Why DLC Needs More Brains

Borderlands – The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned

Much downloadable content seems to me to be somewhat conceptually broken. No no, I’m just overthinking it right? People like a game, they want more of it, and so the developers make some more and sell it out. Simple right? Hmm, I’m not convinced.

I don’t have a problem with developers offering more content to those who want it, after all they’re just a different scale of expansion pack really (my other misgivings aside). My problem largely stems from the type of game DLC is often being made for and the way it is integrated. Take the Zombie Island DLC for Borderlands: I enjoyed it, liked the areas and the new environments and had fun playing it, but the way it was integrated just seemed utterly incongruous and entirely at odds with the rest of the game.

First off is the geography. The DLC area is not actually relative to anywhere on the map, it’s a magical, far away land that can only be reached by means of fast transport. It could be anywhere and so might as well be an alternate plane of reality. This leads to a second problem which is as there is no real route to it the island only appears in the fast-transport list and right at the beginning of the game too. I presume these were intentional, designed to allow the gamer play their new DLC straight-away rather than locking it away in the latter stages of the game. Fair enough, I can understand that. Of course this leads on to another problem though: where as every other part of the game has fixed levels of difficulty requiring your character to be of roughly of a certain level, zombie island has to scale to allow almost any level of character to play through. A useful mechanic certainly, but your suspension of disbelief gets a little tested by the way zombie island missions simply scale along with you while the regular, mainland ones inexorably become trivial. The DLC missions are always at a fixed difficulty with relation to your current level and will scale even as you work through them (though playthrough one caps at lvl35). With the difficulty being immutable in this way you cannot simply grind up some more levels elsewhere and come back stronger nor can you skip side-missions in order to make things tougher, meaning that the difficulty must be set just right. Naturally in this fine balance the developers erred on the side of caution and as a result zombie island was rather easy, even with multiple players, and there was nothing you could do about it. Well, actually you could go there before level 10 to make it harder as that seems to be the minimum they’ll go, but this of course raises another issue, that of breaking the story. Being set after the end of the game it’s a touch incongruous to experience the DLC story before you’ve even left the Arid Badlands starting area. The solution to this is to make the story itself rather unrelated and ineffectual to the main plot, after all how critical can a piece of plot be if you can play it any point in the game without ruining the rest of it? Great. That’s exactly what I wanted.

It’s perfectly feasible to add more content to the game in a way that fits in with original title – alter the map slightly and put an exit by the coast for example. You have to reach that spot for your first visit, then obviously you can fast travel in from then on. This would solve many of the conceptual issues of difficulty and story placement and also just the arbitrary nature of warping to a new playground for an unrelated jaunt. Perhaps the story might need changing, but you would at least know what kind of time scale you had to play with. However, this of course comes at the sacrifice of not letting someone who has just paid for their DLC have access to it right away unless they have a character in roughly the right spot. This wouldn’t make for happy consumers.

So you’re faced with the choice between something that amounts to a short interlude which, due to its brevity, fails to re-create the magic of the original, or having to grind through hours and hours of the game again simply to access the small segment you’ve just paid for (which is again hamstrung by brevity), something you might have to repeat for each new pack. Neither is really an inviting prospect and it’s for this reason that I think this particular model is broken or at least needs a little thought.