length of the original main campaign).

LexW 2021-02-15 17:36:19 UTC #5

Adding to that, one issue is that I think the last major “wave” of AAA CRPGs ended in like 2015, which would be where you’d expect to see the biggest expansions/DLC. Since then, it’s been slim pickings for AAA CRPGs. We’ve recently got 2077, which has been a bit of a car crash, and they’ve not even had the balls to detail any DLC for that. I’d expect some fairly serious stuff like Blood and Wine, to try and re-invigorate their brand, but we have no idea. We got ME:Andromeda, which was bad enough that they cancelled a bunch of DLC, including what looked like a pretty chunky one. Nothing from Bethesda (FO4 was 2015, had mediocre DLC). Larian’s previous efforts were both AA rather than AAA in cost/scope, but BG3 is AAA - but it’s deep in early access, so no idea on any DLC.

Am I missing anything? We’ve had some good indie stuff, including Disco Elysium, and a lot of mediocre-to-great AA stuff like Pillars 2, Pathfinder, The Outer Worlds, DOS2 and so on. TOW has a couple of big-sound DLCs but I find myself unable to care because it feels so static/inflexible/uninvolving (tried replaying it recently). Pillars 2 had a season pass which did include a very good DLC - Beast of Winter, which is like, much over-looked but definitely a “proper” DLC like Lair of the Shadowbroker, Trespasser, or older stuff. Still not a ton.

With DA4 and ME5 (people call it ME4, but it’s post-Andromeda, so…), assuming they don’t all explode in some ball of flames (Casey Hudson once more left Bioware, for better or ill, as did a couple of others - not creatives though), I would expect that the amount of DLC that actually gets made is dependent very much on their reception. I will be interested to see if Bioware is confident enough to be selling “season passes” at launch with them or what approach they take.

We’ve got Starfield at some point probably in the next year or two, and being Bethesda, I expect them to try and cash in pretty hard so I would expect a lot of DLC - question is will it be any good? TES6 is so far away it’s not even worth considering, as ridiculous as that still sounds - who knew it would go from 5 years between TES games to likely 15+? I can’t think that’s effective management of resources.

Obsidian, now with more money and probably more staff have Avowed, which we still know jack shit about, though if it’s not first-person and somewhat Elder Scrolls/Ultima Underworld/Arx Fatalis-ish, I’ll be shocked. If that’s looking good, I am sure Obsidian will have DLC coming for it.

There are others, but anyway, I think whilst we may see some good DLC come out as the next wave of AAA CRPGs comes in, it’s probably 1-2 years away for most, and the situation is otherwise likely to be pretty static.

alms 2021-02-15 22:41:36 UTC #6

I was looking at Prison Architect only a few days ago, so I am short out of anything encouraging to say.

Baines 2021-02-16 04:25:06 UTC #7

Koei Tecmo was forced to stop creating Xtreme Legends standalone expansions for its Dynasty and Samurai Warriors franchises, thanks to a 2014 patent infringement lawsuit launched by Capcom, which ultimately ended in a 2019 Capcom victory. (Capcom somehow managed to get a patent for the idea of a disc-based game unlocking content in an older disc-based game, which Xtreme Legends infringed by letting console players play the new XL-exclusive characters in the older base game stages/story through swapping the game discs.)

While you can argue that a game like Borderlands is multi-player focused, the series has maintained the model of plenty of DLC expansions. How much these qualify as “robust” varies greatly from DLC to DLC, though.

Big publishers have been moving away from significant single player efforts for years. Never mind robust single player expansions, devs have sometimes had trouble getting single player games themselves greenlit.

I do wonder what impact the age of Kickstarter and Early Access have had and will continue to have on expansions.

Kickstarter could be used to see if there is enough money-where-your-mouth-is support for expansions. For example, Lab Zero used a post-release IndieGogo campaign to successfully fund the development of several additional characters for Skullgirls. At the same you, you have crowdfunding campaigns where the devs struggle to deliver on their promises, particularly when stretch goals get involved. Yacht Club Games and ArtPlay should both be commended for the years of post-release support they’ve given to Shovel Knight and Bloodstained respectively, but one shouldn’t forget that the years of post-release support was really the devs trying to finish delivering on initial campaign stretch goals.

As for Early Access, too often it feels like games have their development ended before the promised game is even finished. Worse, AAA publishers have arguably been flirting more with a “finish it in the year after release (if it sells well enough to bother)” mentality. Again, this makes robust expansions (at least ones that don’t feel like they were ripped out of the base game) a bit less likely.

LexW 2021-02-16 10:42:32 UTC #8

I feel like it’s more like they oscillate than just move away from. Like, a few years ago it felt much more like, to me, there was a clear attempt to just not make single-player games, and that didn’t really work out, and we actually have quite a lot of single-player or primarily single-player stuff on the way now, whereas whilst there are plenty of primarily MP games on the market, there aren’t many AAA ones on the way, and most recent AAA ones were F2P efforts.

How often is too often? I can’t, off-hand think of an EA game that got cut off before being finished that I’d bought. I can think of a couple that never became good games, but they got all the promised features and then some. The primary EA game I think of as “never finished” is from years and years ago, I forget the name, some kind of town-builder from when EA was new (in fact I think it was called simply Towns). I guess there’s technically Cubeworld, but that was a bizarre situation, and it did get a full release - just the full release was way less fun and complete feeling (despite technically having more content) than the alpha six years before.

Re: AAA publishers, do you have any examples? I can think of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that’s at least openly EA, and limited scope until it’s out of EA.

I’d also like to mention a special offender here, which is an evergreen game, that being Sims 4. Sims 1-3 all got tons of expansions, some substantial, some less so, and were constantly and heavily updated as they went (Sims 3 still had some bugs but it was pretty ambitious for what it was, and they related to that) - problems eventually got fixed. Sims 4 has not only spewed out even more expansions than Sims 3, but they’ve been far less substantial, with some total bullshit at times (i.e. chairs to match a table are in an entirely different expansion, even though it’s clear they were created at the same time - in a couple of case I think concept art has even shown this), and worst of all, severe bugs that have been in the game since 2013/2014 remain unfixed as the just plow forwards - they do sometimes add good stuff (like finally getting proper non-white skin-tones and better non-straight hair very recently) - but they just leave so much stuff broken and regularly add new bugs (which can be especially bad if you don’t have all the expansions). Sims 4 was also pretty obnoxious because it rolled back a lot of what Sims 3 was trying to do, apparently so they could make the graphics more detailed without increasing the min spec (Sims 3 simulated pretty much an entire town at once, Sims 4 just fraction of a town - about 1/4 of what Sims 3 did, if that). Seems like they’re finally starting work on Sims 5, but frankly it’s overdue and feels like they just really dragged out Sims 4 in a way that was pretty bad given the bugs and other issues.

Naramsin 2021-02-16 11:38:22 UTC #9

I also have the feeling that type of player like me, who gets invested in lore, worldbuilding and characters that would like to play that additional content, is considerd by publishers to be drawn to and served by mmo and mmo-ish types of games. So there is no point in catering to them if thay can get their fix elshwere.

Some Japanese games do get some DLC stuff, right? There were DLC for Dark Souls and Bloodborne? No idea about jRPG.

Internet 2021-02-16 12:17:25 UTC #10

Obsidian and Harebrained schemes separately concluded that DLC and expansions sell better as separate games and make more money as new games. New game = more publicity + better reviews. DLC reviews are frequently pretty vicious.