Why Mass Effect 3's DLC will suck

And no, it has nothing to do with the ending.  Or at least, nothing to do with the fact that most people hated the ending.

Let's review:

Mass Effect 1 was all about stopping Saren from opening the super-Relay at the Citadel and starting the Reaper cycle. The DLC for that game involved you stopping a terrorist from slamming an asteroid into a planet and playing king-of-the-hill with holograms.

Mass Effect 2 was all about stopping the Collectors from, um, collecting. The DLC for that game involved you fighting a science project gone wrong, storming the Lair of the Shadow Broker, and slamming an asteroid into a Mass Relay.

My point is that the DLC for these games was not directly tied in to the plots of these games.  Yes, ME2 gave you two additional squadmates in its DLC, and the whole focus of that game was building a team for the Suicide Mission.  But both of those games felt complete without the DLC, and nothing was added to the main plot of either game after the release. The DLC was like the Tom Bombadil chapter in The Lord of the Rings; enjoyable, but totally extraneous to the plot. You could excise it (as Peter Jackson did) and not lose a thing.

Now the plot of ME3 is Stop The Reapers. So the first "real" DLC (by "real" I mean "DLC that didn't ship with the game and was also not a desperate fix designed to maintain enough interest to make DLC profitable expand on our vision for the ending") has been announced. And guess what? You're hunting for a Reaper-killer.

Let's face it: this was inevitable.  A polite way to describe ME3 is "tight," as in "it's a very tight story, with everything being about stopping the Reapers." A less polite way would be "sparse," as in "the sparseness of the side missions is a blatant giveaway that this game was horribly rushed." Remember in Mass Effect 1, when you could land on a planet and explore? Yeah, it padded the sidequests something horrible, and the copy-pasted prefab structures got old really fast, but it made the galaxy look bigger. Mass Effect 2 gave us side-quests that at least involved stumbling across missions on random planets in the middle of nowhere. Now when EDI discovers an anomaly, you just launch a probe and pick it up, rather than going down to the surface and slaughtering a bunch of bad guys.

Now you can decide whether this is an improvement or a necessary sacrifice to the "tight" storyline or a desperate time-saving measure (but it's the last one). But it means that pretty much every single element about Mass Effect 3 is about beating the Reapers.

And now we have more DLC about beating the Reapers. In other words, instead of being an extra, this is going to be an expansion of the plot. Only it's not going to actually expand the plot, because ME3 barely had one to start with. (What it had was a random string of occurences that were not linked by cause and effect, but that's a different post.) Prothy the Prothean couldn't tell you anything new about the Catalyst, remember? Likewise, Leviathan isn't going to be able to wave his magic wand and make the Reapers go away, because then there'd be nothing for the Catalyst Kid to do.

So we're going to get DLC that feels more like "stuff that we didn't have time to put in the game before we shipped it" than "random fun adventure sidequest thing." Hooray.

Now that's not to say I won't buy it. Because I do want more DLC; judging by the content of the previous games' DLC, we can expect to slam an asteroid into a Reaper someday.