I liked Final Fantasy XVI and said I would buy the DLC when released. True to my word I did, and I played the first pack. I came away remembering why I don't really like most DLC.

Echoes of the Fallen costs $10 or is $25 as part of a dual pack with more DLC coming later. For that money you get a 2-3 hour quest line only accessible if you've unlocked the final mission and done some other stuff (which I had) and involving venturing into a tower to investigate the source of some new crystals that are making their way out into the world and worrying Clive and his band of morose buddies. So you go to investigate and...it goes how you'd expect. A little bit of unspectacular sides story stuff, a whole lot of fighting including some new bosses, and some very unexciting loot because it's FF XVI and all loot is unexciting.

While I will admit that some of the boss fights are well designed here, the base FF XVI gameplay is mediocre and this doesn't fix that. The story stuff is medium tier sidequest level and there's nothing visually spectacular or exciting here. There are no set pieces anywhere near as cool as the big moments from the main campaign. Meanwhile they want $10 for this, which is 1/7th the price of the full game. For that money you get no new abilities, a very short run time on a dollar per hour basis, and just not much beyond...more of an already overlong game.

This is the value problem of DLC. It's more expensive per hour than the main game (usually) but it also doesn't add anything significant to the mechanics or the rest of it (usually.) There are, of course, exceptions (Torna The Golden Country got spun off into its own game as well as being DLC for a reason) but they are relatively rare.

And yet as someone who tends to have FOMO when it comes to games I buy a lot of this stuff, play some of it, and am almost always disappointed. This stuff is almost always made by younger teams learning how to design smaller projects, and it's good for them to get the opportunity to get their feet wet, but it should be a better value for players. The Horizon: Zero Dawn DLC is an example of a compromise between the "Whole new game" approach of Torna and the "short and mediocre" Final Fantasy XVI approach.

Echoes of the Fallen is not a miserable experience to play and it has some decent bosses for a game with generally mediocre combat, but it's just not worth the money and it doesn't feel essential.

I got a lot more out of the Final Fantasy VII Remake expansion, which had new characters to play, a much more compelling story, and some interesting new mechanics. Something at that level would have felt worth the money. Maybe the second DLC will be better.

I considered buying FF16 for about five seconds during a Black Friday sale, then remembered that I own and still haven't touched the FF7 Remake, and it makes no sense to buy another one of these before I've played the one I have. I also just wasn't that impressed by the demo.

We have had a few recent examples of good and relatively cheap DLC for triple-A titles. There's that free Valhalla DLC for GoWR that came out less than a week ago; I liked it less than a lot of people seemed to because I wasn't really looking for a roguelite from that game, but I have to admit that it's pretty robust for being free. Also, the Separate Ways DLC for RE4 was only $10 and was awesome for that price, could have easily been $20.

But there's no denying that a lot of this type of DLC is overpriced or lacking meatiness. Sorry the first FF16 effort wasn't better.

@atheistpreacher: Surprised that you didn't mention Phantom Liberty, since that was the big hit expansion this year. But you're right that there are good examples of AAA DLC, which is one of the reasons I keep buying it. It's not ALL bad. That's part of why I keep buying i. Some of it is really fun, and to be fair I think there's less of this throwaway AAA DLC than there used to be, just like there are fewer obligatory multiplayer modes.

My issue I guess is in part that theoretically this stuff should be better or cheaper than the main game. So much is already in place before DLC gets made that the designers can focus just on telling a story or inserting new gameplay wrinkles or building levels rather than the basics like developing an art style or a move set or casting actors. DLC sells fewer copies so it does have a lower budget even on a per hour basis but still, it sells enough that they could do something more interesting. And some games do!