You shouldn’t be angry about The Witcher 3’s expansion pass

The internet is pissed off at CD Projekt RED today.

“Quick question,” Marius U begins on the official Witcher Facebook page, “Why is steam charging $25 for witcher [sic]3 DLC pass when CD project red [sic] said they wont [sic] charge for any dlc’s [sic] in order to stand out from other blood suckers like EA?”

Sick.

I get it, sort of. How dare a developer make a game and announce thirty additional hours of content outside the main game before it’s even released! Right! Right?

Wrong.

Setting aside the fact that The Witcher 3 has mountains of free DLC, the game has been in development for years. YEARS. I first previewed a build of the game at E3 2013. Then 2014. And we’ve had a bunch of other hands-on time with the title since. Not only have we seen the game improve right before our very eyes, we’ve seen the amount of care and attention to detail CD Projekt RED has injected into Geralt’s latest adventure.

Hell, CD Projekt RED has delayed the game numerous times just to ensure they’ve got things just right.

The fact of the matter is that the game’s development team is mostly done with the core title, and rather than layoff staff or move directly onto another game, they’ve used their resources to produce additional content for The Witcher 3.

Thirty hours of additional content.

THIRTY.

That is a large number.

To the nay-sayers out there, this one is simple: let it go. A development cycle means developers will burn the candle at both ends to get a game as perfect as possible for release, but that still means they need to stop with enough time to get discs pressed, packaged and out to customers. Sure, day one patches mean work can continue, but entire teams aren’t needed in that process. It makes sense, to me, to use those bodies to produce additional content. Who cares if it’s announced before the game comes out? Especially in the way that CD Projekt RED did.

“We remember the time when add-on disks truly expanded games by delivering meaningful content,” CD Projekt RED’s Marcin Iwiński said in the press release announcing the content. “As gamers, we’d like to bring that back. We’ve said in the past that if we ever decide to release paid content, it will be vast in size and represent real value for the money. Both our expansions offer more hours of gameplay than quite a few standalone games out there.”

At its best, DLC nowadays offers up three to four hours of additional content at exorbitant costs.

Even by another name, the content in the expansion pass isn’t remotely close to what’s called DLC these days. Take 2K’s Evolve, which charged nearly the same amount as The Witcher 3’s expansions — $25 USD — for a single monster. Call of Duty map packs cost around $25 USD. Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s Season Pass cost around that and offered up one short piece of DLC before being cancelled and refunded altogether.

Don’t even get me started on Evolve’s bucketload of cosmetic DLC, which totalled a whopping $150 AUD. Need I once again remind you that The Witcher 3 gets at least 16 pieces of DLC – some cosmetic, some not – for absolutely free?

CD Projekt RED’s expansion content should be praised, especially in light of the recent trend of full-priced re-releases of content released on last-gen only a year ago. Dark Souls II, Borderlands, Halo, God of War III, Tomb Raider… the list goes on. And on.

In the end, CD Projekt RED knocks it out of the park. “While we’re offering the Expansion Pass now, we want to make one thing clear: don’t buy it if you have any doubts. Wait for reviews or play The Witcher and see if you like it first. As always, it’s your call,” Iwiński concluded.

Pretty simple, eh? Don’t like it, don’t buy it. I plan on doing exactly what they suggest – I’ll sink hours into the main game first before I make a decision on the extra content.

And I’ll sure as hell download all of the free DLC before that.