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The eagerly awaited Fallout 3 downloadable content has arrived, but before you shell out the 800 points (that's $10 or £6.80) we have to warn that although your enjoyment is subjective, the length of the additional content seems to be a tad on the brief side.
Fable 2's content suffered a similar fate and was priced the same. For £6.80 worth of game, you should expect around 2 hours or less of gameplay with some added items thrown in for good measure. Now if we dissect the number of hours to complete the DLC and compare them to the hours of the full game and the cost, you might start wondering that £6.80 is perhaps a little too steep, although we concede that value for money is very much subjective.
It's easy to sit there and compare the price with say watching a movie, but these comparisons are not exactly fair because movies and games are two completely different mediums with very different perceptions of entertainment hours from the consumer. The same can be said for spending £6.80 on lunch that is devoured in 30 minutes or less. Games in general tend to be a certain length and in Fallout 3's case offers many hours of entertainment, way beyond watching a movie and eating food.
Fallout 3 can eat up the hours based on its open world free-roaming gameplay. So for gamers starting a new game and completing all the quests (basically what ships with the £39.99 disc) you could expect 30 hours plus of gameplay. Now if we were to calculate the cost of 30 hours based on the DLC pricing, Fallout 3 would cost well over £100.
We admit this is not a fair calculation, but it does highlight two points. The first, downloadable content seems to be way overpriced for what you actually get. Let's not forget that anything new for a game you like or love is well appreciated, but it seems fans are being fleeced in terms of how much they have to pay for these 2 hour extras - something many could cast a suspicious eye on and claim were withheld deliberately from the retail game to be sold later in the product's life-cycle for this rather inflated price.
The second, is the brevity of the content itself. Fallout 3 is a massive world and as already mentioned can eat up the hours. So why is it that developers are only providing small snippets of additional gameplay? why not use the world that is already there and create some new situations/missions? We're not sure how easy or hard this is to implement from a development viewpoint, but clearly this is what fans and gamers expect and would like to see.
Either way, no one forces you to buy the content, but at the end of the day if you're a fan of (X) game, then it appears that if you want the full experience, you're going to have to pay for it. Such is the nature of Digital Distribution methods for this generation. We guess gamers have to decide with their wallets whether they can agree with Digital Distribution pricing, that's the only thing you can do, but if you bail out now, don't expect a price drop in the future because unlike other goods DLC never seems to depreciate in value (Oblivion's infamous Horse Armor pack still costs 200 points).
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Date: 2009-01-27 |
| Posted by: Robert Cram |
| Source: |
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