Since the release of Total War: Warhammer, I’ve been too busy burrowing my way through ancient mountains and gathering copious amounts of beard rings as the mighty Dwarven army, to really stop and think about Creative Assembly’s DLC practices. The release of “Blood for the blood god“, the latest piece of downloadable content for the game has finally awoken me from my Dwarven slumber however and I’m not best impressed.
Blood for the Blood god is the second “scrap” of DLC for Total War: Warhammer that unceremoniously plonked itself onto the Steam store a few days ago. At first glance, everything seems wonderful! More blood, more gore, more incomprehensible and utterly pointless violence for a Total War game!? sign me up! Drawn in by the promise of added brutality I realised I’d been duped. The DLC costs £1.99, not a massive amount to be fair… but shouldn’t blood and gore have been in the game to begin with? When you start to think about it you realise that you’ve been expertly conned even if you don’t buy the DLC, you’ve paid full price for an incomplete game. Blood, something so vital to a Total War game is being sold separately later down the line and for £1.99 I’m sure many people will throw money at it without even thinking, but it’s the implications that are problematic. It’s understandable that developers want to make more money from their games but this is not the way to go about it, the DLC has already been flooded with negative reviews on Steam proving that this kind of behaviour causes a chasm between the developer and the consumer. The argument has been made that the excessive violence was removed to keep the age rating down at release and I can appreciate the fact that Creative Assembly want to make this awesome game accessible to more people… but why charge us extra if it was going to be in the game anyway?
The evidence is mounting creative Assembly and the jury do not look happy. If we go back even further to the game’s initial DLC the “Chaos Warriors Race Pack” things don’t quite add up. The Chaos warriors are an essential part of the Warhammer universe, they are the Barbarians to the Romans, The Persians to the Greeks, yet they are only avaliable as day one DLC for the very reasonable price (sarcasm) of £5.99! This really is an abysmal business practice best left in 2012 with Mass Effect 3 and the Protheans, Creative Assembly should be ashamed of themselves for ripping off their fans in such an obvious way and should take inspiration from companies like CD PROJEKT RED and their latest title the Witcher 3. The Witcher is a great example of DLC done right, all minor and cosmetic additions made to the game were given to the player in weekly updates not withheld before release in order to extort the player base. The paid DLC that CD PROJEKT RED did eventually release were huge content filled new zones for players to enjoy, “Blood and Wine” sits comfortably with an “overwhelmingly positive” steam rating and is heralded as a masterpiece that acts as a love letter to their fans, not a swift backhand.
It’s genuinely gutting to see this sort of behaviour from a developer that makes such brilliant games and it makes you wonder if Creative Assembly feel any sense of a moral obligation to their fans. Sure it’s easy to give in and just spend your two quid on some blood spatter animations but then we’re only acknowledging this to be acceptable conduct, more will be cut and the price will go up further. I believed the gaming industry was becoming a more progressive and consumer friendly place but perhaps I’m just naive and we’ll always be stuck in the past… Horse armour anyone?
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