I totally agree that the little tugs of DLC are usually complete garbage, and are a dumb cash grab. The games that run on a regular $60 model that also throw in microtransactions everywhere are also a huge letdown. I'm sure there was a meeting somewhere where people thought "What if we use the free to play model, but make them pay for it too???!>!" and it seemed like gold.
There are games like Battlefield 3 and 4, and The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us that have roped me in to purchasing their season passes. I find the content being offered to be worth my investment (ESPECIALLY with the TellTale games). It looks like developers and publishers haven't really gotten the hang of DLC. Looking at how Japan deals with DLC is especially egregious. Looking at the eternity of skins and costumes in fighting games and now RPGs really irks me.
I find big chunky story DLC (Dead Space 2&3, Bioshock 2's Minerva's Den, Dishonored's DLC, and the GTA 4 DLC) to be what hooks me the most. I really love being brought back into worlds that I have grown to love and getting to experience more of it in a meaningful way.
HEY XBOX!
This thing feels like it came in pretty hot. There is a lot of functionality that feels underdeveloped (Lack of streaming, snapped video not working always as intended, strange exclusions of optical audio settings, and I've heard some rumblings about other weirdness), and it feels like this won't be fulfilling all of the Microsoft promises right out of the gate. It's a big box and it's got the apparently quite scary Kinect attached. Is anyone actually afraid of this thing destroying their privacy?
Anyways, it's a bit of a mess out of the gate, but holy heck does it ever feel like the future. Talking to it to record, snap windows, search, boot the thing, turn it off, access your home theatre is INCREDIBLE. It makes the old gen systems feel very antiquated when I start them up. The general ease of use of the system has started to shift my opinion of physical media. It blazes from one application to another and multitasks one main window and a snapped window of video or your party or whatever.... And this general speed of the system has made me want to just have my games digitally on the system. When I'm done watching
Jeff Green be terrible at Dark Souls and I want to start playing Dead Rising, it is a bummer when I say "Xbox play Dead Rising 3" and it stops to tell me that the disc isn't in the machine. Whaaaaaaat? I have to get up and put this disc in?
I'm just going to let you guys know - getting up, taking a disc out, putting it away, and then placing another on in the slot DOES NOT feel like the future.