General RPGs' Late Add-On Characters

Add-ons are, by now, a fact of life for RPGs, and video games as a whole.  Love’em or hate’em--and I know where I’ve come to stand on the matter--there’s a good chance these days that any major RPG release, and quite a few minor ones, will eventually (or immediately) be saddled with an extra adventure that you can pay to experience.  It may be a full-on extra story, or just a minor sidequest, but either way, this additional content almost inevitably comes with various new items, equipment, abilities, and/or game features to collect and earn.  It may even come with a new character who will join your party!

Hey, here’s an idea, developers?  Maybe you could, I dunno, just stop doing this?  Like, for real.  Stop.  Doing.  This.  

Stop.

Look, sometimes this isn’t a serious detriment to the RPG.  A character like Shale in Dragon Age 1, or Zaeed in Mass Effect 2, the DLCs they’re found within were available on Day 1.  Which isn’t a GOOD thing, obviously, because if an add-on is done at the time of the game’s release, then why the hell isn’t it just a part of the damn game to begin with?  But, at the very least, if you want the full experience of Zaeed or Shale as a party member who interacts with the adventure as it unfolds, it’s there to be had from the moment you acquire the game and start playing.

But generally, DLCs come out for a game after a good chunk of time has passed from its release date.  For example, the Far Harbor add-on for Fallout 4, which introduced the party member Longfellow, was finished 6 months after the game’s release.  By that time, just about any player who had started playing Fallout 4 shortly after its release date would be long since finished with its main plot and side content, so the only content that the player could utilize Longfellow in would be that of Far Harbor itself, and the later DLC package Nuka-World (which introduced its own crappy party member Gaige, who thus got even LESS time than Longfellow).  In a game where the party members to some degree react to and engage with the happenings of the story, and the introduction of new locations, that’s really frustrating.

Admittedly, this isn’t often a problem for me, personally, because I usually don’t play RPGs immediately after their launch.  Hell, it’s a miracle when I get to a game within 5 years of its publication.  So it didn’t cause any irritation for me when I played Pathfinder: Kingmaker a year after its launch, and thus had the DLC characters of Kalikke and Kanerah available to me from the start of the game to engage with and be a part of the plot.  But anyone who started playing the game on the day it released in September would almost surely have finished it, or at least been in its last stages, when the Wildcards DLC dropped in December.  If that player wanted to get the most out of the content he or she had just purchased, he or she would have to play the game through all over again to have the time and opportunity to fully experience all that the tiefling sisters offered as characters.  And hell, I was already planning to play Mass Effect 2 over again when the DLC that introduced Kasumi released--but not everyone was, so suddenly acquiring a character too late to have the chance to involve her in all the plot interactions which she was capable of, having Kasumi wind up as nothing more than an afterthought unless a whole other playthrough was initiated, had to be rather irritating to some.

And hey, I don’t always avoid the brunt of this annoyance.  I don’t actually know anything about the character Oom from Torment: Tides of Numenera, because I started playing that game the hour it came out, and finished well before Oom was completed and released.  And as it turns out, great though Tides of Numenera and its 1000-page-long script is, I don’t have 50 hours I can just conjure out of nowhere to drop on the game all over again to get to know the newbie.  

I do cut TToN a little slack on this matter, though, since Oom wasn’t something that was being sold as an extra so much as it was just a late addition of content that had been intended to be a part of the game but was unfinished as of the game’s release, and they added Oom to the game for free.

I do not extend that same generosity to Fire Emblem 16.

Hey, Nintendo!  The next time you feel like tacking a DLC onto your game that adds a whopping 4 separate characters to the cast, do you think that maybe, JUST FUCKING MAYBE, you could try releasing it just a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit earlier?  Say, perhaps, while I’m still playing the fucking game?  It ain’t like I rushed through it, either.  I only started playing 3 Houses a month after its release, and it’s not a short adventure.  Especially when you’re insane enough to go through it 4 separate times to see every path of the game, since no one warned you that you can skip the Blue Lions route and miss absolutely nothing.  Nintendo, you really couldn’t have released the damn Dickensian Sewer Rats DLC at some point before the start of my FOURTH playthrough?

No, of course not, I forgot.  You had to get the DLCs for those lounge wear cosmetics and the game mechanic of cramming rotten fish down stray cats’ throats out into the world, first.  Obviously that’s the REAL priority, here.

Thankfully, Youtube Let’s Plays exist, and I didn’t have to waste my time and money buying a frankly subpar quartet of party members I would have to play the game a fifth time to fully experience.  May the 8 Scribes have mercy on the players who began another round of FE16 in earnest solely for the sake of the Ashen Wolves characters, though.

Just...if you’re gonna add characters to the game, characters who are meant to be a legitimate part of the cast and a part of the game’s story, do it at an appropriate time.  If you HAVE to lock them behind a DLC, which you shouldn’t, because that’s fucking garbage, but if you HAVE to, release that DLC soon enough that they can be an actual part of the damn story without forcing your player to commit to a 40-hour rerun.  Because honestly, at that point, Zahua and Kasumi and the Ashen Wolves and the Devil of Caroc and Longfellow and Kalikke and Kanerah and Maneha and Mintberry Crunch and Gaige and all the rest of these tardy-to-the-party members are almost more trouble than they’re worth.