Thread by @gravislizard

so, i hate DLC a ton, and i'm gonna go off on it. tune out

i don't give a shit about any new economies or how things have changed in the last 20+ years since i started video jaming

DLC feels greasy as fuck and the greasiest fucking part of it is when you install a game for the first time and the very first fucking thing it does is dump DLC in your lap

every DLC I've ever seen was totally unrelated to the game. it's meta shit. it's like a joke about the game, something for the lifers, a little quip that only has value to people who have seen every square millimeter of the game, who know it down to the molecules

the last game i remember this happening for was half life, a game i tore apart so deeply (i was making my own models and animations for it at one point) that it stopped being a game to me and was just a set of tools me and friends used to express ideas

that was in like 2007. and, you know, i don't care if you're 3400 hours deep into a game, like, whatever, do whatever you want. i judge you at a distance, i won't lie, but i'll defend to the death your right to blah blah bla h

let me tell you a story about DLC that made me hate this shit permanently and i always, always will hate this shit and here's why and I'm gonna tell you.

in like 2009 i got borderlands. or maybe it was a year or two later and it was borderlands ii, i don't know. now, in a video fucking game, you learn how the game universe works. i learned how level gating worked, or whatever similar thing it did, and that told me where to go

so i was playing the game, having a good time. and then me and my boyfriend and whoever else i was playing with entered a new area, and it was hard as shit. like really fucking hard. and it was *weird*. it felt really empty.

we were dying like 20 times more than usual, but also the place just had no soul to it at all. it's like all the NPCs had disappeared and the world had died. no radio messages. no personality. it was just A Place You Could Shoot Guys If You Want I Guess

after two FUCKING days of this we finally cleared it. came back, tried to get our bearings. found out we had been in a DLC area that we hadn't known about.

i hadn't paid for it or asked for it. it was FREE, see. it was a GIFT. which was forced on me unannounced. well guess what: in order to get through that area, which we thought was the next part of the game, we accidentally powerleveled. we were like TEN FUCKING LEVELS over.

it ruined the game. i never finished it. suddenly we were untouchable, nothing could hurt us and we could kill everythign in one shot. every weapon that dropped was all red arrows across the board. it wrecked any sense of immersion instantly.

the only reason videogames work is because there is an illusion of internal consistency. it seemed like our actions had value. the illusion was completely wrecked.

so i just fired up saints row iv for kicks. i played 5 hours of it and then stopped a long time ago. i hit Continue, and the first thing it did was make me sit through THIRTY. FUCKING. DLC MESSAGES.

i don't want these! i didn't ask for them! and there's two things that suck shit about this

1) this isn't a game to me anymore. this is some companys desperate effort to wring more profit out of their product. i'm not going to forget that this game is now tainted with a bunch of "please spend $40 for this 6 year old game on sale, we'll give you a free pen"

2) i know it's going to taint the game world. i don't know how or where. everything will be fine, and then I'll pick up something kind of odd, and I won't know if it's part of the game, or some tacked on shit they had an intern make three years after the fact

i bought a product years ago. that was the last time i wanted to interact with it commercially. it is deeply offensive that the company was able to reach out and silently make me part of further marketing efforts. fuck that. that makes me nauseous. it should make you nauseous.

now i don't even want to fucking play this, because I don't want to play - ha fucking ha - the game. i don't want to be a point on someone's fucking statistics report saying "ah we now have 15.05343% pickup 6 years after release"

i've said this so many times but it bears repeating, it's revolting that ANY of us know about marketing, and the reason we know anything about marketing is because we're permanent parts of marketing. we're CONSTANTLY aware of marketing.

even after you buy someone's shit you continue being milked, it never fucking ends. and we unconsciously adopt their terminology and come to think of their shit as normal and even good.

i am absolutely uninterested in having a conversation about any of this so don't even start

oh final note: i tabbed back into the game, played it for two minutes and deleted it because i had no idea what was going on. i'm thirty. when i'm forty everyone's gonna hate me