Whenever this game is brought up here, I frequently see people criticize the amount and cost of its DLC, which to be fair totals to nearly $80 on top of a $60 base price game. However, not only have these DLC been generally of good quality worth their asking price, how Creative Assembly has handled their release has served to strengthen the community rather than divide it between the haves and have-nots. This has been accomplished in two ways.
1. All players can experience DLC upon release
WH2 DLC comes in the form of either lord packs that add new leaders (Legendary Lords), units, and mechanics to existing races or race packs that add entirely new races to the game. But regardless of whether or not you own them, you will still see and fight against these new lords/races in your campaign. It's even possible to get some of the new units without the DLC if you merge your faction with an AI controlled one later in the campaign, at which point you gain control of all their armies, new units and old. You just can't recruit them yourself unless you own the DLC.
2. DLC releases are always paired with content updates/additions for all players
Almost every time CA has released a DLC for WH2, its corresponding update patch has included major, game-changing reworks for pre-existing races that are available to all players. Some examples of these are:
• For the prophet and Warlock DLC, the underempire mechanic was added for the Skaven, allowing them to establish secret undercities in rival factions’ settlements. This mechanic drastically strengthened the race and made them much more viable in the campaign.
• For the Vampire Coast DLC, the bloodlines mechanic was added to the Vampire Counts, which gave players the ability to customize their faction by using a unique resource called bloodkisses (gained by killing enemy heroes and faction leaders) to recruit lords from 5 different specializations that granted powerful faction-wide bonuses.
• For the Shadow and Blade DLC, CA made numerous optimization improvements to the game that collectively reduced the end-turn times for all players by as much as 60%, addressing one of the biggest complaints (especially for ME campaign players) with the game.
The one caveat here is that most of these community-wide improvements have only benefited those who own both games and thus have access to both the WH1 and WH2 races. However, thanks to how much content is unlocked by owning both and how cheaply WH1 can be bought on sale (as low as $5 now), practically everyone still active in the community does. So in effect CA is using DLC sales to subsidize the cost for improvements to the game that benefit (almost) the entire community. Because of this, everyone now gets excited for DLC releases, even those that don’t intend to buy them.
And this is all for a game that’s now nearly 2 and a half years old, in which time CA has released 2 games, including its fastest-selling TW game ever. I think this is a fantastic way to handle DLC releases and I really hope it catches on.
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