Any you can find, really. It's all about "the more you know"...

That said, certain genres of gaming have always had such content - and typically they are in the licensed sports genre (which includes the licensed racing genre).

But we are talking about an RPG here. As stated, Bethesda coined (and ruined) the phrase with their Horse Armour. This wasn't standard for this genre of gaming (at least in my experience).

In my experience, an expansion pack does one significant thing over anything else - it adds to the gaming experience, typically by including new mechanics and options. If it doesn't do this, then it can't truly be called an expansion pack.

The problem is very complex, because of various issues. Horse Armour is notorious, simply because it is paid content that was little more than a modder could provide, for free. What we "expect" is that a company will provide more than what you can get for free from the community.

Maybe, just maybe, this is more about the growing capabilities of the modding community within gaming. They keep pushing the bar higher and higher.

You only have to see this in effect with the likes of Civilization V - they released a bunch of DLCs that were basically paid-for mods. Often, members of the community would go out and make their own versions of these DLCs, because the content that they added was so negligible.

But you also got the expansion packs - great big gameplay changing products that introduced new mechanics, which were above and beyond what a standard accomplished modder could make. They included lots of additional content which worked with such key game-changing mechanics.

Ultimately, what the so-called Expansion Pass offers is theoretical content that appears to fall between these two extremes. Gone are the days when "more of the same" is perceived as being of value. More hours of gameplay isn't as important as new gameplay, especially in a genre where games can be artificially inflated through grinding and exploration.

How do we know that the new quests aren't just a load of additional fetch quests? We don't.

How do we know that the new area isn't just a field for randomly spawning monsters? We don't.

We haven't seen the gameplay of TW3 yet, so how can we know if we want the additional content, and that it is worth another $25? We don't.

It's asking too much, and puts CDPR in a negative light. The only people who would react positively to an expansion pass are those who have already committed themselves to buying the game without having seen it.

If TW3 was a F2P (P2W) game, this expansion pass is squarely targeted at the "whales" in the community - those that support the game by buying everything for it, regardless of quality or content.

For everyone else, this is more of an entry barrier - what such people perceive is not $50 for a game and $25 for expansion(s), but $75 for a "complete" game. This is because if they enjoy the game, chances are that they will pay the extra for the expansions. The main reason that they wouldn't spend this extra $25 is if they don't like the game. In this case, they won't see that they have saved wasting $25 on expansions, but that they have wasted $50 on a game that they don't like.

The timing is all wrong, since it implies that either CDPR are desperate for cash, or greedy for cash - neither of which are ideal choices to inspire confidence in the game. These are not assertions, just implications based on the simple question of "Why do this now?" CDPR had nothing to gain and a lot to lose by their timing this before the actual release of TW3, since this does look like they are trying to ride the hype of the game, rather than it's actual quality.

Saving this for even a week after release would have made all the difference, simply because a lot of the questions would already have been answered by the game itself.

Add in that the disclaimers by iWi that players can "just wait" hints at copious amounts of reverse psychology. After all, if the players could "just wait", why didn't CDPR "just wait" to release this announcement?

If I was a true cynic, I would probably think that the increased tension over the release of TW3 is actually just a cunning marketing ploy to enhance our collective feelings of relief when it works out okay. A good "so CDPR didn't turn out to complete bastards after all" tactic that makes us feel grateful to get a mediocre game, rather than a true catastrophe...