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Daily Archives: June 25, 2010

DLC ruminations

When I first heard of the concept of down-loadable content in console gaming, I liked it; it made sense to use the HDD and internet capabilities of this generation of machines to advantage by offering gamers a way to spend even more time in their favorite games.

However, it’s getting a bit pricey in some cases.

Disgaea 3 is a good example. I love Disgaea as much as anyone, but really, do I look like a rube who wants to spend another $30 or more buying extra characters for my party? Nope. Much as I loved Laharl from the first game, I’m ready for someone else’s story in Disgaea 3. There’s just no way I’ll ever collect all the downloadables for Disgaea 3.

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum (and not the one near SEM Chicago). And by that, I mean that some games keep the amount of DLCs offered down to a reasonable number, but they are price-and-HDD-space hogs!

For example, in Mass Effect 2, I have purchased all the DLC currently available, but I have an original 20GB Xbox360, so I’m already thin on space and each significant mission added in DLC is averaging 0.8 GB of hard drive space. That adds up quickly when you only have eight GB free to begin with.

Heck, Dragon Age: Origins’ Awakening add-on was so massive and expensive, it fit right in on the shelves with new games, and the prices were not that far apart. Yikes!

Mass Effect 2 impressions

I finally forced myself to finish the original Mass Effect. The main reason? Finally owning Mass Effect 2! You need a completed mission file in order to bring your Mass Effect character over into Mass Effect 2. My Captain Shepherd is a female named Torah Shepherd, but as I soon found out, a lot more than just her name, appearance, stats and character level survived the import.

You see, BioWare had promised that your decisions and the way you played Mass Effect would deeply affect how the story plays out in later games. So far, I’m seeing that to be a case of truth-telling, not just hype. For example, my character took the Paragon path and chose to save the Council at the end of the game; my Mass Effect 2 game started with those events taken into account.

Had I let the council perish, my Mass Effect 2 experience would have been immediately different. And while I haven’t searched through the game enough yet to know where all the electric fireplaces are, I can say that BioWare is rather unique in actually delivering a notably different experience based on how you play. In a few years, we might look back on this story-branching approach to game design as simple, rudimentary, even a bit dated… but whatever we’re playing by then, the branching storytelling with genuine differences in play revolution started here.

Mark it down in the chronicles.