Game Reviews

Mass Effect 3 and Day-One DLC

So a few of you involved in the gaming community are probably aware of some flack BioWare was (is?) getting for releasing day one DLC for Mass Effect 3. For those who are not familiar with gamer lingo this basically means that there was add-on content available for Mass Effect 3 the moment it was released… for which players had to pay extra.

This annoyed some people. There’s a decent summary over here along with some user comments if you want more exposure to the incident as it happened.

I’ve had a few readers ask me my thoughts on this and given that I’ve finally found a few moments between packing and writing I figured I’d respond.

Overall, while I understand the business rationale behind the decision, I think releasing day 1 DLC content is tacky.

Not evil or malicious or fundamentally wrong. Just tacky.

Business models constantly change and if the business model for AAA titles in the videogames industry requires day 1 DLC for games to make a profit, then so be it. But I wonder why, even if just for etiquette or to show some more respect to the consumer, if the DLC couldn’t have been released a bit later, post-release.

See, part of the original justification for DLC was that it gave players more of what they enjoyed from the game. It was part of the communication, the network building, between a company and the players. When a game releases DLC on the same day as the original game not only does it seem like they are trying to squeeze more money out of consumers it also comes across as a door slamming shut, between gamer and developer.

We’ve made more of what we thought you’d like without waiting to hear your thoughts on the game itself. Enjoy!.

Nothing fundamentally wrong here either. Just different.

Even if the messaging behind the Day-One DLC had been slightly tweaked I think the response would have been muted. For example maybe focus playtesters on Mass Effect 3 indicated this particular DLC content would be well liked and would complement the core game. Anything to hint that this DLC sprung from a desire from the developer to give the players more entertainment. Not (only) to make more money.

And that’s what the root of the issue is. If a developer appears too greedy it pisses players off — no matter their actual intentions or the actual facts, which in this case was that the team had time to build the DLC while waiting for Mass Effect 3 to be approved for distribution.

I think too often developers are blind to how what they do affects players perceptions of them and the industry. They don’t anticipate the reaction. And we are living in a connected world where _reaction_ is everything.

Just involving the players, even if somewhat superficially, into a decision, I think can go a long way towards making them more agreeable to a change in business practice like this. Anything from voting or commenting on new content to be released in DLC, or making the DLC appear to be a race between players and developers (i.e., ‘we guarantee we will have downloadeable content available the moment the first 1 million playthrus of Mass Effect 3 are completed’).

Stuff like that.

Anyways, that’s my thoughts. Back to packing.

UPDATE: Please check out the article by Erik Kain on Forbes for what I think is a very fair assessment of the situation with more details than I’ve provided here.

Former lead designer at BioWare (Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights). Creator of Raiders of the Serpent Sea.

116 Comments

  • Siona

    Thank you for your comments! It really makes those of us unhappy with the DLC issue (as much as I love Javik himself) and the ending especially (don’t love that) feel a little more validated and treated like fans, not kids.

  • Anonymous

    You seem like a pretty smart guy Brent. Too bad you weren’t there to offer a little bit of advice to Case Hudson and Mac Walters on why you shouldn’t change everything just to be dark and edgy for seemingly no reason other than to be dark and edgy. 

  • Tremulantone

    Hey Brent,

               Thank you for approaching the issue in a way that recognizes I am a human being, not a wallet devoid of all thought and feeling. You’re going to have a lot of people head your way soon as they realize this is one of the many avenues the Bioware of old has gone, myself included.

  • JJ

    about the day 1 DLC – that particular DLC, because of what you get with it, should have been in the original game. i got the collectors edition so i didnt have to waste money on it but its still BS how they charged for it. especially when all you get is one short mission, a shitty weapon, outfits that mean close to nothing, and a character that SHOULD have been one of the most important pieces in this game

  • Eirik

    Hi, mr. Knowles. In regards of the ME3 endings and your background, I have a rather specific question.   

    I’m not sure what role you had in the company but I heard you were involved with the Baldur’s Gate franchise. I always believed quite firmly that BG2:Throne of Bhaal has perhaps one of the best examples of how a long-running game series with such depth ought to end. With just enough closure and generally giving the player a very positive, content feeling out of all of it. 

    But I was wondering if BG2:ToB was always supposed to ‘wrap up’ the series? I remember BG2 ended with a very vague cliffhanger at its end, but fairly soon it was apparent that an expansion pack (that’s a term we sadly rarely use these days) was in the works and would be released rather soon. So in contrast to ME3 they ended their ‘final’ game with a cliffhanger but supplemented with a ‘closure expansion pack’. Was this always intended? Did the BG franchise have a very clear vision on how it ought to start and how it ought to end? 

    I’m just very confused at how BioWare could imagine that this ending (a rehashed version of Deus Ex’ ending in faulty thematic narrative) somehow should be a ‘better’ ending to such a long series than how they did it with the Baldur’s Gate franchise. . .  I’m quite sorry for this long post. 

    with regards, Eirik

  • Matthew Kozachek

    Brent, thank you for summing this up so eloquently. If you get discounted as much as us fans/consumers get discounted, then there’s something seriously wrong with both the industry and the gaming media.

    Part of the problem, I think, stems from many of us consumers/fans being viewed as spoiled teenagers and immature. I cannot think of a more blatant lie. 

    I’m sad to hear BioWare is no longer the company it once was. Especially sad because I’ve played their games since I was in middle school – since Baldur’s Gate. I’ve had a lifelong affair with BW, I don’t want to see it end – but I fear it may have to. I feel like I’m being broken up with by a long-time partner.

    Here’s to hoping either BioWare can recover, or a newcomer can take it’s place.

  • Matthew Kozachek

    I don’t honestly think that it would be any more difficult than what was achieved with Mass Effect 2. They basically created two of every part of the purely-cinematic sequence plus character deaths.

  • Brent Knowles

    Thanks for the comment. I’m not familiar (because I have’t played the game) with how integrated/deep the content is. Disappointing that it sounds like it was a disappointment!

  • Brent Knowles

    Eirik

    I was only a junior team member on BG2, learning my way in the industry from some really fantastic mentors. So I can’t answer specifically to the plan for the ending… though I think we all learned a bit about ‘endings’ in general during this time. Anyways Kevin Martens was the lead designer for BG2:ToB. He’s with Blizzard now.

    And yeah, I miss expansion packs too (I was fortunate enough to be lead designer on the Hordes of the Underdark Expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights)

    Also if you are curious I have a series of blog posts about my time with BioWare and what I did there.
    http://blog.brentknowles.com/2011/05/06/how-the-story-began/ 
    – Brent

  • Brent Knowles

    Matthew,

    Thanks for stopping by. I think with the growing demand for more voice over and more cinematics in games a studio like BioWare is in a difficult position. Continuing to offer games with huge choices and lots of branching plots is prohibitively expensive when the art/voice/cinematics costs are so high.

    And sadly it appears that sales are at their highest with the games that have strong cinematics but inadequate choice options. Maybe it will take a newcomer to come onto the scene with some clever design techniques that accommodate both or maybe it will be an established studio like BioWare. Here’s hoping somebody figures it out.

    – Brent

  • MrWest

    I honestly didn’t even care about the day 1 DLC or the ending. I was just happy to finish my femShepard that I’ve been playing since M1. Yes, the ending did kill the game a little bit for me, but I’m not as vocal about it as the other players.

    I thought they should have made the DlC free with purchase like they did with Zaeed in M2, or Shale in Origins. I thought that was a smarter business tactic since it gives the player a reason buy a new copy  rather than a a used/pirated version. 

    My major problem with M3 was the massive cut in dialogue.  In the first two games there was so much dialogue to choose from. They were either kind, humorous, or just down right rude. ( I recommend watching “Commander Shepard is still a jerk” to see where I’m going at.) In M3, Shepard spoke by herself so much, that I thought I had unknowingly turned on some feature that limited the dialogue.

    Dialogue choices are what separate an RPG from other games. When you remove that it stops being an RPG for me.       

  • Matthew Kozachek

    You’re very welcome! I’m doing a little happy dance in my head “Brent replied to me! The guy who wrote some of my favorite games!”

    I’m more hopeful for upstarts or small teams coming about thanks to the recent successes of games like FTL, the new Double Fine Adventure Game, and Wasteland 2 on Kickstarter. They’re not getting the hundreds of millions of dollars that big publishers can come up with, but 3.4 million and 1.3 million (and rising) for Double Fine and Wasteland 2, respectively, are nothing to scoff at when completely fan funded.

    Hell, with 30 days still left on their Kickstarter Wasteland 2 might very well be the kind of game we’re talking about wanting to come into being.

    Best,
     – Matt

  • Brent Knowles

    Good points, thanks.
    I think we’ll continue to see less and less dialog in games (RPG or otherwise). Just too bloody expensive to justify the voice over. And once you have one ‘name’ actor, the cost is astronomical — cutting the budget for several other characters.

  • Andrew Hancock

     Great post! Your statement that “it’s a game, not a movie” ought to be drilled into every game designer out there. Unfortunately, so many games today treat “telling a story” as being the most important thing (and to be brutally honest, most video game stories aren’t that great) and reduce the gameplay to some dull, mindless, repetitive task that serves no purpose but to shuffle the player from one cutscene to the next. Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 are the worst offenders in recent memory, although ME3 is far worse.

    A proper RPG should react to your character’s intrinsic qualities and have the story develop around those qualities. In a game like Fallout or Planescape: Torment, for instance, the decisions I made in building my character, and the decisions I made during the course of the game, had consequences throughout the game, to the point where someone with a completely different character might go through the game in a completely different way. In Fallout, for instance, it was possible to build a character that could go through the entire game without firing a shot, if that was how you wanted to play. Or you could play as a thuggish brute with an Intelligence stat of 2, who would get the dialogue options you’d expect from someone of such low intelligence.

    ME3, on the other hand, destroys any illusion of it being an RPG in the first ten minutes. The “role” of Shepard doesn’t exist – his character “build” is only relevant to combat (which is totally separate from the narrative), and no matter who you imagine him to be, no matter what decisions he makes, there is one path through the game with only minor deviations. I was shocked at how much automatic dialgoue there was in the game, with few opportunities for player input. It’s essentially a JRPG narrative duct-taped to Gears of War’s gameplay, with a very obvious seam between the two.

    As for the endings, you’re right that there’s enough pointless tragedy in real life that we don’t need to overdose on it in gaming. Mass Effect never really struck as me being particularly “dark” (at least the first game wasn’t…ME2 was far less “Space Opera” and far more “generic action-flick that happens to be set in space”) The common criticism of the those who disliked the ending is that we just want a “rainbows and sunshine” ending, but that just isn’t true. I don’t think anyone expected Shepard and Co. to come out of the Reaper invasion unscathed. But there’s a difference between a bittersweet ending, and an ending that’s just pointlessly cruel and screws over the main characters for the sake of being “dark” and “edgy.” ME3’s ending resolves nothing, offers no closure, fails utterly to the show the consequences the player’s decision, and is a exceedingly poor conclusion to a trilogy that many players will have invested five years and a few hundred dollars in.

  • Brent Knowles

    Geez, all this praise is starting to inflate my ego. God knows what will happen if I ever get a wikipedia page!

    Anyways, you make some excellent points, especially concerning the clarification of what a happy ending would entail.

    As for the limited ‘choice’… this is just the way these kinds of games are going to be I think. I’ve posted a fair bit about this in the past, especially close to the time when I originally left BioWare. Games with voice over and cinematics are too expensive to make now. Multiple choices = content that not everyone sees.

    This is impossible to justify to executives/shareholders, especially when it actually doesn’t increase sales. And the  BioWare games of today are selling better than the games from the ‘early years’. I think sometimes though that makes people feel that *all* the lessons from those past games are irrelevant (because the newer games sell better).

  • Matthew Kozachek

    Holy crap… I loved HotU.

    If I ever get the opportunity to shake your hand for that, I will. That was one of the most awesome Expansion Packs ever made!

  • Guest VI

    Dragon Age Origins was the finest RPG I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Started my 100th playthrough a couple days ago and it still hasn’t ran its course. It probably never will. True art has a way of not going stale.

    I know this has nothing to do with ME3 or day 1 DLC, but when I saw an opportunity to thank the lead designer of my favorite game of all time I couldn’t let it pass.

    Thank you, sir.

  • Josh

    Best post ever. I just finished ME3 and you articulated my problems with the ending better than I ever could. I’m crushed and ready to put all 3 Mass Effect games in a box and never play them again. My planned multiple runthroughs of ME3 will have to be replaced with another playthrough of DA:O now (which did ending choices right).

  • guest 123

    Dragon Age : Origins had ( IMO) one of the best ending out there. It basically resolved everything that happened in the game and also lived some room for a sequels. I really loved the writing,dialouges,story in Dragon Age Origins. Wish you worked for ME3 . You created a game that I played and finished 7 times. Whatever you do in the future may you be successful.

  • Ryan Morgan

     And that’s why you do talent scouting for voice actors so you don’t have to pay name actors for parts, and can still find people who can do the job well.  Most devs (in the videogame world anyway) are just too lazy to do that.  Hence we get voice acting like this

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pD83hmKjr0

    It could be done, if they actually cared more about it than a little bit of $.

  • Brent Knowles

    It is too bad that ME3 has been this disappointing for you. As a designer I know this is the opposite intent that those who made the game were aiming for.

    I do want to clarify though… my comment (the one that has been pulled out and used by many) was talking about a game trilogy in a generic sense. I have not actually played ME3.

  • Brent Knowles

    Oh the scouting still happens. Lots and lots of it (I know, I remember listening to loads of it for Dragon Age Origins).
    But I think when there’s an opportunity for a big name actor for a major role in a game, the opportunity is jumped at. And to be honest some of the big name actors are *good*, I just don’t think they are good enough to warrant cuts happening elsewhere.

  • The Guest

    Dragon Age handles the DLC so much better. Besides being just more fun in general, it wasn’t as vital to the plot, like that rage-inducing thing that was the Arrival DLC. It was optional. If you wanted to ignore Ostagar, you weren’t losing anything. If you decided to never activate Shale, it was no big deal. But if you didn’t play Arrival, you’d be more than a mite confused as to why Shep was in jail.

    Of course, Dragon Age also handled the ending well, too. Both games. Dragon Age: Origins is what I thought the ME3 ending should be. It wrapped up the plot well, had an awesome final battle that made you feel awesome, and it actually had a climax and denouement. I felt awesome at the end of DA:O. I didn’t feel awesome at the end of ME3. I just felt betrayed.

    Heck, at least Dragon Age II’s open-ended, ambigous ending made sense for the narrative structure. Mass Effect 3 just grabbed the Fail Ball and wouldn’t give it up.

    So, I’m just going to stop rambling and say: Thank you, Mr. Knowles. Thank you for explaining why the Day 1 DLC was tacky. Thank you for this awesome blog post. And thanks for Dragon Age: Origins. It’s the game that made me want to join Bioware, and it’s always gonna have a special place in my heart.

    Thanks. :)

    (Wow, long comment is loooonnnng.)

  • Lance Davis

     Something I think you missed is that the DLC appeared to be a piece of the game they cut and sold to us. Not an ‘addition’ like most DLC, but an actual piece of the game, carved out and repackaged. The mission that begins the DLC fit into the game perfect, wasnt a weird stand out like the ME2 DLCs, then there were full on CG cutscenes, tons of dialogue, full interactions between your new squadmate, the other squadmates and the world. The DLC was obviously original game content, Bioware says they couldn’t finish the content so they shipped the game and then polished the content and packaged it for DLC. While believable, from a player perspective the content was core content that belonged in the game and something the developer should have delayed the game to finish.

    Then again, if the ending of the game hadn’t sucked so damn bad I really wouldn’t have minded. I understand the economic side, the price of a game is pretty much set in stone but dev costs are going up. I don’t mind them needing more money if it’s worth it. It’d just be nice if they were honest, imagine BW just saying the game was freaking expensive to make and they had to do this to make a profit.

  • Ryan Morgan

     I’m sure it does still happen, no discounting that but even so how do you explain Jessica Chobot getting a somewhat major role in Mass Effect 3?  Yes I know you had nothing to do with ME3, but I know at least a dozen amateur/semi-pro VAs who could’ve done better than that so what the heck do you think happened?

  • Brent Knowles

    No idea.

    I was actually a bit surprised because generally there’s an issue when non union voice actors are used — basically if you use the union for some voice acting you are suppose to use it for *all* voice acting. Though that could have changed since I was in the industry and/or she might be part of the union.

    I just remember getting flack for trying to use non union actors in the past.

  • Faceless Minion

    Indeed, one of the main issues here is that though Bioware strenuously stated that this was made as post-work, there were plenty of indications that this wasn’t the case.  Having promised that it wasn’t remotely on the disk – and then having had people just have to change a few lines in their games to activate it – was also an egregious PR blunder.

    But really?  This -does- play out as nothing more than raw, unbridled greed from the company.  If it weren’t Bioware, it might not…  But Zaeed and Shale have been available previously, not as grabs for cash, but rewards for purchasing the game new.  If they had had Javik as such?  People wouldn’t be remotely in this sort of uproar.

  • Faceless Minion

     I don’t see why The Arrival is really rage-inducing?  It was a lovely bit of content to me.

  • Ryan Morgan

     Thanks for the responses Brent.  Don’t think I’m trying to grill you or anything I’m sure you’re great I just had some questions that needed answering, and you answered honestly unlike what Bioware has been doing and all we’ve wanted is honesty all along.  So thanks man.  Sounds like you and I would get along great together.

  • Michael Johnson

    I wish you still worked at Bioware Brent. All the developers with good customer/developer integrity seem to be leaving.

    I’m afraid Bioware is only being used by EA as a marketing tactics.

    They just slap Bioware onto everything so it will sell well (ala C&C Generals 2)

    It’s looking like ME3 will be the last decent Bioware game. Which isn’t saying much considering they completely bombed the ending

  • Anonymous

    I agree that a large part of the negativity with ME3’s DLC is the “tacky” feeling it gives players. But ME3’s DLC controversy is rather tame by comparison to others. I wrote an article centered around Gears of War 3’s on the disc DLC where I believe the issue is much different..

    Reading the article you linked to in the update, the argument in support of BioWare seems to be that the foundation for the DLC to be integrated into the game existed but was not finished until after the game went gold. I’m curious if you feel other controversies like the Gears of War 3 DLC transcend tackiness and rise to the level of evil, malicious, or fundamentally wrong.

    When the content is complete and on the disc, but inaccessible save for an unlock key (again not the issue here with ME3) what are your thoughts? Here’s a link to the article I wrote if you’re interested:

    http://clevermusings.net/2011/11/dlc-already-on-the-disc/

  • Brent Knowles

    Thanks for the kind words Michael. I still think BioWare is a strong developer though. As you said ME3 is a decent game, despite the ending not satisfying *all* players. I suspect EA doesn’t have quite the influence that many think it does. Sometimes a game developer simply tweaks the direction they are headed, in terms of the games they make. Sometimes maybe they rush when they should have taken their time a bit more.
    BioWare still has many, many talented individuals. By most accounts 95% of Mass Effect was pretty good.

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