A sad day for DLCs
By JoeyRavn 12 Comments
09/07 was a day marked in the calendar of many, many RPG fans. Bioware was releasing not one, but two DLCs for their most popular games right now-- Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins-- Lair of the Shadow Broker and Witch Hunt, respectively. Both were supposed to be a massive addition to their respective games. Lair of the Shadow Broker is the biggest DLC for ME2, both in scope and story-wise, beginning to bridge the gap between ME2 and the future ME3. Witch Hunt, on the other hand, was supposed to bring closure to the Original Dragon Age: Origins storyline, reuniting your character, the Grey Warden, with Morrigan, who had went away after the final battle in the game. The DLC's main purpose was to tidy up the story a bit and finally untangle some major plot loose ends, to make room for Dragon Age II.
They both failed epically.
The original PC release of Lair of the Shadow Broker was a 1.5GB file full of zeroes. 0 = nothing, garbage data. So you, and a couple thousands of other users, downloaded 1.5GB of absolutely useless nothing. The fact that the file was still available for download several hours after Bioware had acknowledged the problem did not help at all. People kept downloading the DLC only to find it was worthless.
Witch Hunt had only one bug, but a major one. If you've played Dragon Age: Origins, you know that Morrigan may play a key part in the resolution of the fight with the Archdemon. Well, if you play through Witch Hunt, in the end you find a heartbreaking bug (spoilers for Dragon Age: Origins follow):
I like DLCs, specially if they add to and expand the plot of the game. But seeing a BIG company like Bioware royally screw up not once, but twice on the same day with their DLCs is beyond my understanding. What about quality control? I can understand that LotSB may have been corrupted while uploading it, if that's what Bioware wants us to believe, but no one dowloaded the file to see if it was OK before going live? No one played Witch Hunt to see if, at least, the major plot-changing decisions worked as they were intended? I know many people consider DLCs a cheap way to deliver an unfinished game and then cash-in with big paid patches... For the most part, I don't agree with this view, and I understand that bugs are unavoidable, but seeing a big and respected developer like Bioware let such huge failures slip by makes me real sad. The ME2 DLC has already been fixed and Bioware is working on Witch Hunt right now, but still... something like this shouldn't have happened.