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Day-One DLC Isn’t Always Evil, Says Borderlands 2 Guy

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Everyone hates day-one DLC. But even haters of the practice don't really understand why it exists.

The exact procedure that goes into launching a game means that developers aren't always on-hand with a game up until to the day it is launched. Teams are left free to work on bugs, patches, or extra content after the game has entered its alpha stage.

Gearbox senior producer Sean Reardon finds it unfortunate that the wider community of gamers does not understand this procedure, but to him it's also understandable. He loves working on DLC, and in fact was the producer for the DLC on the first Borderlands title. DLC, he says, is not always evil.

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"I can imagine a situation where the game is in certification for 5 weeks before it comes out. It's actually off our hands. Day one feels different to me than on-disc. On-disc means that at the time of going into certification I've done extra work and decided, you know what? I'm not going to give you that. I'm going to cordon that off and ask you for more money later on. There's a line there.

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I'm going to go home and I'm not going to get my $60 worth. Then they're going to charge me more to unlock the thing I should've gotten the first time. That's horseshit. That's actually horseshit. And I firmly believe that."

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It's safe to say you won't be seeing any on-disc DLC with Borderlands 2. Reardon says he is going to push his team to put every ounce of effort into creating a complete game for launch, and then push them even further for any potential content thereafter. "The only work that had happened before shipping Borderlands 1 was to enable the fact that we could even have DLC. There's actually a lot of work to make that possible to not exclude that option."

The first title's DLC gave players new settings, creatures, vehicles, and gameplay modes that convinced gamers to revisit their gameshelves for Borderlands 1. For those of you who were as addicted to the game as I was, the downloadable content was both a welcomed addition as well as the perfect excuse to keep playing. Any potential Borderlands 2 DLC will hopefully inspire the same amount of creativity from the development team.

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