You see, I can understand that between Dagger Fall and Morrowind, Morrowind and Oblivion, or Oblivion and Skyrim, features get cut out, because they just wouldn't work out. Yeah, the (in)famous "Too little bang for the buck" precept.
What I am not buying, literally, is that the same feature/game mechanic/whatever is restored at a later time as a paying DLC because well, they ARE pretty cool to have after all, after being heavily argumented against by the Devs/Marketing team in a first time.
Do you not expect to find the same features, improved and expanded upon, in the sequel of any game ?
Did you not expect to find the same spells, stats and classes in BG2, after experimenting with them in BG1 ? The same skills, weapons, armors, creatures, lore, in FO2, after enjoying them in FO1 ? The same powers, and what not, from Kotor1 to Kotor2 ?
I can't speak for you, but I know that I did when I bought those games. So what did change between the normality of then, and the one of today ?
Does it not seem suspicious to you that, barring the valid reason of the above "not working as intended", whole locations, game features and companions get cut out from a sequel, and automagically appear again a couple of weeks after release, provided that we accepted to shell out even more money to enjoy the game as we should have to begin with ?
Its not a matter of content in terms of hours of playtime, or Go delivered through Steam.
Companies, like EA and Bethesda, perfectly know that people will want to have the whole thing. Playing vampires with limited feeding animations ? Playing the game with limited weapons ? Not quite, especially if one intends to use mods later on, that will require those as "standard" to further improve on, simply because they probably belonged to the, uh, yes, right, base game mechanics ?
Finally, Tribunal (EDIT: and Bloodmoon) was much, much more than a DLC that reintroduced half working or absent features from the base game because of a lack of time, or initial funds. It was a true expansion, by the very definition of the word, with a whole *new*
worldisland, *new* story, adding *new* creatures, *new* weapons, etc. It did not interfere with the base game in the sense that you had full base game features with the former, and only half base-game features with the latter. One could perfectly enjoy the base game mechanics to their fullest without playing a werewolf, and still can nowadays.
A DLC should remain totally independent of the base game, as new remote locations that are not mentioned anywhere in the base game (like FO3's Mothership Zeta), new non-canon companions (like ME2's Kasumi) or minimalistic graphical enhancers (like ME2's alternative armor packs). If a DLC touches existing content, it should offer a new perspective (DAO's Leliana's Song) or truly expand upon a secondary aspect of the main story arc (ME2's Shadowbrooker). DLCs should not be stupid last minute cut-out shenanigans like a part of this DLC and others (ME2's Zaeed, DA2's Exiled Prince, ME3's "get a real ending", etc.) seem to be.
EDIT: If anything touches the base game features, it should be called a patch, and provided for free.
Have them sell as many
furryelven races and Facebook graphical enhancers DLCs as they wish, but keep the base game integrity as a whole. Caution anything less, and expect to see more of
these or
these in a not so distant future.