Posted June 28, 2011
Kitad: An expansion doesn't has to be short at all. It could be a 20 hour game for 30-40 bucks that wraps up the plot of what happened in the first game.
To continue your Dragon age example, did you play Awakening?
Yes, I played it several times. I have the expansion and all of the DAO dlc. My opinion was that Awakening was good but not great. As a narrative expansion, it manages its own plot points fairly well but really resolves nothing of the storyline from the first game. That's actually fine. It exists to allow players to spend more time in the world without creating closure that would discourage people from investing in the next game. If a TW2 expansion were to follow such a model, it would end without forcing the story into a premature conclusion. To continue your Dragon age example, did you play Awakening?
As a game-mechanical expansion and refinement, I found it frustrating. For example, the drastic reduction in conversation options, even the repetitive ones, made the whole expansion feel claustrophobic to me, as did the lack of full compatibility with the world of DAO. You can't revisit post-DAO Ferelden on the original map. Granted, DAO isn't the sort of game that requires a lot of grinding and exploration, but the impossibility of additional wandering draws attention to Awakening's limitations. As expansions go, I thought Oblivion's "Knights of the Nine" and "Shivering Isles" packs were a bit better integrated into the original game.
Now, I agree that TW2's third chapter feels too short. I wish that there was more content, but I don't think the actual ending is out of place.