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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1769 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 5, 2026

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I'll cheekily play ball. If you're being this pedantic then you must also admit that the term DLC is still accurate, and furthermore some expansion packs repackage or compress the game files in such a way that actually shrinks it, I think Phantom Liberty and Blood & Wine are known for this, so the term Expansion Pack is not purely descriptive as there is compression instead of expansion. Would you insist on a different term for the few expansion/DLC sets that accomplish this paradox?

No one measures how much they're willing to spend on a video game (or additional content for a game) based on how many kilobytes it takes up. The classic metric is "hours of gameplay", which is imprecise and prone to Goodharting but still more illuminating than size on disc. If content purchased separately from the base game adds extra gameplay time, then it's an expansion pack, even if it entails a refactoring of the base game's code such that its size on disc is smaller. If purchasing an expansion pack actually removed hours of gameplay from the base game, I would concede the point that this can no longer be called an expansion pack, but to the best of my knowledge this has never happened.

you must also admit that the term DLC is still accurate

My point was not that the term "DLC" is inaccurate: it was that it isn't dispositive, and that it replaced a perfectly good term which was.

If purchasing an expansion pack actually removed hours of gameplay from the base game, I would concede the point that this can no longer be called an expansion pack, but to the best of my knowledge this has never happened.

Lots of games have DLCs explicitly meant to make the game easier and therefore faster to complete.

If they are different difficulty modes, then these expansion packs give the player the option of making the game easier and faster to complete. I'm talking about a hypothetical expansion pack which, upon installation, immediately removes five missions from the base campaign.

I of course agree that there has been a large and recent shift of midwits replacing good specific terms with bad vague terms (Space, content, partner, etc). In the spirit of pedantry many expansion packs decrease the Speedrun time for a given game (Elden Ring, others), for typical gameplay, I'm quite certain that almost all recent World of Warcraft expansions (which almost nobody calls DLC, ironically) have decreased the time it takes to reach max level and play the endgame than the original game - but I would concede that decoupling the "expansion" from the world-wide overhauls and patches that come out simultaneously are difficult to decouple.

These are fair points. Typically, when I read a claim that a game contains "20 hours of gameplay", I interpret that to mean "the average player on their first playthrough will take 20 hours to complete the main quest and all the sidequests". It would be churlish to claim that e.g. Half-Life "only" contains half an hour of gameplay, even though it can be beaten in that time. While expansions which change the base game's mechanics in such a way as to facilitate speedrunning could technically be said to have "contracted" the game, speedrunners are such a noncentral example of players that they hardly seem relevant.

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