So i got Dragon Age Origins...Love the game but theres one damn thing that nearly ruins it for me...

And that is how the downloadable content is shoved down your throat.

When you first open the game there's a card in the case trying to get you log into your EA account in order to download the blood dragon armor DLC.  Whatever you can ignore that and just pop in the game.

Then when the game starts you see 'DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT' in big bold letters on the main screen.  The DLC even has its own loader sequence, as the game automaticallly checks to see if you have it.  Whatever you can ignore that too. 

Then when you're actually playjng the game and you go into your inventory menu, there's icon that is specifically for the downloadable content. Okay, WTF EA? 

And then when I'm talking to some guy about a quest he wanted me to do, the dialogue options revealed I can only do the quest if I download the damn content! what the hell? It's one thing to promote DLC on the main menu, but to break the immersion by saying you can only do a quest if you download it is just shameful.

greedy companies

Get over Yourself EA.

Oh and we wont even Get INTO Madden 10.

I actually liked the grey warden quest. I'd be more then happy to pay 5 bucks a pop for quests like that if they wanted to add a half dozen before Dragon Age 2 comes out. I certainly don't want the game to end, its awesome, so keeping it on DLC life support is fine with me.

Yeah, I've seen this with Burnout Paradise. This game looks even more intrusive.

Letting consumers know that you've got extra content for sale is obviously necessary, but designing a game in such a way that it gets thrown in your face repeatedly is a big turnoff, and makes me disinclined to participate in your revenue stream EA.

I actually LOVED the free content in burnout. Getting motorcycles out of the blue was awesome.

I hate DLC overall and the way they did i in DA really pissed me of. I remember the days that content was rolled out for the community without any charge or after a year or so you paid 20 bucks for an absolutely mind blowing amount of content in an expansion pack.

Thankfully I will see a hell of a lot of content for free thanks to the PC community, with a community like that how do they honestly expect me to actually pay for more content?

Don't even mention EA's iphone games... Red Alert has 2 campaigns with 5 maps each and 2 skirmish maps.. while the DLC is gonna be another campaign and 6 skirmish maps.. that's 12 maps in the real game and 11 as DLC.. >_

Nobody's going to complain about free DLC. It's putting the island on the map and leaving the route open, then throwing a menu in the players face if they should happen across the bridge in the heat of a Road Rage mission or something. That's obnoxious.

In principle, I like the idea of DLC, but there are a lot of ways to screw it up. Downgrading the enjoyment of people who don't buy your DLC — in the case of Burnout, by throwing menus mid-game and offering deceptive options in other menus — is one of the pitfalls to be avoided. I want carrots for buying your DLC, not sticks for failing to buy it.

This is sort of a way to work around the increase in costs over HD development. Although some companies seem to be increasing it to justify continued development. Stockholders want more profit, and they invest so the company can keep making games, so their role is very important.

Gaming isn't government funded, and will probably never be in its current form.

If you want gaming to continue to become more graphically complex there is the fact that prices have to increase in some ways. The cost of developments goes up, and as a results the profit needs to be sustained by higher prices and DLC.

DLC is just another way of increasing the price without upsetting the consumers too much. Maybe we need to reevaluate this rule that games need to still get more graphically complex, even though results are diminishing for most people's perceptions, and that you can achieve great entertainment with less graphics. The processing power hasn't been a huge barrier to gameplay since last generation.

Agreed. DLC can go to Hell as far as I'm concerned.





Unless it's free.