Oh, DLC, how I adore your pay-to-win nature.
So we took a detour into the Jaws of Hakkon DLC around level 18, and we had a super tough time breaking in. Most of the monsters were above level 20, and we finally got a great fight out of some of the encounters. If you are fighting, dying, and running away to regroup, you finally got my attention.
We had to change up party members, take tanks, and re-equip in order to compete. We had to pour on DPS to finish fights. We lost some fights and had to come back to try again.
Finally, after sixty hours, the game is getting interesting.
But the loot! Oh, the loot. Treasure troves full of level 21 purple gear we can't use yet because the party is severely under-leveled at level 19. Big, long, juicy lists of loot. Skins and ores that net 5-10 items in each harvest! The bounty is mouth-watering, and we are taking in this almost-cheater zone with glee and gluttony. Compared to the crappy gray-item loot and paltry harvests of other zones, this DLC area is stunning in its bounty and generosity.
Get to this zone as soon as possible at 17-18 and live here until level 23-24, it is that good. I fear going back to the regular game's zones will be something of an anticlimactic let-down. To suffer through major fights and be rewarded by a normal quality item is going to kill us the next time it happens in a regular-game zone.
I have always understood pay-to-win, and we see this in regular roleplaying games. The later books in a game are always filled with power creep, better items, and game-breaking power builds. If you pay for an extra book, you are rewarded by the company in raw power and that feeling of greatness. If you ever go back to the original book's classes and builds you feel weak, and the expansion classes call to you.
More than just your ego suffers. The game's first adventures suffer as well, as they don't feel like challenges anymore. I am sure once we load our Dragon Age party up with all this level 21 loot, once we go back to the regular game's zones our party will be overpowered and blow through every fight. We will probably lament the fact we will never find stuff as good as the DLC gear, and all of our treasure finds will feel weak and paltry. We may grow bored at the lack of challenge and the lack of gear, and we will want to head back to DLC areas just to find challenge again.
And if we ever harvest in an regular-game zone and pick up a single skin or ore we will wince and know there are better, paid places to harvest that will net us a better haul for our effort.
And so it goes. Nothing changes in the world of videogames and pen-and-paper games. If you pay for expansions, you are rewarded. On the other hand, you also ruin the balance of the original game and you lose more than you gain. How so?
Let's say your DLC is $15 and your original game is $60. By paying $15 for a small subset of better items you made the rest of that $60 game out-of-date and worthless.
Now, for a videogame you pay $15 to play a little longer, so there is a benefit to the purchase. Without that DLC, you cannot continue playing. There is a value here, you keep playing.
For a pen-and-paper game, you pay money to have new options to start which invalidate your original book, and you lose the value of the original book. So when you pay for expansion content, you lose value in your original game. With videogame, you do lose value as well in the original zones not being a challenge anymore. This hits pen-and-paper games harder, and you saw this in D&D 4th Edition game, where to play you needed to keep up with the latest book's insane power curve. You see this also in Pathfinder's later books as well.
To play with others, you need to pay up and get the latest. The 'power curve DLC' a lousy business model for players, but great for pen-and-paper publishers.
But Dragon Age? Still surviving with our playthrough, and more updates and reflections on this soon as we approach the end of the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment