Awesome: Lair of the Shadow Broker trailer
This is, I submit, what downloadable content (DLC) should be all about:
And yes, you can romance Liara again.
Being an Ultima fan, I’ve always measured add-on content — DLC included — against the metric established by the two expansions to the Ultima 7 games: Forge of Virtue and The Silver Seed. And really, the standard set by either expansion really is the one that I think most would agree that modern DLC should adhere to: you get new locales, new missions, new items, new characters, and a substantial amount of additional gameplay time relative to the length of the original game’s narrative.
Giving Thane Krios sunglasses? That’s not really worthwhile, as DLC goes. And to be equally fair, none of the DLC that has been pushed out for Mass Effect 2 thus far has really hit the mark for me. Neither of the two new characters, nor the Project Firewalkerexpansion pack, seemed to measure up, and I’ve yet to play Overlord. (Bring Down the Sky, for the original Mass Effect, came closest.)
But Lair of the Shadow Broker looks like it might just meet the standards, which would be a good thing and a fine bar for BioWare to set as far as DLC is concerned. I’ve no problem, at the level of principle, with the idea of downloadable add-on content for games; the Internet is today’s means of transmitting content that would, in a previous generation, have shipped out on 3.5″ diskettes. It’s really just a question of the quality of the content getting pushed. Thus far, it hasn’t seemed to measure up…but that might be about to change.
It seems to me that Bioware have, till-now, had two classes of DLC.
Small DLCs – bonus items, custom appearances, and the like.
Medium DLCs – bonus maps, small missions.
IMO, the medium type is actually more of a ripoff than the small one, since it inevitably ends too quickly and then you’re done. At least with the small ones you get an item that you can play with for the entire game, plus they’re less expensive.
Judging by the price, it appears that this new Liara DLC is an attempt to start a new class of larger DLCs, “mini-expansion packs” perhaps. I hope I’m right about that.
BTW, I’ve played Overlord and it’s fairly decent. It introduces an explorable overworld map of the planet, which is somewhat reminiscent of ME1 (but far, far prettier).
Though, again, it’s all over very quickly.
Now that I think of it, Bioware have had a class of larger DLC in the past, though it wasn’t really proper DLC. The buyable premium modules they released for the first Neverwinter Nights.
The overworld map concept is interesting-sounding…why do I get the sense we’ll be seeing that a lot more in ME3? (I’d be all for that, BTW; it’d make the game feel more RPGish, something I think was missing to a certain degree in ME2.)
Overall, the assessment you offer is pretty spot-on, I think. None of their DLCs have been terribly ambitious; Firewalker added half a dozen missions and the hover tank, but was too quick and far too easy. The Kasumi and…that bounty hunter whose name I forget…expansions were fun (both characters are well done) for what they were, but weren’t anything special on the other hand.
Much the same could be said for the Pinnacle Station expansion to ME1…it added some fun excuses to shoot things for an extended period of time, and it was great for boosting your kill count with underused weapons so as to get those shiny achievements on your character’s sheet…but yeah, didn’t really add much value.
Bring Down the Sky — though a bit short — is about as close as BioWare has come, thus far, to pushing out truly worthwhile content, and that one was hampered by the fact that ME1 wasn’t really designed for those sorts of add-ons. ME2 was, but hasn’t yet had an add-on released for it that was worthy. Though since Lair released today, that may have now changed. I hope so, at any rate.
I suppose the NWN modules do count, if in a somewhat obtuse sense. And they were proper expansions, to be fair.
At the same time, the DLC concept is more in line with the FoV/TSS model, in that what’s added to the game is not a separate selection for play in a menu, but an additional area in the game that can be access during the playing of the main plot.