Case for a Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes Expansion
1) Firstly sales/economic.
Frogboy already announced on one of the journals that the Downloadable content packs sell really well and are a great source of income for LH.
Secondly I’m willing to bet that the original income from hard sales of Fallen Enchantress & Legendary Heroes was below initial expectations because War of Magic didn’t meet expectations and Stardock gave out free copies of FE & LH to a large customer base.
I think this is enough reason to argue that an expansion pack around the $40-50 range would generate sufficient income if the content included was appropriate to the cost of the expansion
2) Development
-I would argue that expansions are a lot easier for any game producer than trying to make a brand new product. Why? Because the underlying engine, graphics support, AI & other systems are in place. Expansions allow for more development on improving existing features and adding new content – this gives reviewers and players much more to talk about also.
-An expansion imo carries much less financial risk and risk of a disastrous launch. I.e the dev team is not under huge pressure to build and release a new & largely untested fully functioning game to the publishers because of an underestimation in the required development time.
3) Marketing
-Expansions already have community and public support
-An expansion is going to get much more publicity than a big patch (2.0) or a series of downloadable packs.
-An expansion is a very powerful means to really ramp up public support for a game. I explored with Civ 5 Vanilla in a net café. It didn’t really do much for me so I didn’t bother buying it. I happened to read the reviews on BNW a few years later and that really excited me so I went and bought both expansions simultaneously….
-Expansions often have better reviews than new games. How many ambitious widely anticipated strategy games have had disastrous or poor launches? Remember Sim City 5, C&C4, War of Magic & Civ 5?
Regarding Civ 5 on release. It was pretty scaled back and received a lot of criticism from disappointed players. Gods and Kings expansion brought it up to a level that many players decided was acceptable with the fantastic Religions feature, but the second expansion Brave New World was what really defined it as what I think is one of the greatest 4X games in history.
To me Legendary Heroes feels like it is sortof around the Gods and Kings level or perhaps a bit below. It functions and its mostly fun but there still feels like there are many areas that need improvement before it is something that really raises the bar for the 4X experience. Many of these I would argue are fixable. Sure patches & purchasable content packs will help move the game in that direction but why stop there? An expansion promises you the financial return and allocates the dev team the sufficient resources to really bring things up to speed.
Before I go on I would argue that an expansion should not include naval warefare, ships and sailing/moving between continents unless the dev team was really sure they had the resources to do a good job of it. My reasoning is that it will take a lot of resources to implement sailing and moving across oceans & AI etc for sea battles and I’m not sure if it will really end up a shining point for the game.
Don’t get me wrong naval battles and sea exploration is interesting but it is VERY difficult to do well and I can’t help but think the dev team would be better putting their resources in things that would enhance areas of the game that already are in place.
