Best traditional expansion pack? (no DLC garbage please)

[Fargus]

Mass Effect 3: Citadel

 

[Fargus]

Just kidding

Favorites:
Gothic NotR
Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge
Morrowind: Bloodmoon
Silent Storm: Sentinels

Pretty good and worth a mention:
NWN HotU
Enemy Within and WotC for nu xcum games
Golden Land 2 Cold Heaven
Tiberian Sun: Firestorm
Blazing Deserts for Battle Brothers counts as expansion
Forgotten Stories for Enderal

 

[Glop_dweller]

Die By The Sword Cuss Pack

 

[Odoryuk]

I'm surprised no one mentioned The Frozen Throne. Probably how I first realised what a game expansion is.

 

[karoliner]

Medieval 2 Kingdoms
Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai
Age of Mythology: The Titans
SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Quake 2: The Reckoning / Ground Zero
Quake: Scourge of Armagon / Dissolution of Eternity / Abyss of Pandemonium
Dark Colony: Council Wars
Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Honestly, a lot of classic game expansions were good so picking out a best is a really hard task. That said, ones that just made the game that much better:
Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors
Heroes of Might and Magic 3's expansions
Lords of Magic: Legends of Urak

 

[luj1]

Quake 2: The Reckoning / Ground Zero
Quake: Scourge of Armagon / Dissolution of Eternity / Abyss of Pandemonium

Why are these special? I played them, they are very meh.

 

[Saldrone]

The best "traditional" expansion packs are those that mostly complement the base game (Such as Brood War and Frozen Throe). However those who only offers new campaigns/levels such as Opposing Force are great but rarely surprases the base game

 

[Baron Dupek]

How people figured out those runewords in D2 back them?

 

[luj1]

How people figured out those runewords in D2 back them?

It was 2001, somewhere in the eastern bloc. I was growing up in this post-socialist wasteland and we used to play Diablo II at a local LAN den. On Syncmaster CRTS and trackball mice. There was no internet so we had a weathered notebook with all the various runewords guys found on their own. It made everything so mysterious and rewarding, definitely one of my fondest gaming memories.

 

[Beastro]

Morrowind: Bloodmoon

What exactly do you like about it?

I tried and could appreciate bits of the building a base on the frontier, but it felt so shoddy and incomplete. Came off more like the side project one of the devs did on his own in his own time that he threw out for people to mess with rather than a proper expansion.

 

[Reinhardt]

nwn hordes. you can bang both aribeth and drow wommyn by telling them "i'm strong enough to handle you both"

 

[Cyberarmy]

How people figured out those runewords in D2 back them?

My dear, beloved gaming magazine gave a full list of them. But they forgot to tell us that they only work on online so we were baffled at first

 

[Zoo]

My favourites:

Gothic II: Night of the Raven
StarCraft: Brood War
Cilvization IV: Beyond the Sword
Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Another great ones:

Shogun Total War: Mongol Invasions
Medieval Total War: Viking Invasion
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne
Age of Empires II: The Conquerors
Red Alert: Aftermath
Half-Life: Opposing Force
Call of Duty: United Offensive (I have only played the multi-player, I liked it much more than the base game, the sequel was somewhat decline, and it was my last CoD for MP)
X-COM: Enemy Within
WH40K: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (the best of the three expansions)

It's a shame, but I"ve never played Dungeon Keeper: Deeper Dungeons.

 

[kangaxx]

Ant missions from RA. Believe it was part of Counterstrike?

 

[octavius]

How people figured out those runewords in D2 back them?

My dear, beloved gaming magazine gave a full list of them. But they forgot to tell us that they only work on online so we were baffled at first

The Runewords could have been great if implemented properly.
Like needing to find the recipe in-game, and to use it as part of the crafting.
And maybe you could even find alreadey created Runeword items in-game.
It would certainly make the game feel more like a proper CRPG and less like some advanced slot machine (professional D2 farmers are like those zombies that used to (or still are) spend their free time at slot machines, like in Las Vegas.

 

[luj1]

nwn hordes. you can bang both aribeth and drow wommyn by telling them "i'm strong enough to handle you both"

HotU was a big mess. Both thematically and story-wise, as mechanically. I'll never forget that action section where you throw boulders (?) on demonic hordes in Hell.

 

[luj1]

How people figured out those runewords in D2 back them?

My dear, beloved gaming magazine gave a full list of them. But they forgot to tell us that they only work on online so we were baffled at first

The Runewords could have been great if implemented properly.
Like needing to find the recipe in-game, and to use it as part of the crafting.
And maybe you could even find alreadey created Runeword items in-game.
It would certainly make the game feel more like a proper CRPG and less like some advanced slot machine (professional D2 farmers are like those zombies that used to (or still are) spend their free time at slot machines, like in Las Vegas.

The only thing you need to do is nerf runewords. It's better than buffing sets and uniques. And you need to increase rune drops, and drop rates all around. You can play your whole life and never see some items, like Tyrael's Might.

 

[Hydro]

Medieval 2 Kingdoms
Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai

WH40K: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

All of these are rather a standalone games, priced accordingly. Good games nontheless.

 

[luj1]

Dark Crusade was great. Soulstorm was shitty.

 

[Average Manatee]

Harder question. Name a game that was crap on release but made great by an expansion.

Only one I can think of is Mask of the Betrayer. Unless you count PvP balanced by expansions like Brood Wars or Frozen Throne.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Why are these special? I played them, they are very meh.

There was one Quake expansion pack that was significantly better than the other, but I'll be fucked to remember which one is which based on the name alone after all these years. It's kind of like Final Doom, but I can remember which one is which.

I tried and could appreciate bits of the building a base on the frontier, but it felt so shoddy and incomplete. Came off more like the side project one of the devs did on his own in his own time that he threw out for people to mess with rather than a proper expansion.

Bloodmoon is great until you realize that Bethesda was too stupid to make it a mid-level expansion as opposed to an endgame one. It's absolutely retarded that werewolves are more powerful than Dagoth Ur. Any enjoyment I might have gotten from it were greatly overshadowed by this, so I barely played it.

Harder question. Name a game that was crap on release but made great by an expansion.

The Sims 2. It was okay on release, but the expansions really made it pretty damned good with a hat tip to Open for Business which allowed you to run commercial lot as your job. Of course, Sims 2 had that really wacky time issue where each lot seemed to have time only passing on the lots you were at. Go to your community lot to work at 8:05am, work a full day on your lot, arrive home at 8:10am. Eventually you just figured out it was a great idea to make your first floor of your house the business and live on top of it.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

There are very few expansion packs that felt like they lived up to the standard of the original game, just thinking back to the short period in time when they were being sold as boxed releases a few of those come to mind. Mysteries of the Sith for Dark Forces 2 was one of them, the gameplay is more of the same with a couple of cool additions and the levels are fine, but they skimped out on the FMV cutscenes and used in-engine ones instead so we never got the 90's edgy cheese of

Mara Jade

. Or take Alien Crossfire for SMAC, they did add some nice new buildings and techs, but the new factions weren't as great as the old ones and felt very superfluous, game didn't need more of them, and not the progenitor aliens either. I guess people weren't used to nickel and diming people back then, so when it came to making expansion packs, be it by the original studio or not, there were often not much to do, game was already complete and all ideas they had were in them.

90's shooters had generally good expansions since it's a hard formula to fuck up if you already have a good core, just add a couple of new weapons and enemies with a level pack constituting a new campaign. The Plasma Pak for Blood is a good example of that and it was a good sendoff to the game, letting you blast through a final hardcore episode that integrated a couple of cut things from the game. Return to Na Pali for Unreal had Legend do the same for that game, taking cut maps and knitting together more Unreal, even if the story had really ended. Marathon Infinity is remarkable since it themed the story in the game around the release of an official mapping tool and was even better written than the base game.

The shooter expansion I was most impressed with was Wages of Sin of SiN, mostly because it was made by another studio but managed to keep up the very high standards Ritual had set with the original game, another campaign about as long, non-linear levels that change depending on your decisions, the amount of interactivity and a plethora of new enemies, textures, and new items and weapons. At times it felt like playing the Duke Nukem Forever we never got with the casino level. The only real continuation we got of the first game too since the sequel fell for the episodic meme that never ever worked out.



Real-time strategy game expansions were similar, the standard being some new units, perhaps a new faction, a new campaign and some skirmish maps, but I can't think of any that really stood out as being particularly great, not that many of them were bad. Like Winter of the Wolf for Battle Realms, it doesn't innovate much. Homeworld: Cataclysm is noteworthy for being a stand-alone expansion pack that diverges slightly from the original, but not entirely in good ways.

Even after reading through this thread I can't really think of any expansion pack that is a must have or that radically improves on the base game. In terms of expansion packs that truly changes the game the only thing that comes to mind is Dinosaur Digs for Zoo Tycoon, because it's an entirely different vibe to tend to a zoo full of dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park than it is to keep a normal zoo. The best you can hope for is an expansion pack it seems is one that feels like a sequel done cheap with the same assets and engine of the base game.

 

[Zoo]

Medieval 2 Kingdoms
Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai

WH40K: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

All of these are rather a standalone games, priced accordingly. Good games nontheless.

Fall of the Samurai has different mechanics than the base game, but Dark Crusade is an expanded efition of the base game. For multiplayer, you even need the the vanilla and the other expandions if you want play as their factions. If you have only Dark Crusade, you can only play as necron or tau.

I don't know yet if I would disqualify FotS, but I certainly consider Dark Crusade as an expansion.