When you pick up downloadable content for a game, generally, you’re expecting more of the same experience: a few extra hours, some new gear, perhaps a boss fight the base game didn’t have room for. What if, instead of new outfits and a handful of fetch quests, a DLC decided to crown you the new god of madness? What if it dropped you into hell to stop a president’s wedding, or handed the entire story over to a teenager narrating her own homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign (complete with a dragon she very clearly made up five minutes ago)?
Even the wildest DLC needs a solid game to swerve away from, or the swerve doesn’t land. Every base game with excellent DLC is strong enough to stand on its own. That’s the common DNA: studios that had built something sturdy enough to trust it, confident enough to hand players a portal to hell, an alien hive-mind under a suburban cul-de-sac, or a crown that makes you ruler of an entire realm of madness — and bet that players would play anyway.
For these nine DLCs, that confidence turned out to be well-placed. Here are the best DLCs of all time that took their main story and had the confidence to dream up wild new experiences for dedicated players. Each of these nine game expansions took a big swing, and has been remembered for that creativity ever since.
How this one broke its game: Your brain gets stolen by talking robot scientists… and you spend the whole DLC chasing it down in a jar. Obsidian’s expansion to the sixth major Fallout game opens with the Courier waking up on an operating table in a secret 1950s research facility called Big MT, missing their brain, heart, and spine. Where have your vital organs gone, you ask?
They’ve been stolen by the Think Tank, five disembodied scientist brains floating in jars. They don’t remember why they took your spine, so don’t ask them! Getting your organs back means wandering a pulp sci-fi wasteland full of talking appliances, a sentient vacuum named Muggy who’s obsessed with cleaning your face – lovely, thank you Muggy, now stop that – and a rogue scientist hiding out as a floating robobrain.
Fallout: New Vegas built its reputation on grounded factional politics. Old World Blues concentrates on mad-scientist slapstick, instead, but does so with writing as good as anything you’ll see in the base game. How this one broke its game: You fistfight a clone of yourself in a museum, then throw a dinner party for the entire crew like nothing happened.
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