I turned on my Xbox this week to see that the expansion pack for Fable 2 had been released. I checked out the screenshots, watched the developer videos…and with my birthday coming up this Friday, I was considering dropping a few hints about it for my Birthday.
Then something stopped me cold. For some reason there was something nagging at me about buying the downloadable content. Eventually, I worked it out.
It was a line in one of the developer videos where one of the programmers, talking about how hard he was having to work, mentioned that when Fable 2 originally went gold (IE: Ready for release) he didn't get a break because he went straight to work on the downloadable content.
Can you see where I'm going with this yet?
The thing is, if Fable 2 has a fault, it's that it's incredibly short. It's short for a regular game and ridiculously short for an RPG. You can burn through the main quest in about seven hours, and to be completely honest, there's not a lot of meat in the side-quests which consist of three or four repeatable missions.
So, with that in mind, I kinda resent spending a sixty bucks on an incredibly short game, and then be expected to spend another fifteen or twenty to extend that very short experience by a couple of hours…especially when the extra content was created at the same time as the original game.
The question is a very simple one. If the game is noticeably short and if the extra content was made at the same time as the original game…why wasn't that content included with the original game to begin with?
This is a disturbing trend that I'm noticing more and more.
You see, the way this is marketed to us is that we buy our games and then, if we want to, we can buy all this extra stuff. Unfortunately, it's not really a case of buying a game and then spending more money on optional extra content. Instead, what's actually happening is, we're buying cut-down, incomplete versions of games and then have to pay more to get the 'full' content.
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