Writer James Bishop explores the problems of narrative downloadable content, the stumbling blocks games like Dragon Age have encountered in their DLC efforts, and what makes BioShock 2's new Minerva's Den succeed.
Gone Home was one of the first games upon which the term ‘walking simulator’ was bestowed, games in which you move around an environment, seeking out interactive artefacts and/or triggering audio and video logs that, together, tell a story - the interaction and player agency coming from the order and pacing through which you uncover moments of interest.
Your resultant depth of understanding is determined by how far you're willing to explore both the world around you and how you decide to interpret what you've seen, heard and ingested.
Here Steve Gaynor of The Fullbright Company (Gone Home, Tacoma) talks to Indie By Design's John Robertson about the progress he and his studio has made since Gone Home, what is the core nature of his games and how he goes about constructing and designing them. We also discuss his work on the Bioshock series and where games as a whole sit within wider culture and why they find themselves in their current position.
Aaron at IGCritic says "Many have come to think of the term DLC as standing for Downright Lazy Cash-grabbing as opposed to what it is usually intended as; additional content."
Kotaku:
"Whether it's a good old-fashioned expansion pack or modern DLC, spinning additional content for already-released games has been a standard practice in the industry for decades. But the best expansions do more than simply add a few extra hours of the same game for you to play. They enhance the ideas and systems explored in their parent games, condensing them down into a smaller, tighter package that function as self-contained entities."
