Abusing DLC

So I finished Alan Wake around 11AM PST. Great game, and I'll have a review up either later tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

The main thing that got me thinking on the topic of DLC was the ending of Alan Wake. I won't spoil it here, but after the credits rolled, a single line read: "Alan's journey through the darkness is not yet over...princess is in a different castle, etc and so forth..." which isn't so bad, if a game is expected to have a sequel, much like the God of War games, or Mass Effect. Instead, Alan Wake is going to be having several downloadable "episodes" which will assumably complete the story.

Just a little background on the game: It has been in development for the last 13 years, and up until about a year ago, during E3, it was largely considered to be vaporware (vaporware meaning that it's a game that was announced, hyped, then never heard from again). That's as long as the recently canceled Duke Nukem Forever, which also started it's production in 1997. This game has been kicking around for about 13 years, and then at the end of the 13 years, a cliffhanger ending with the promise of DLC is kind of a slap in the face.

While I did get the code to get the first chapter of DLC for free, I can't help but still feel robbed by this transaction. I basically got an unfinished game.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of DLC. Maybe you get a character which hadn't been thought up until so late in the production process that you can't include it without pushing the project back a few months, or maybe it's a set of cars that you don't need to play the game, but they enhance the experience. Either way, if you buy a game, you should at least get a proper ending. I don't pay for a movie only to get an hour and a half of movie, then right at the climax, have the movie cut me off and say "sorry, I'll tell the last 45 minutes of the movie over the course of the next year...for 1/6 of what you paid for the game per screening..."

There are also games which can get away with this type of behavior, where they can divide the story, and promise more later. The thing is, the games that are like that have earned that right because there is generally more meat to the game as a whole.

The best game I can think of would be Mass Effect. If they were to add some main storyline DLC to that game and charge $10 for it, I would be ecstatic, even though they ended on a cliffhanger. Why? Because the game was 40+ hours, and I didn't even do all the side missions.

As I said above, Alan Wake is about 11 hours. I finished it in one sitting. By no means has it even SOMEWHAT earned the right to an unfinished ending. To me it just feels like they're trying to bleed more and more money out of us. It isn't enough that we pay $60 ($80 in my case...) for a game that would have been $40 had it been released in the time frame that most games typically take to produce. They also have to bleed an extra $5-15 per "episode" just so that I can get some closure on the damn game. It's like buying a Mario game, finding out that Peach has been kidnapped, collecting stars for 10 hours, only to find that you're not even going to fight Bowser, and you're not even going to get close to rescuing Princess Peach.

That's what I liked about the episodes for Heavy Rain. They enhanced the story, but at the same time in no way affect the story or interfered with the progression of the game. Entirely optional, and they only served to provide more immersion with the world that you played in.

So really what I'm trying to say is that the creators of Alan wake (Remedy Software) need to finish the actual plot with the first pack of DLC (the free one, it's only fair to those of us who bought the game), then they can do whatever else they want to do with the next episodes of DLC (assuming there are more). They created an interesting cast of characters with alternate storylines. I'd happily play through chapters where you find out what Alan's predecessor's experiences was with the island.


Sorry to all if it seems a little rambly. I haven't had any sleep while I was playing through this game, which reminds me, I have to find the nearest well-lit room to crash in for the next 10 hours.