If you seize downloadable content material for a recreation, typically, you’re anticipating extra of the identical expertise: a couple of additional hours, some new gear, maybe a boss battle the bottom recreation didn’t have room for. What if, as an alternative of latest outfits and a handful of fetch quests, a DLC determined to crown you the brand new god of insanity? What if it dropped you into hell to cease a president’s wedding ceremony, or handed your entire story over to a young person narrating her personal homebrew Dungeons & Dragons marketing campaign (full with a dragon she very clearly made up 5 minutes in the past)?
The perfect DLCs of all time took their most important story and had the boldness to dream up wild new experiences for devoted gamers. Every of those 9 recreation expansions took a giant swing, and has been remembered for that creativity ever since.
9
Fallout: New Vegas – Previous World Blues
How this one broke its recreation: Your mind will get stolen by speaking robotic scientists… and also you spend the entire DLC chasing it down in a jar.
Obsidian’s growth to the sixth main Fallout recreation opens with the Courier waking up on an working desk in a secret Fifties analysis facility known as Huge MT, lacking their mind, coronary heart, and backbone. The place have your very important organs gone, you ask? Fabulous query. They’ve been stolen by the Suppose Tank, 5 disembodied scientist brains floating in jars. They don’t keep in mind why they took your backbone, so don’t ask them! Getting your organs again means wandering a pulp sci-fi wasteland filled with speaking home equipment, a sentient vacuum named Muggy who’s obsessive about cleansing your face – beautiful, thanks Muggy, now cease that – and a rogue scientist hiding out as a floating robobrain. Fallout: New Vegas constructed its popularity on grounded factional politics. Previous World Blues concentrates on mad-scientist slapstick, as an alternative, however does so with writing pretty much as good as something you’ll see within the base recreation.
8
Mass Impact 3 – Citadel
How this one broke its recreation: You fistfight a clone of your self in a museum, then throw a cocktail party for your entire crew like nothing occurred.
By the point Mass Impact 3: Citadel dropped, protagonist Commander Shepard had spent two full video games holding the galaxy collectively via sheer drive of will. This DLC’s reply to that stress was easy, and intensely relatable: Let Shepard punch a clone of themselves via a museum, then throw a cocktail party the place your entire crew – dwelling, useless, in every single place in between, throughout the entire trilogy – reveals as much as roast one another and relive the glory days. There’s a heist on this DLC. There’s a on line casino. There’s a second the place the sport stops pretending it’s not fan service and simply provides you precisely what you need. After three video games of nonstop apocalypse, Citadel lets its characters simply be joyful for a minute, and it feels unbelievable.
7
Saints Row 4 – Gat Out of Hell
How this one broke its recreation: You fly via precise hell on demon wings to cease the president from marrying Devil.
Saints Row 4 already had its Boss-turned-President preventing off an alien empire with superpowers. Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell escalates from there… one way or the other. Devil has struck a take care of the alien overlord Zinyak, and a part of the association includes marrying off the Boss to seal it. Johnny Gat and Kinzie Kensington fly into hell itself – utilizing literal demon wings, as a result of why wouldn’t you, given the chance? – to crash the marriage earlier than it occurs. You’re rewarded with an authentic, absolutely staged musical quantity the place Devil, voiced by Travis Willingham, belts out a Disney-villain-style showstopper about controlling his daughter’s destiny. What else are you in search of in a DLC!?
6
Borderlands 2 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Maintain
How this one broke its recreation: A teenage bomb skilled narrates your entire recreation as a D&D marketing campaign, and the “dragon” is a skeletal robotic she made up on the spot.
For only one DLC, Borderlands 2 stops being a sci-fi looter shooter and turns into a tabletop RPG, narrated dwell by teenage bomb skilled Tiny Tina as she runs her homebrew “Bunkers & Badasses” marketing campaign. Weapons get reskinned to be swords and staves, bandits are actually orcs, and the sport’s personal environments warp mid-sentence based mostly on no matter Tina decides to improvise subsequent… together with a dragon that’s actually a jury-rigged robotic. Beneath the fantasy chaos, Tina is struggling – she’s working via grief over a pal’s demise by burying it in cube rolls and made-up monsters, however the recreation chooses to let gamers determine that out whereas retaining the primary deal with the wild Dungeons & Dragons shenanigans.
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5
Purple Lifeless Redemption – Undead Nightmare
How this one broke its recreation: John Marston hunts Bigfoot and fights off zombie hordes with a co-op survival mode bolted onto an elegy for the Previous West.
Purple Lifeless Redemption spends its total runtime being a sluggish, mournful ode to the vanishing American West. Undead Nightmare responds to that vibe by unleashing a zombie plague throughout that very same frontier and handing John Marston a shotgun. Out of the blue, you’re looking undead variations of legendary animals like Bigfoot, keeping off zombie hordes in a brand new four-player mode, and watching acquainted cities get utterly overrun whereas facet characters react with the identical deadpan seriousness they’d convey to a cattle dispute. It’s a full style swap, however one the sport takes utterly in stride.
How this one broke its recreation: You change into the brand new god of insanity by successful a jester-and-jailer energy battle no one noticed coming.
Cyrodiil, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion’s most important setting, is a reasonably standard medieval fantasy province. Shivering Isles, Bethesda’s 2007 growth, drops gamers into the realm of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Insanity. This explicit realm has two distinct halves to discover and, ah, get pleasure from: Mania – a garish, hyperactive land of manic pleasure; and Dementia, a darkish, paranoid world of gnarled roots, decay, and basic gloom. Working via each halves of this odd place earns gamers the realm’s throne – thereby reworking them into the brand new god of insanity. Along with a crown, although, you additionally get the Wabbajack, a workers that transforms anybody you swing it at right into a random creature. (A sheep? A crab? One other god?) That weapon alone is value downloading the DLC.
3
The Sims 4 – StrangerVille
How this one broke its recreation: Your Sim goes grocery purchasing in a city secretly contaminated by a parasitic alien hive-mind, and somebody (you) has to reserve it.
The Sims has typically been a chill, cozy recreation about paying payments, constructing relationships, and sometimes setting a kitchen on fireplace. StrangerVille, a 2019 recreation pack for The Sims 4, interrupts that comforting gameplay expertise with a full authorities conspiracy. On this DLC, your Sim strikes right into a quarantined desert city the place residents are getting contaminated by a parasitic alien hive thoughts, full with glowing crystal growths and unnervingly synchronized dialogue. It’s fairly the sci-fi swing for a life sim, however you’re by no means allowed to overlook for a second that you just’re nonetheless enjoying The Sims. Wish to examine a body-horror alien conspiracy whereas nonetheless ensuring your Sim’s utilizing the toilet and consuming sufficient? That is your DLC.
2
The Witcher 3 – Hearts of Stone
How this one broke its recreation: You crash a marriage, battle a person’s reflection, and lower a take care of a service provider who’s operating all of existence.
Most of The Witcher 3 is about monster contracts and continent-spanning politics. Hearts of Stone, CD Projekt Purple’s 2015 growth, narrows down to 1 man’s unhealthy take care of the satan. Within the DLC, Geralt will get employed by the rich, cursed Olgierd von Everec to finish three unimaginable duties… together with crashing his personal ex’s wedding ceremony and preventing a dwelling reflection of himself, all brokered by a service provider named Gaunter O’Dimm who, spoilers, seems to be operating one thing a lot bigger than only one contract.
1
Outer Wilds – Echoes of the Eye
How this one broke its recreation: An area thriller hides a village that erased its personal reminiscence… plus one thing in the dead of night that’s stalking you.
Outer Wilds is a delicate, melancholy recreation about looping via the final 22 minutes earlier than a solar dies. You’re piecing collectively an historical thriller with a curiosity that the sport’s time mechanic grants you (as an alternative of extra of a race-to-the-finish, wracked-with-dread scenario). Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, the sport’s 2021 DLC, introduces a sixth location to discover, one hidden in plain sight: A cloaked construction orbiting the solar, containing a complete simulated village who erased their very own historical past out of collective guilt. You’ll spend a whole lot of this DLC navigating in near-total darkness…or being chased and actively hunted by light-sensing elk-birds. Your alternative!
Even the wildest DLC wants a stable recreation to swerve away from, or the swerve doesn’t land. Each base recreation on this checklist was already sturdy sufficient to face by itself – New Vegas didn’t want brain-jar scientists to work, and Oblivion didn’t want a insanity god to be value enjoying. That’s the widespread DNA right here: Studios that had constructed one thing sturdy sufficient to belief it, assured sufficient handy gamers a portal to hell, an alien hive-mind below a suburban cul-de-sac, or a crown that makes you ruler of a complete realm of insanity…. and guess that gamers would play anyway. For these 9 DLCs, that confidence turned out to be well-placed.