Demonstrably Locked Content

Cody and one of his alternate costumes found on the SFxT disc.
Picture from Shoryuken.com

I felt a certain amount of irony last night, after I finally got around to playing DLC Quest, to then read about Street Fighter X Tekken having 12 downloadable characters on the game disc and that Capcom state it is to ensure compatibility between buyers and non buyers. The first comment on that article authoritively states: "Duh. Anybody that knows a single fucking thing about how games are made knows why DLC is on-disk. Whining babies don't know what the fuck they're talking about."

Okay, so there is a grain of truth in that first comment, DLC for consoles isn't just like modding on a PC or something, where dropping some new files into the correct folder will automatically be picked up by the game engine. With the console expecting all data to come from a disc (or a hard drive seamlessly pretending to be a disc), you have to know in advance how you're going to store extra content on disc and roughly what sort of content you'll be able to add.

This commenter clearly forgets the fact that just last year there was an update to Super Streetfighter 4 though, which added 4 new characters that were not originally on the game disc. To allow compatibility here a free update was made available to all players, which allowed them to play against the new characters but not use them. This all proves that it is possible to add bonus characters that aren't on the disc but that it takes more work to do so. The Arcade Edition update was the best example of a DLC update for a fighting game so far and I hoped that would be the approach taken by most in future. But of course not even Capcom themselves would take a consistent approach internally, with Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 being a brand new game, only available at retail (another game with 2 DLC characters on disc). Why people are willing to jump to Capcom's defense for taking the easy route I can't understand - other than wanting to brag about knowing how to make games.

With this case in particular, these unlockable characters feel like something that you would have previously gained access to by playing the game, in a similar fashion to the additional characters in Street Fighter 4. What I think might be a better approach is to follow the example of free to play mobile games, where everything can be unlocked eventually just by playing the game but you can also pay to unlock features if you are impatient. I'm sure that this would have been a welcome feature in Street Fighter 4, as unlocking all of the additional characters took a considerable amount of time. This was a frustrating task if you took the game around to a friends house or were trying to run a tournament. In those cases you wouldn't feel aggrieved about paying a little extra to unlock characters and those who don't pay would still have the same experience in the end. I'm sure this wouldn't please everyone but I think it would lead to a lot less backlash overall.

I wasn't always so critical towards DLC in general, I guess my initial idea of how it would work relied on 3 assumptions though:

1. It wouldn't be that expensive.
2. New content would be mostly created after the game was released.
3. Err, that you would have to download the content.

Each of these assumptions has proven to be false in a lot of cases and more often than not it feels like content is being held back from you, rather than it being a bonus. I understand that there may be cases where projects overrun and content has to be pulled, so it is a good thing that it can eventually see the light of day via DLC. The same goes for content released the same day as the game, where the development of the DLC starts after the development of the main game is complete, even if this still seems cheap to a lot of people who aren't aware of the different production stages behind the scenes. But when most of the content makes it onto the game disc then that means that it was finished by the time the discs needed to be pressed, probably at least a month in advance and it becomes hard to justify the fact that additional work was done to create an 'unlock code'.

Sadly I feel that I have very little interest in buying this game now, the entire thing has been a clusterfuck of confusing pre-order bonus gems and these locked characters are just the icing on the cake. I may feel especially strongly about this since one of the characters is Cody, a character I play quite a lot. I feel like Capcom have burned a lot of bridges that they have built in bringing people back to fighting games by the approach they have been taking. This constant monetization and new versions of games has shown that they haven't really changed from their approach in the 90's where they ran the Street Fighter series into the ground through a multitude of different versions. I thought better of it as I don't know for sure but I really wanted to reply to that first comment with: "Yeah, I know about making games and I know exactly why this happens - money."