If you bought the game used, possibly at close to full price, The Stone Prisoner DLC cost $15. The infamous Warden’s Keep DLC cost $7 or 14% of the retail cost of the game. Complete with all the DLCs the game was pretty different, all sorts of new options for play and character-building unfolded and it was a whole new discussion.ĭragon Age is a game of many tellable moments but when the game first came out and people discovered that the game they purchased had holes left in it, that it was not the entire game they had spent $50-$60 on, the first and biggest tellable moment was the player’s encounter with the salesman NPC.Īs time has gone on, it has become clear that EA and BioWare are the masters of this technique, selling you a game like swiss cheese and forcing you to pay half-again to fill them in. We all purchased the Ultimate edition when it was cheap on Steam over the winter holidays and played again. I really liked the first Dragon Age and playing the game is a sort of communal event in our household, complete with discussions of characters, equipment and decision points. The nearest equivalent I can think of would be paying for a newspaper and then being forced to pay again for access to their website. The video game industry is not the only one having trouble letting go of their content, but they are one of the few to settle on the concept of releasing incomplete products and then forcing you to pay large sums of money to fill in the blanks they’ve left in the game.
The thought of purchasing a game with hooks built into the launch product for pay-to-play DLCs is distasteful.
I didn’t order it back when there was even more free stuff with the pre-order (in early January) and I don’t think I’ll pre-order it now. In four days we will have passed the deadline to get a whole bunch of free DLC with a Dragon Age 2 pre-order. The prospect of zero-day DLC just feels wrong to support. There are few games I’m more excited for than Dragon Age 2, but I’m struggling with whether or not to purchase it.