I'm a little late to the Stacking party, but it seems like my slacker attitude is going to pay off. I'm already at 33% completion after a few relatively short gameplay sessions, but the DLC, The Lost Hobo King is waiting for me. Stacking is an odd case in that I'm genuinely excited to dive into the DLC immediately after finishing the game. I usually consider Game of the Year editions if they're available, but often I end up in one-and-done situations. I'll finish the game with no desire to try any of the extras, or I attempt to play extra content, only to stop out of boredom or indifference. More Challenges in Arkham Asylum? Adding co-op modes to the competitive arenas of Uncharted 2 or Battlefield: Bad Company 2? Extra characters whose locations and interactions have a clearly 'tacked-on' feel in Mass Effect 2? I'll pass on all of them. The problem with all of these examples is that they use the mechanics of the game to go about content that it was not originally designed for.
The original set of Challenges in Arkham Asylum is in place mostly for the presence of a competitive multiplayer experience by way of leader boards. They also served as a place to stick the PS3 exclusive Joker playing. Modes like this have worked for some games (I completed all of the arena challenges in God of War 3) but for the most part they're bound to be an inferior addition in place simply to bolster the hour count for a game. Arkham Asylum wasn't about the combat. It was a complete package. Because this is the case, any successful extra content would have to take advantage of every aspect of the original adventure to be successful.
The rise of online co-op DLC is pretty disheartening. There's a big difference between the Zombies maps that Treyarch includes in its Call of Duty games and the co-op modes of Uncharted 2 or Bad Company 2. Zombies has maps and gameplay mechanics specifically designed for the mode itself, and even though I don't personally care for the mode, I know good design when I see it. Meanwhile, Uncharted and Battlefield take the gameplay from their single player mode, make it harder to compensate for player count, and offer it up as something worth paying for.
Mass Effect 2's DLC wasn't too far off track; you use the all of the gameplay mechanics of the original game, and the new characters and quests are on planets that were in the original game. The problem stems from the lack of depth when compared with the original game. Zaeed and Kasumi are interesting both in aesthetics and personality, but the lack of in-depth dialogue with said characters interferes greatly with the immersion the Mass Effect universe offers. If new characters are added to Mass Effect 3 after the release, I hope they get the same treatment that the original cast gets.
I'm currently only partaking in one DLC experience and it's going really well. Borderlands takes place in a setting that's initially intriguing, but quickly deteriorates. The first of the DLC's for Borderlands solves this problem by giving us a setting to explore that's a stark contrast to the vast deserts and ghost towns of the original journey. Gearbox knew what they did right (the mmo-style gameplay and pacing) and offered more of it in a new setting. I have hopes that the Borderlands DLC's will all be better than the original game - Gearbox has taken they're gameplay model, changed nothing, and simply allowed the player to exist in areas with more and stronger enemies with better loot at the end of the corpse trail.
This is what excites me about the Stacking DLC - more of the same. If done wrong, this method is viewed as lazy, boring, a rip off, etc. But Stacking has something going for it that the aforementioned games are missing, genuine charm and originality. When a world is unique, you want to explore it further; when characters are funny, you'll talk to everyone. Usually searching aimlessly for an item (or in the case of Stacking, more dolls) upsets me. "I'm already wasting time playing this game. I don't want to be wasting time inside the game too." Its an old standby for me, but in Stacking, I've abandoned the complaint. In Stacking, you're constantly rewarded for just wandering around trying stuff out. They've packed the game with content, but it's not spread over too large an area. The result is that you're in constant mini-adventures, all of which will at some point give you something to laugh (or at least smile) about. The appeal of The Lost Hobo King is that the player is playing what's essentially a sequel story. New worlds, new dolls, and new stories await. There's nothing 'tacked-on' about it, because it's essentially a whole new game, simply using the same mechanics. This wouldn't work if players got bored with the world of Stacking by the end of the original story, but as we know, boring isn't what Tim Schafer does.
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