DLC vs episodic gaming

It has been a long long time.. Even too long.

Either way, I was thinking about the DLC as that seems the fad of the year or even the last couple of years. All the big games need to have one. At some point people were talking that episodic gaming might be it and only Valve really ended up doing it and burning bad doing so. I am not going to repeat the old news, but 4 years on and we are still waiting for just ep3. Sure Valve puts in the effort and delivers great experience at the end, but this is time frame I would like to wait for a full retail game.

Now looking at DLC I see all the unfulfilled expectations from episodic content realized in these DLC packs. Or at times just lazy developing (or eager publisher). Borderlands seams to be a good example to the former, as the game was one would expect out of a retail game and some of the first DLC packs improved and extended it to some lengths, while the best is that we see a pack year after the game launched. And let's not forget that all the newcomers to the game will have to buy the full retail game which should be cheaper by now so this is a great way to stimulate the second sales wave of the game.

On the other hand something that really gets in my pants are modern multiplayer FPS games. While the games are great and so forth, they come with choice of 3 weapons, and 3 maps. A week or month later, whenever you get tired of the choices, you get a DLC that gives you that little extra to keep you playing and paying. I miss the day when games came with multitude of options. Also, I do not want to say that the mod community has died down, but the developers really should embrace this by offering more community maps in these updates.