When you’ve seen all there is for you to see in a game, and you’re desperate to get just a little bit more out of it, the world of DLCs is there to help you out. The best DLCs of all time add a big helping of new gameplay and story content that will give you more time with a game you love, but they’re not all so great.
Be it because of a lack of interesting content, unnecessarily locking stuff behind a paywall or too high a price point, some DLCs have garnered a reputation as being utterly worthless, and you’d be better off playing the main game without them.
The Midnight Show – The Saboteur
After getting middling reviews upon its release in 2009, the cycle of nostalgia has come around and many people now claim that The Saboteur was an underrated classic. Whether you agree or not, there’s one aspect of the game that is still rightfully derided.
As part of the plot, your main safehouse and base are hidden at the back of the Belle de Nuit burlesque house, where women in seductive outfits would do seductive things. However, if you wanted to see the women naked, then you’d have to put down $4.99 for The Midnight Show DLC. That’s all it did.
My Wedding Stories – The Sims 4
You could reasonably lump all of The Sims 4’s expansions onto this list, as the drip-feed of content has tired fans out over the years. However, My Wedding Stories is the worst offender, as it was almost completely broken on launch – and for quite a while afterward too. Designed to let you plan and host big wedding events, often the event would start but completely fail to happen, leaving you with nothing for your money.
DX Upgrade – Sonic Adventure
Sonics first true attempt to go 3D, Sonic Adventure was pretty good when it came out in 1999. So good, in fact, that in 2003 it was rereleased for the GameCube and PC as Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut, which contained a bunch of new missions and a new playable character. It was a nice addition to a memorable game, especially as Sega had left the console market by that point.
What wasn’t nice was when it was ported to the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2010. Rather than re-release the DX edition as a HD remaster, Sega instead released the original game, and forced players to pay extra if they wanted the DX content.
Horse Armor – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
When you see discussions of how microtransactions, live-service models, and over-monetization has ruined modern triple-A video games, they all point to one DLC pack as the start of that slippery slope – Horse Armor.
The idea of paying $2.50 for a cosmetic item in a video game was utterly absurd in 2005 and caused outrage across the gaming community. Almost 20 years later and here we are, with full-price games that require regular extra purchases to see all there is to see thanks to battle passes and in-game currencies that cost real money.
There’s a reason most of the entries on this list are from the early 2010s or earlier. It’s because DLCs in the traditional sense are getting rarer and rarer in the modern gaming world.
25 Lives – Sonic Lost World
Sticking with the theme of paying money for something utterly worthless, when Sonic Lost World first launched, you could buy a DLC pack that would give you a bunch of extra lives. What makes this so laughable is that extra lives are pretty easy to come by in Sonic Lost World, and the game itself is pretty easy at the best of times anyway, so you probably won’t even need to use them.
From Ashes – Mass Effect 3
Often a DLC pack that adds new story content is a reason for celebration. However, when that DLC launches on the same day as the game, it raises questions. It implies that the side quests and new characters contained within could’ve easily been included in the base game, but the publisher chose to separate them out just to make a quick buck.
Such is the case for the From Ashes DLC, which locks a character behind an extra paywall, and launched on Day 1 of Mass Effect 3. Players were rightfully furious about having to pay an extra $10 to play content that should’ve been in the full game.
Verizon skins – Marvel’s Avengers
Marvel’s Avengers was a very limp live-service game that had its fair share of shady microtransactions inside it, but this one stands out thanks to the disgusting corporate shilling on display.
Would you like your Captain America – an idealistic symbol of the corporate world and the best parts of America – to be plastered with the logo of a telecommunications conglomerate? Well, if you were a customer of Verizon then you could do just that in Marvel’s Avengers.
Re:Mind – Kingdom Hearts 3
This DLC is one that falls short of expectations. Re:Mind lets you relive the highlights of the game’s ending, while throwing in a bit of extra lore for good measure – because that’s something Kingdom Hearts didn’t have enough of, apparently – and it let you play as Kairi and Riku. While the extra characters were a welcome addition, for a whopping $30 price tag, it wasn’t worth the trouble.
True Ending – Asura’s Wrath
Complex RPGs are no stranger to hiding away a “true ending” somewhere. This usually requires doing a very specific series of tasks, or sometimes 100%ing the game – it’s a very rewarding experience for putting in all the extra effort.
Asura’s Wrath had a different take on it though. If you wanted to see the true ending of that game, you’d have to complete the challenging quest of paying $7 to access the final boss fight and cutscene.
All 800 packs – Train Simulator Classic
For many years, Train Simulator had a unique business model where every year players would be upgraded to the new game engine for free, but if they wanted any of the new trains or routes, they’d have to buy them separately.
This may sound like quite a good deal at first until you realize the ridiculous number of packs the team would release every year. Since launching in 2009, there have been 807 DLC packs for the game, costing well over $10,000 if you wanted to buy all of them. Even splitting that cost over 14 years is mind-blowingly expensive.
Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.
