The DLC that shouldn't have been discussion

Hey guys, I'm pretty new to the forums. I'm a Dark Souls addict, so I feel right at home.

I have had a very distinct feeling lately that this DLC was supposed to
be in the game to begin with. This is not a rage thread or anything though, I'm quite happy to have spent 10 pounds for this, as I love Dark Souls and meeting Artorias and co. and having new stuff to explore was pretty cool. Still, I'm convinced this material shouldn't have been sold separately. I'll be mentioning a couple of points where I think the evidence supports my theory, but I warn you, wall of text ahead. (Disclaimer: This is merely my opinion, just wanting to share my thoughts)

a) I said in another thread I had read an interview with Miyazaki about DLC and I found it. Link is here.

It reads:

Namco has previously stated that there are no plans for Dark Souls
DLC, and you similarly did not do downloadable additions for Demon’s
Souls. Is there a reason that you don’t think DLC works well for the
Souls games or could you see that being a possibility in the future?

My point of view for DLC is as follows: Items such as strong weapons,
spells, and armor are rewards for players for being able to overcome a
difficulty. So I am not going to provide those items as DLC. Also, I
wanted to create a complete package of the game without adding any DLC.
That is the reason why I am not planning any DLC for Dark Souls.

Sure, it doesn't rule out the possibility. But this is the guy who has his will with creating the game, he is in charge of it and his opinion seems to be that he's not a fan of DLC. He favours complete packages as mentioned. You can argue things change, but I have the impression that this man wouldn't change his principles, which at the end of the day I think is what this is about. DLC is rarely if ever done to add new, unforeseen content that was brought up through game popularity and demand. DLC is done for capitalism' sake and planned months before release date. Worth remembering nowadays we have DLC season passes... A whole bunch of content not included with the initial package so it can be profitable from later on and passed in as extra work, except it was done during game developing time. Anyway, I digress...

b)
The content isn't late game. Its access is not granted after we've gone past the finale of the game, but in the middle of it. So it's not so much extra content, using the word extra as a continuation, but more of an extra area if one fully explores the game once you have said DLC. When the player encounters this area the design seems as if it's supposed to be a surprise, and a reward for exploration, just like Painting of Ariamis. PoA exists in a very similar manner to the DLC, you find an item through exploration, you stumble on to the area, which you've been previously, with said item and a new interaction occurs bringing you to your reward - new area with more loot, etc. If you were making new content, would you add content for the middle of the game? Not saying it's absurd, but at least, less sensible to me anyway.

c) It doesn't make a lot of sense business wise, from my perspective, that one would add extra content for a port version of the game which was released based on a petition. This petition had a lot of signatures, thankfully, but they still didn't know how well this version would sell when you consider that a lot of signers might not be interested in playing the same upon its release, some might pirate it, and 90k signatures isn't a lot when you need to sell a game; so why would you spend extra money with programmers, designers, etc. on producing new content for a version of which you wouldn't know how well it would succeed? Again, you can counter argue this just as easy, but to me it doesn't make a lot of sense. Specially since your original platforms sold pretty well.

d) Strongest evidence I found so far:
I was looking through the artwork book the other day, I got it because I pre-ordered the game at the time. Well, first thing that I thought was slightly weird was that in the Stone Giant's artwork, it also seemed to show the Giants of the Royal Woods in their armour. A couple of pages after, I found the Chester fella artwork. And finally, before Gwyn's artwork, is the Sanctuary Guardian one. And let me tell you, they look exactly the same as in game. Again you can argue... maybe they dropped it and then thought it was cool to use them afterwards. To me, it sounds like they may have ran out of time to implement it. Remember, these artwork pictures are old. They are done before, or during game developing time, so at least these things were on their mind back when they were developing the game. I can post these pictures if people are interested in seeing them.

e) Not very strong evidence, just a theory really. The pendant. The pendant that has no effect or use, but is supposed to have a secret effect since the director itself said it did, on more than one occasion. However... so far, no actual use has been found. Without delving into the existing pendant theories, I only wanted to mention the idea that the item that lets you into the DLC is a 'broken pedant'. The difference between a person who has the DLC bought and a person who doesn't is the fact that the golem drops this item. The question is simple, could the original pendant be the originally intended portal to Oolacile? Was that its original intent? Two items called pedant, one is new as is a portal, one is old and has no use. Food for thought here.

Now I want to state again... I love FROM. I love the Souls' games. I don't blame FROM even as I truly believe this DLC content should've been in the game to begin with. Miyazaki is a stand up guy who keeps taking risks with gaming which nowadays is unbelievably rare. I can only hope more games from FROM are released. I believe the publishers are the ones to blame, they are the ones who push the developers to hurry up and shut up when it's time to make money. After all, it's side content, nobody will really miss it.

Thanks for reading.

This thread gets my conspiracy senses tingling...... LOL what if this had been the original secret of the Pendant?!

DUM DUM DUM

(BTW Im not joking about this....Im just kinda paranoid.....)

But thats some pretty in depths stuff there mate. I can tell you are an avid Dark Souler!

The DLC was meant to be original content, but got cut due to time constraints.

DoughBOY knows all the answers.

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but I'll reply without reading your post... If I'm off base, please let me know and I'll read it!

A lot of the content that is in the DLC was planned, or at least conceived, during the Development of Dark Souls. But, like Dough said, had to be cut due to time constraints. Happens to all games in development. Some areas that are even included in the original release seem a bit rushed. The DLC, on the other hand, seems very polished--so if anything, we should be thankful for that! I really like the additional content, and I've also been overwhelmingly pleased with the original content (incredible amount of replay value), that I can be nothing but happy that we got DLC (too bad it took SO LONG to get it, though...).

not meaning to be offensive/whatever, am seriously curious, but how do you guys know the content was supposed to be in there originally? I know we have some concept art..... is there anything more solid? was the whole area in development before it got cut due to time restraints...? I am just curious, also, sorry if this has been covered before....

BLA1NE wrote: (too bad it took SO LONG to get it, though...).

I think that's the real problem. A lot of the reason why we've all been hearing a lot of people saying they're unhappy with it. We all had to wait so long, and it got built up so much, that there was almost no way it had even a remote chance of living up to what the fans built it up to be. It's not really our faults though. If they had just released it to all of us at the same time I bet we would all be happier with it. It wouldn't have become the crazy phenomenon that it did for so many months. Now that we have it we're all finding out it's just a short little DLC. I'm really enjoying it despite that though. I don't really think there's anything wrong with it at all.

@tofuC: From said something to that extent ages ago when all this stuff first started being talked about.

tofucactaur wrote:not meaning to be offensive/whatever, am seriously curious, but how do you guys know the content was supposed to be in there originally? I know we have some concept art..... is there anything more solid? was the whole area in development before it got cut due to time restraints...? I am just curious, also, sorry if this has been covered before....

This might not sound too convincing, but I watched someone's video on youtube, it was probably Epicnamebro, and he showed that the Chained Prisoner and Marvelous Chester models were in the game disk.

It was quite a while ago so I don't remember much at all, but I saw the models myself. Chester had his arms stretched out like he was on a cross and everything.

on a cross? whats the significance of that symbolism in relation to Chester?

I didn't mean it as something to do with symbolism, that was just the best way I could describe it. Isn't that some kind of default model stance? The Butchers in the Depths do it too when you slide down the thing and they attempt to chase you lol.

Oh oh yeah. I know what you mean. I misunderstood. It's kinda the default model stance for a lot of game sprites I think. I know sometimes when I'm playing company of heroes I'll have a squad that'll be under fire, so most of the soldiers will fall into defensive positions, like getting behind cover and firing back, and sometimes there will be like 1 or 2 that just stand normally with their arms outstretched like that and not dive for cover at all. It's kinda funny to see in the heat of a firefight like that.

A really nice theory from the OP. I dusted off my artbook too and indeed they are all in the book!!

Thanks for the nice read!

Probably Bandai Namco rushed them under pressure. Atlus & JapanStudio were/are far better publishers than Scamco. But there is already concensus on that one across the internet lol. ;-)

tofucactaur wrote:not meaning to be offensive/whatever, am seriously curious, but how do you guys know the content was supposed to be in there originally? I know we have some concept art..... is there anything more solid? was the whole area in development before it got cut due to time restraints...? I am just curious, also, sorry if this has been covered before....

In addition to the stuff in the artbook I remember interviews where the director has said stuff along the same lines.

@tofucactaur There is never going to be absolute evidence that this DLC was planned to be in the games' original package. Nobody from either FROM or NAMCO would ever confirm something of the sort, all we can do is guess. With that in mind, take what you want from what I wrote, as it is relative. I will say again though, I'm pretty convinced of what I'm writing.

@BLA1NE I know that these things can happen, but, I'm just not as accepting as you are with paying twice for the same content. Remember, this content was produced during game developing time. So, you and I paid for it when we paid for the original box regardless of if it came with it or not. Now, the content couldn't make it but was done... and a year later it's passed on as paid DLC and you're paying for something they produced beforeand has been paid to already. Seems fair? Not to me. Also... One of the reasons that I love FROM games is that they are unbelievably polished, which means I'm hardly going to be thankful that they did what they always do with this DLC as well. That's like being thankful an RPG has swords.

@ViralEnsign_ / TheBigLebowski Thanks.

^No, that's what I was saying: the DLC is more polished than some areas in the game. To me, that says that it was produced after--or at least polished after. Either way, it wasn't done at the time of the game's release. And also what I was saying is that what we got at release was already so satisfying and had so much replay value that I couldn't have asked for any more than that--I got my money's worth, and then some. Hell, I beat the original content at least 40 times, if not more--what kind of game has that replay value these days?!

I wish the DLC had hit back when I was still hooked on the game, but I'm still happy I got to play it now, and I'm more than happy about all the time I had with Dark Souls when I was hooked. So I can't fault From for anything here, and Namco not all that much either.

Even in the PC Version are many models who could have been in the game...but they are not.
I have seen many screenshots of complete models of weapons, armor, etc what is in the files of DKS PTD on PC - so there is still more potential. Creatives are never done, but someone must tell them 'release or die' at some point.

They got the oportunity to realize more of their ideas with the PC Version and took it

just my 2cent