With Batman: Arkham Origins just around the corner, it was kind of a shock to hear about a season pass for the title. Traditionally, the format of the Arkham games didn’t lend themselves to enough DLC to warrant a season pass. When you finally read what you get for this $20 price tag and is also claimed to be a $30 value, it really doesn’t feel worth investing another 50% of the game’s original price for this extra content.
- New Millennium Skins Pack (five Batman skins and one Robin skin)
- Infinite Earths Skins Pack (five Batman skins and one Robin skin)
- Gotham by Gaslight Batman (only available in the Season Pass)
- Brightest Day Batman (only available in the Season Pass)
- Initiation – Play as Bruce Wayne in his final test
- An unrevealed story expansion
While not a fan of it, I get the attraction for developers to include extra story missions as DLC since it encourages players to not sell back their disc to Gamestop for a mere $12 so the story expansion and even the Initiation make sense to me as DLC. That said, without the knowledge of how long the expansion is, I can’t see this being worth more than $10 to $15 at most for the combo in total. Unless we are talking about The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’s Shivering Isles expansion, there isn’t much in the way of a single piece of DLC worth more than $20.
So that leaves the skins. Having fallen victim to a alcohol blur of XBox Live spending on Injustice, I have seen the appeal of skins and then the quick fall in their allure. Only a few years ago, skins were something you would play through a game in order to unlock or enter a secret code to get. Now they are transactions. Considering I will spend the majority of the game looking at the back of a black cowl, changing the logo on Batman’s or Robin’s chests doesn’t seem that appealing to my wallet. Individually if these 6 skin packs even go for $5 each, it doesn’t sell me on it. Plus, I’ll throw it out there, White Lantern Batman looks stupid. (Sorry Geoff Johns)
Batman: Arkham Origins is due out for the XBox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and Wii U on October 25th.
