Top 10 Video Game DLCs No One Should Buy

Don’t waste your money. Welcome to WatchMojo and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 10 most pointless DLCs of all time.

For this list, we’re looking at downloadable content that added so little to a game it’s almost impossible to justify their existence.

This add-on didn’t carry a hefty price tag at the time, costing Xbox users only 400 Microsoft points, but it was still deemed to not be worth even that amount of money. These “lost challenges” probably should have stayed lost, because they were almost completely superfluous. In fact, some players felt that they’d been lied to by Rare. The bold claim that there were 12 challenges turned out to be rather misleading; there were in fact only six, it was just that you had to do them all twice. Though some of the challenges gave you a few minutes of fun, the overall experience felt like a waste of time and money.

As a pre-order bonus for the standard edition of this 2016 game, players could unlock three new missions. In them, you’ll drink a strange concoction from the tribe’s shaman and before you know it, your spirit is embodying a woolly mammoth. Yes, you heard that right. This DLC was too bizarre even for “Far Cry”, a franchise well-known for venturing into the realm of the absurd. As a cumbersome and hard to control wooly mammoth you set out to avenge your herd, which begins with you chasing a ghost rhino across the map to slaughter various groups of rhinos. And the two subsequent missions weren’t much better. If you didn’t pre-order the game, you definitely didn’t miss out.

Different retailers have long offered incentives to pre-order from them specifically, but as far as exclusive bonuses go, this felt especially cutthroat. Depending on where you reserved your copy of “Transformers: Fall of Cybertron”, you’d be treated to different skins for your favorite Transformers, making them take on the appearance of, for example, Optimus Prime in the 1980s cartoon. But plenty of fans were frustrated that to unlock all the skins you’d essentially have to pre-order multiple different copies of the same game for the codes. And then...Activision decided to release the skins in additional DLC packs, in a move that surely enraged diehards who had already paid top dollar to collect them all.

There was a lot weighing on “Destiny’s” first DLC pack. The game was still finding its feet and tensions were rising between Activision and Bungie. The story of “Destiny” thankfully has a happy ending, but this wasn’t the DLC that got it there. To be frank, “The Dark Below” added nothing of substance to the game. It had a bland, barebones story with only a few additional missions and no new cutscenes, and didn’t even have any particularly good loot to make it worth your time. But worst of all is the fact that this glorified map pack would set you back $20. It was the very definition of a rip-off.

An open-world game centered around the French Resistance during WWII, “The Saboteur” was well-received upon release. But that didn’t stop Pandemic Studios trying to improve the game even further with “The Midnight Show” add-on. Though this DLC did include a minigame and other free minor additions, it was mostly remembered for the fact it added nudity to the game’s brothels. The code to unlock said nudity, however, was only free to those buying a brand-new copy of the game – otherwise, you had to pay $5. That’s right; EA was using the promise of smut to convince people to buy the game new rather than get it second-hand.

On the face of it, a DLC adding new content and two brand-new factions to a game sounds pretty cool – but there were problems with this tantalizing offer right from the very beginning. Sure, if you bought these expansions you might run into Orcs from the new factions during the game, but most players had already finished it by the time the DLC pack came out; the pack was so hollow that it didn’t warrant a new save just to sometimes run into different Orcs. If you really wanted that content, you’d be better off getting the entire season pass and the actual good DLC content.

Ever wondered where Gladio went when he briefly left the main story of “Final Fantasy XV”? If you answered “yes”, you may want to reconsider. For all those players who couldn’t sleep at night wondering what he was up to, Square Enix released “Episode Gladiolus”, which follows him on a very brief mission thread in which he abandons his mission of protecting Noctis so he can learn how to be better at… protecting Noctis. You do a few trials, fight a boss, and unlock a shirtless outfit for Gladio. So yeah, whatever you were imagining was likely way cooler. You can definitely give this one a miss and save your $5.

If there’s one series that’s notorious for microtransactions and having way too much overpriced DLC, it’s “Dead or Alive”. But the franchise never earned this reputation more than when they started charging players to change their hair color in “Dead or Alive 6.” That’s right; it wasn’t a charge to unlock additional hair colors, it was a $1 charge to change the hair color. If you didn’t like it and wanted to change it back to the color it was before, you’d have to pay another dollar for the privilege. This was later revised so that for one ticket you could permanently unlock all the colors of a certain hairstyle, but it was still a shameless cash grab.

Re-releases of classic games can be a lot of fun, but sadly, that was NOT the case for this version of “Sonic Adventure.” First appearing on the Dreamcast, it was ported to the GameCube as the “DX” version which was then later ported to the Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2010. But this port didn’t include everything from the GameCube version. In fact, it actually stripped away the DX content that was in the original GameCube port. If you wanted to 100% the game, you had to pay for the additional missions. Pretty offensive, right? But wait, it gets worse. The earlier Gamecube re-release also came with Game Gear games, which are completely unavailable even with the DLC.

Back in the “Oblivion” days, Bethesda practically invented the trend of selling worthless cosmetic items with no gameplay advantage when they came out with horse armor for $2.50. This golden armor could be equipped to give a bit more pizazz to your trusty steed. Would it protect your horse in combat? Absolutely not, but it’ll certainly make you stand out. Since then, however, it’s been said the horse armor was ahead of its time. Now, games are awash with additional cosmetics, whether that’s skins from loot boxes or pre-order bonuses, almost none of which will actually affect the gameplay.