Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Tears of the Kingdom – DLC?

Link flying around on a patched together vehicle

Several gaming media sites have picked up on a remark from the official website for Tears of the Kingdom, where it states at the bottom of the page:

**Full version of game required to use DLC. Sold separately.

This currently gets treated like a semi-confirmation that the game will have DLC. However, if you look at what the double asterisk is pointing at, it's just a statement that buying the digital version of the game will score you My Nintendo Gold Points, which can be used to buy other games and DLC. It only says DLC in general, not that this game will get DLC. There is simply a misunderstanding here and nothing is confirmed yet.

But this still raises the question whether Tears of the Kingdom could or even should potentially get DLC or not. After all, the whole development of the game began with more DLC ideas for Breath of the Wild, which became so substantial that Aonuma decided to make a new game out of it. And after five years of development you would think that they put every possible idea that they could have had for Breath of the Wild into this game already...

On the other hand Nintendo certainly will want to milk this cow and judging from Fire Emblem Engage they are no stranger anymore to selling already finished contents as DLC. So, they could just cut out certain features from Tears of the Kingdom and sell them separately to make more money out of this behemoth of a game.

I personally hope that this won't be the case, of course, especially since I thought that the Expansion Pass for Breath of the Wild was absolutely mediocre and they should not repeat DLC in the same format. If they were to sell another Master Mode as DLC, to drop armor pieces randomly all over the world, or to withhold quality of life features again, I would just hate it. The Expansion Pass for Breath of the Wild was DLC done wrong, at least for the most part.

If they are going to sell DLC again, it needs to be something more substantial. Let's say that the map of Breath of the Wild was only expanded vertically, then finally breaking out of its horizontal borders would make for an excellent expansion. For example, they could let you put together a boat, which lets you explore an ocean realm in the same style as The Wind Waker. Needless to say that this also should be something that the Zelda team has only started working on.

And here lies another problem: they have spent over ten years working on Breath of the Wild and its sequel now. It's very likely that they want to move on to something new entirely. They even need to if they don't want the next Nintendo console to go without a major Zelda games for many years, like the Wii U did.

1 comment:

Raul said...

Hopefully they don't lock a hard mode behind dlc again. But other than that if I end up loving the base game which i probably will (assuming it's BotW but better) don't mind supporting dlc. Same with other games. But I also rarely buy dlc in general outside of Smash