Why I Hate DLC and patches?

[The_vagabond7]

I don't think that old games were greatly more finished or less buggy than modern games. PSX and N64 games had tons of exploits, and glitches too, and if you go back to previous generations there are tons of them. But it was a different era back then. Due to the much smaller role the internet and online played there was a good chance most people simply did not know about them, or since it was local play you could prevent others from taking advantage of them with a good swift punch to the arm. Other times glitches simply became part of the gameplay such as with Super Smash Bros Melee, or the original Street Fighter 2. But now that you have tens of thousands of people competing online, they are bound to find and exploit things missed by the testers, and there is nobody to punch those jackasses in the arm. So patches are welcome. Otherwise you end up with something like Mariokart DS or Metroid Prime DS where exploits and cheating run rampant and there is no point in even playing unless it's with friends.

Online play and the growth of technology has over time shrunk the amount of content, I agree. But DLC is a remedy to that, not a bane to it. Golden Eye could have more than seven multiplayer maps, but most of them were poorly designed, easily exploitable, or just not very much fun to play on, so that even in local play among serious players a handful were used. But when it's just you and a few buddies thats not a big deal, but when it's tens of thousands of players online you'd better make sure you're maps are balanced and fun to play on, especially since it takes so damn long and so much money to make them.

Do some companies take advantage? Absolutely. The whole RE5 debacle comes to mind. But others make incredible use of it, such as with Burnout Paradise, Left 4 Dead, and Fallout 3. Would removing patches and DLC somehow improve the games we have now? 99% of the time, absolutely not. Everyonce and a while a game comes out when it's not finished, but by far and large that is a state of the PC community. The rest of the things simply would never exist. All of that awesome content on Burnout Paradise would cease to be, they wouldn't have continued developing it for another year and then sell it at the same price. Left 4 dead simply would've lacked some scenarios, Valkyria Chronicles wouldn't have had the extra stories. And all those glitches and exploits? They'd still be there. Just like they were in previous generations.

With the good comes the bad, but I think the good drastically outweighs the bad in this case.

 

Edit: I'd like to add a little caveat to my statement about the PC community. With widely varying hardware alot of games get released that perform well under certain conditions, but abysmally under different hardware set ups. I never buy a PC game in it's first month because of this. This is the nature of the beast though, and patches in these cases are also welcome. Not to say all PC developers are lazy, but due to the way the PC market works there are always more hiccups within in than the console market.