I'm on paternity leave at the moment so have only just cleared the nappies and caught up on last week's news. Most of it has been commented on here but the announcement of the first downloadable content for Mass Effect has left a sour taste. Mass Effect is a fabulous game, one of the best of 2007, but it was obvious that the immense promise wasn't fully realised. The core story was excellent - Knights of the Old Republic goes 80s sci-fi - but the pre-launch hype had talked of planetary exploration and off the beaten track adventure. Sadly this promise was never fulfilled with the relatively small number of optional missions all far too similar. Shooting a generic bunch of assailants in overly familiar interior environments wasn't quite the Elite style free roaming I had in mind. So it's hard to escape the feeling that this new content should have been included in Mass Effect from the off.
You only have to look at Oblivion, the other great Western role-playing game on the 360, to see how downloadable content should be done. It had 5 or 6 content packs available after release - heck, the Shivering Isles expansion is larger than most full priced games - but considering that Oblivion had 100+ hours of action on its own it was hard to feel short-changed. Well, okay the horse armour was a joke, but you get my point. Downloadable content for console games then, happy to pay?
