10 Games That Should Have Just Been DLC

10 Games That Should Have Just Been DLC

Welcome to MojoPlays, and today, we’re taking a look at 10 games that would have been better off as DLC.

“Halo 3: ODST” (2009)

Calm down, don’t break out the pitchforks just yet. Listen, “ODST” is one of the best games in the franchise, okay? We don’t think any differently than you do about the game’s quality. The only gripe we have is the length of the campaign. Most “Halo” games last about ten hours, eight at minimum. “ODST” lasts barely half that long. It goes by so quickly that we have to wonder why they wasted money printing discs and throwing cases together when they could have just released it as an expansion to “Halo 3”. It would have made the same amount of money, right?

“Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown” (2012)

This may sound new to some of you younger folks out there, but there was a time where fighting games were excessively re-released. “Virtua Fighter 5” was one of those games, having two re-releases without much of a difference. With “Final Showdown”, you got two brand new fighters and…a bunch of costumes? That was the excuse for trying to triple dip on this game? At least “Ultimate Showdown” had a good enough reason in that it was VF5 optimized for modern hardware.

“Mario Party: The Top 100” (2017)

By 2017, the Nintendo 3DS already had two “Mario Party” games: “Island Tour” (the bad one) and “Star Rush” (the ginger kid of the franchise). Did we really need a third game? “Mario Party: The Top 100” was one of the most unnecessary and questionable games Nintendo has ever put out, especially when we got to see which minigames were considered the “top 100”. Most of the collection was composed of the least enjoyable minigames from the series. What made it more confusing was when “Super Mario Party” launched roughly a year later. Dudes! Why didn’t you just develop this under the new game and sell it to us as an expansion?? The 3DS died the second the Switch launched. Why did it need a THIRD “Mario Party”?

“Infamous: First Light” (2014)

Much like “Halo 3: ODST”, we aren’t saying “First Light” isn’t deserving of its roses. Honestly, we could go for a new “Infamous” game starring Fetch. But couldn’t Sony and Sucker Punch have just sold this game as an expansion to “Second Son”? Just about all of the assets of that game are reused for “First Light” anyways. Plus, it could have been a good way to further sell folks on the possibilities of games getting consistently built upon after launch a lot sooner than it wound up taking. At least Sucker Punch said they had fun developing the game!

“Crash Team Rumble” (2023)

Funny thing about “Crash Team Rumble” is that it was originally planned as a component of 2020’s “Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time”. And honestly, it should have stayed that way or have gotten canceled. Instead, it spent nearly three years longer in the oven only to come out half-baked. A small roster of characters and almost every cosmetic locked behind a grindy progression system is not worth thirty bucks, especially when the game is so unbalanced. Six months of post-launch support included? Not even worth twenty. It really should have just been shoved into “Crash 4” with bonus characters as DLC. We could have gotten a new “Spyro” game by now.

“Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II” (2010)

Given how great “The Force Unleashed” was (truly one of the best “Star Wars” games ever made!), we were psyched to hear we were getting a sequel! Dude…it was such a disappointment. “The Force Unleashed II” was roughly half the length of the first game with a rushed story that made very little sense in the end. Sure, it had a couple of cool moments, but the wait was not worth it. It may as well have been an expansion for the first game cut down to maybe an hour in length and regarded as a side story. Oh well, the past is the past.

“Dead Or Alive 5: Last Round” (2015)

Much like “Virtua Fighter 5”, “Dead Or Alive 5” got excessive with re-releases, too. The base game launched in 2012, a year before the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launched. A second revision, “Dead Or Alive 5 Plus”, was made for PS Vita a few months later in March 2013 and featured better Training options. Then, you had “Dead Or Alive 5 Ultimate” on console a few months after that, which added five characters on top of the Training features the Vita had. And two years after that, we finally came to “Last Round”, which would have one new character, two DLC characters, and get a plethora of post-launch support. Koei Tecmo…dudes…why didn’t you just make one launch on PS4 and Xbox One, then make those eight characters all DLC? Why four re-releases?

“Assassin’s Creed: Mirage” (2023)

The story of “Assassin’s Creed: Mirage” is similar to “Crash Team Rumble”. What was originally planned to be DLC for a pre-existing game apparently got “too big” and supposedly warranted its own game. Thing is that the world of “Mirage” doesn’t feel big enough for that excuse. The skill trees and equipment upgrades felt barebones, and combat felt like a joke most of the time. Failing stealth just rarely ever felt like a punishment. So…why couldn’t this have been an expansion for “Valhalla”?

Every “Call of Duty”

This conversation comes up nearly every year: “why doesn’t ‘Call of Duty’ just stick to one game and update every year?” It makes total sense, too. Rather than keep making new SKUs of games that increase to absurd file sizes every year, Activision could just cycle campaigns and maps in and out once every so often. There’s just one problem: money. “Call of Duty” rakes in billions and billions of dollars every year. Part of this is because there are people out there who only buy consoles just to play “Call of Duty”, and they and their friends are going to buy every “Call of Duty” every year. You think Activision is really gonna turn down that money?

Just About Every Sports Game in Existence

Really, the amount of money going in and out of sports games is ridiculous for what little work is actually done on them compared to the majority of the gaming industry. What is your sixty or seventy bucks going towards when you buy one of these? Not much. Next year’s game of Madden, NBA, or PGA Tour will go through a small roster change, maybe a new story for the season/career mode. But what some have found in their favorite sports games is that in reality, almost every game is just a recycled version of last year’s game. If roster updates are really the biggest changes in these games, why aren’t we just getting yearly updates? Oh yeah, for the same reason why we keep getting annual “Call of Duty” games: money.

Which game do you feel could have been DLC instead of a full game? Let us know down in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to MojoPlays for more great videos everyday.