Watching the news cycle around Little Tina’s Wonderland the last month has been like watching the news cycle of a game on fast-forward. You know how it goes: The game comes out. Gets positive reviews, fans praise it. DLC hits, then gets slapped by fans. Eventually, it’s basically a frame. Only this time, the whole cycle happened to play out in barely more than a month.
Little Tina’s Wonderlanda spin-off of Gearbox’s long-running Border areas series of loot-shooters, released last month for consoles and PC. Just last week, the game received its first DLCcalled a dungeon run Rolled up prisoners. It is the first part of four that is included in a long-running campaign called The Mirrors of Mystery, which includes the $ 30 season pass for Wonderland. (You can purchase individual parts for $ 10.) The season pass also adds an as yet undiscovered seventh grade to Little Tina’s Wonderland.
Rolled up prisonerswhich you can access in the new Dreamveil Outlook area by Wonderland‘hub city, sees you fight your way through a series of gradually challenging battles culminating in a boss battle. Completing the challenges adds extra variable chambers and a new raid boss Chaos Chamberthe repetitive roguelit-like playoff mode of Wonderland. And in Rolled up prisoners mode, the boss himself rises every week – though you must complete each version before you can unlock the next version. It’s a new idea that forces a longer playing time through rebroadcasts. But innovation is not something you can actually chew on, and for everything in the world, this new expansion is a series of chambers that you can fight your way through repeatedly.
“One of the most important things is that it introduces that concept [of replayable dungeons] much earlier than the Chaos Chamber, ”Matt Cox, creative director at Little Tina’s Wonderlandtold me in an interview earlier this month.
About 2.7 seconds after Rolled up prisoners went live, Border areas the fans withdrew. It’s not that the DLC is not funny, they say. It’s that it’s disappointingly short – especially when you compare it to similarly priced extensions from the past Border areas game. The popular Border areas streamer Ki11erSix briefly summarized feedback on Twitter, notes to Rolled up prisoners the run itself is short, the boss is a pushover, the equipment you can earn on it is “overwhelming”, and the expectation is not in line with what Border areas fans have for extensions.
“Complain here. The whole subreddit is flooded with the same posts,” a player wrote in a semi-viral Reddit post on it Wonderland subreddit shortly after the release of Rolled up prisoners. “This thread is already longer than DLC,” another player said the same day. Many of the nearly 1,000 responses are similarly negative and say so Rolled up prisoners does not offer near the same value for money as extensions at the same price.
To some extent, the setback is understandable. Border areas games, as Ki11erSix pointed out, are actually known for offering meaty extensions after release. The first game, released in 2009, featured three expanded narrative DLCs that added additional missions and regions to the game, each available for $ 10. (A fourth extension, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot, was more of an arena mode than a narrative campaign. It was also up for grabs for $ 10.)
IN 2012 Borderlands 2 followed suit, and saw four long expansions in the wake of the release, each up for $ 10 apiece or totaled in a $ 30 season ticket. One of these extensions, Little Tina’s attack on Dragon Keepacts as a precursor to Little Tina’s Wonderland. Last year, Gearbox made it available as a standalone record for $ 10. That was it, too free for one week at the Epic Games Store.
Borderlands 3which was published in 2019, also contained four post-release campaigns. They were a bit more expensive than the first two games: $ 15 for each expansion, $ 50 for the season ticket. Hi inflation. Borderlands 3 ended up having one other season tickets; rather than full extensions, but the two additions—Designers cut and Director’s Cut– simply added new modes, missions and enemies to the base game. That pass cost $ 30.
So there is definitely a historical precedent for more meaty DLCs here. But on the other hand, it is not the case that Gearbox has intentionally obscured some of what is included in the season card. In all the promotional material, from the press releases to the trailers, the studio was aware of what Rolled up prisoners– and the subsequent one The Mirrors of Mystery chapters – would entail. And if you think about that Chaos Chamber is the main feature of Little Tina’s Wonderlandso the main feature of Rolled up prisoners is not what you get with your first run through its thin campaign; the main feature is what it adds to the Chaos Chamber. (At risk of getting into the weeds on, ohattributing the monetary value of art, $ 10 to add a lot of new space and possible battles to a roguelike is not that much more expensive than similar extensions to other roguelikes, such as. Dead cells.)
But back to the first hand – sorry, sorry, carry on with me – there is also the mindset that Gearbox should have gone beyond to clarify the length of Rolled up prisoners and its like. After all, there’s a decade plus history that reinforces the idea that “Border areas DLC “equals” huge campaign. “It’s not hard to imagine for a long time Border areas fans jumped for the season card without even looking at the content.
Gearbox did not respond to a request for comment on this story.