A DLC is almost a certainty for most modern video games that are released on the AAA market. It isn’t quite expected, but many games seem to hold something back with the promise of it potentially being revisited in future content, as opposed to a sequel. While this ploy for games to keep churning out further content for cash works, it isn’t always in the form players are expecting.
Sometimes, instead of releasing additional content that represents what players would expect to see next in their favorite games, the developers will try something else. This ranges wildly from absolute shifts in the gameplay style to ridiculous stories that leave gamers completely baffled. Strange expansions for games are nothing new, but there are some that still have players scratching their heads to this day. These are some of the best experimental expansions that were released.
7 Snoop Dogg Voices (Call Of Duty Ghosts)
It seems like a strange idea for a Call of Duty game to offer players the opportunity to add Snoop Dogg to their game, but that is exactly what happened with Call of Duty: Ghosts. For the low price of three dollars, players could get Snoop Dogg’s voice narrating pretty much everything that went on during their multiplayer games.
While this may seem more like an unusual mod made by the community, it was in fact a real piece of DLC added to the game. Narrating firefights, talking about enemy activity and kill streaks, Snoop Dogg’s addition was said in the official DLC description to be “giving your combat style some street cred. Ya dig?” Fortunately, players loved the campaign of Ghosts and there was plenty of other great content available.
6 Horse Armor (The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion)
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was released before the advent of expansion packs being released with practically every major game. As such, Bethesda hadn’t quite worked out how to give players a real bang for their buck with DLC. Instead of adding new campaigns, missions, or even weapons to the game, the first available piece of DLC added horse armor.
Available in either Elven or steel variations, the horse armor would raise the health bar of the player’s steed without really doing a lot else besides changing the cosmetics of the beast. There were eight varieties of horse armor styles that came in the pack, but this didn’t really make up for the fact that the whole DLC was just based on horse protection. Nevertheless, it has not tarnished Oblivion's fantastic reputation among fans.
5 The Champions Ballad (Breath Of The Wild)
In essence, The Champions Ballad was a great piece of DLC that gave The Legend of Zelda players exactly what they wanted out of additional content for Breath of the Wild. There were new missions, and dungeons, there was more story was added, and they even got more costumes available for Link. There were new weapons and rewards, but one detail was especially unusual and made the whole thing feel experimental.
After completing the new dungeons and story added to the game by the DLC, players would receive an additional reward which many found quite strange. It was a motorbike, or the Master Cycle 0 Motorcycle, which was meant to be a new futuristic mount. While it was insane to see something so futuristic in a Legend of Zelda game like Breath of the Wild, many began wondering if this was an experiment into possibly delving into the future with a Zelda game at some stage.
4 Enter The Dominatrix (Saints Row 4)
Enter the Dominatrix contains one of the strangest DLC stories ever seen in video gaming. However, the story behind the making of this DLC is even stranger. Originally announced on the Saints Row website as an April Fool’s joke in 2012, fans begged for this to be made a reality. After being announced and then canceled, so the team could work on it as part of Saint’s Row IV instead of III, the DLC was finally released in stand-alone format for the fourth game.
Enter the Dominatrix contains a story about an AI called the Dominatrix which takes over Zinyak’s empire after he is killed. Very tongue-in-cheek in style, this DLC knew exactly how ridiculous it was and players loved every minute of it.
3 The Midnight Show (The Saboteur)
The Saboteur is a game which is set in France during World War II, and the neo-noir open-world style was pretty successful among fans and critics when it was released in 2009. There was a lot to keep players interested, including the shady bars and clubs in which the player character could find themselves.
However, The Midnight Show DLC was a confusing one, because it didn’t really end up adding much to the game besides removing the shirts of almost every brothel girl throughout the game. So basically a nudity add-on, this DLC was incredibly controversial at the time and remains one of the weirder instances of DLC in a major game.
2 True Ending (Asura’s Wrath)
Asura’s Wrath is another major game that found some serious controversy in the release of a DLC. Released in 2012, Asura’s Wrath followed a demigod seeking vengeance against the other demigods who have been involved in betraying him. The episodic style of the game made it easy for Capcom to leave the final section out of the base game completely.
The decision to release Episode IV, which included the “true ending” to the game as a DLC was hugely controversial. Having already priced Asura’s Wrath highly, fans were outraged at the idea they would have to pay even more to see what the developers deemed the true final ending of the game.
1 3C3C1D119440927 (Nier Automata)
Nier Automata wins the prize for the weirdest DLC name, but what the DLC contained was also one of the stranger things gamers have witnessed. The style of Nier Automata is already particularly unusual and has some great characters, but the DLC made gamers go through a very strange challenge to unlock new outfits and content.
After going through the various coliseums and trials available in the DLC, players can unlock a fight with the Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda and the Platinum Games head Kenichi Sato, making for one of the stranger sequences in video game history.