Best traditional expansion pack? (no DLC garbage please)

[NecroLord]

AoE2 : Conquerors. I mean, it brought automated farm renewal.

Hell yeah.
Great expansion.
Mask of the Betrayer is another good one.
90s FPS expansion packs are also mostly awesome.

 

[Fargus]

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.

I liked it. It was very atmospheric, had it's own landmass unlike Tribunal which was just a bunch of dungeons and corridors with magically sealed and immersion breaking town exits. The East Empire Company guild questline was really good.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

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.

The Reckoning brought incredible new weapons (Ion Ripper, Phalanx Patricle Cannon), old enemies hits harder and dies slower, OG Q2 campaign was too easy and TR is just about right.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

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.

Remember the X!Zone CD-Roms that they released for nearly every single first person shooter back in the day? Like D!Zone for Doom, Duke!Zone for Duke Nukem because D!Zone was already taken, H!Zone for Heretic, and so on? They were just shovelware where WizardWorks compiled all the maps the could find on FTP sites on the internet, pressed them, and published them. Sometimes they had some utilities and other mods, but they were mostly hundreds of maps. Some good, a lot not good, but there were hundreds of them. The developers and map makers hated them at the time, but they were great in the era of dial up internet.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

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.

Remember the X!Zone CD-Roms that they released for nearly every single first person shooter back in the day? Like D!Zone for Doom, Duke!Zone for Duke Nukem because D!Zone was already taken, H!Zone for Heretic, and so on? They were just shovelware where WizardWorks compiled all the maps the could find on FTP sites on the internet, pressed them, and published them. Sometimes they had some utilities and other mods, but they were mostly hundreds of maps. Some good, a lot not good, but there were hundreds of them. The developers and map makers hated them at the time, but they were great in the era of dial up internet.

Ironically those cheap map compilations were great for game preservation, while all the fansites and the like eventually went 404 some of the fan content was saved thanks to shovelware CDs. Which are now easily accessible online after people ripped them and will continue to exist out there until bitrot claims the pressed CDs. It's ironic because digital files can be infinitely replicated for free but it took someone selling them to preserve them for the future.

I wouldn't call them expansions packs though, and the releases themselves were rarely if ever labelled as such, at most they called them add-ons. A similar thing happened with gaming magazines, they'd include mods on the CDs along with the trailers, demos and patches, and for some of them it's the only way they survived the shutting down of sites like Fileplanet. In retrospect I wish I had kept more of them but at the time it seemed pointless since it was all on the net anyway and space was more of a concern, both physically, with the CDs, and digitally, with the smaller hard drives of the time.

Since maps back then were made with the original engine instead of the sourceports that we have today I actually mostly prefer them, the restrictions kept them more pure and in line with the original games. I'd take the levels from Level Pack 6: Additions for Blood or Red Hot over Death Wish any day for example.

Back when modding and mapping was something expected on the PC scene and the scale of the undertaking made sense for one or a couple of people to do the gaming magazines also covered it, especially in the late 90's, post-Doom up until and around the release of Half-Life. These days the personal blogs on the net they call gaming journalism doesn't matter as much and so it isn't as big of a deal for a mod to be mentioned by them, it's more of a e-celeb youtube promotion game right now, but it was pretty huge that you'd see previews of professionally put together big budget games in the same outlet you'd get mod reviews in, or mapping tutorials for that matter. That went back all the way to the earliest hobbyist publications that would give the reader the source code to programs in BASIC and the like to type in himself. Which our forum hero and savior of the CRPG genre, Cleveland Blakemore, was sending in games to in the 80's.

I'm not really going anywhere with this but a lot of those early modders in the FPS space went on to form studios and it was a great place for established studios to recruit from, all of the big ones that got their FPS tutelage from making id Software expansions started out that way, and went on to become big mainstays of the genre. That's how Ritual Entertainment began, from Doom modding to SiN the Half-Life killer. Later on Valve would do it all over again in their mission to turn mods into full fledged games, like with Team Fortress, or Counter-Strike, which was the peak of paid mods.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Ironically those cheap map compilations were great for game preservation, while all the fansites and the like eventually went 404 some of the fan content was saved thanks to shovelware CDs. Which are now easily accessible online after people ripped them and will continue to exist out there until bitrot claims the pressed CDs. It's ironic because digital files can be infinitely replicated for free but it took someone selling them to preserve them for the future.

I agree. I was looking around to see if those things still existed online somewhere. I have several of the WizardWorks compilations for Doom, Heretic, and Quake back in the day. I think I might still have them in their boxes in storage totes. I figured they'd be hard to find, but nope! They're really easy to find. I believe they're also part of eXoDOS these days.

I wouldn't call them expansions packs though, and the releases themselves were rarely if ever labelled as such, at most they called them add-ons.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't call them expansion packs, particularly the ones that came with those custom launchers that allowed you to play the various maps with a few clicks. Some of those WADs for Doom were megawads, if I remember right, and iD Software did do Final Doom.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

I'm not sure why you wouldn't call them expansion packs, particularly the ones that came with those custom launchers that allowed you to play the various maps with a few clicks. Some of those WADs for Doom were megawads, if I remember right, and iD Software did do Final Doom.

It's not so much a personal pet peeve or that they don't qualify, I just remember convention being that they'd call it an add-on or level pack when they bundled a bunch of maps together while official new campaigns would be called expansions. Take Retribution for Starcraft for example.

Brood War was in contrast labeled "Expansion Set". You'll find the same is the case for Blood, Plasma Pack being branded as expansion, while Cryptic passage doesn't call itself an expansion, and that was published by WizardWorks too. I'm not sure it was for legal reasons or some arbitrary distinction being made but it was fairly consistent as far as I know.

 

[Zoo]

Ironically those cheap map compilations were great for game preservation, while all the fansites and the like eventually went 404 some of the fan content was saved thanks to shovelware CDs. Which are now easily accessible online after people ripped them and will continue to exist out there until bitrot claims the pressed CDs. It's ironic because digital files can be infinitely replicated for free but it took someone selling them to preserve them for the future.

I agree. I was looking around to see if those things still existed online somewhere. I have several of the WizardWorks compilations for Doom, Heretic, and Quake back in the day. I think I might still have them in their boxes in storage totes. I figured they'd be hard to find, but nope! They're really easy to find. I believe they're also part of eXoDOS these days.

I wouldn't call them expansions packs though, and the releases themselves were rarely if ever labelled as such, at most they called them add-ons.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't call them expansion packs, particularly the ones that came with those custom launchers that allowed you to play the various maps with a few clicks. Some of those WADs for Doom were megawads, if I remember right, and iD Software did do Final Doom.

WizardWorks published different kind of add-ons. While, Duke!ZONE contains tons of user-made maps, Duke It Out in DC, Life is a Beach and Nuclear Winter have proper episodes made by professioanals. I finished Duke It Out in DC more than one time (it was included my first RIP of Atomic Edition instead of Lunar Apocalypse). Life is a Beach seemed cool, too, but I haven't got that back in the day, only tried it later. Duke!ZONE II has both episodes and fan-made levels.

Sunstorm made some fun add-ons for Build engine FPSs, but they only developed for Duke Nukem Duke It Out in DC and Life is a Beach.

 

[NecroLord]

The East Empire Company guild questline was really good.

It has some cool quests, but also rather annoying fetch x quests and running around Solstheim.
Still, Bloodmoon is a great expansion.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Another "Add On", with a very prestigious cover, this wasn't published by WizardWorks.

Life is a Beach seemed cool, too, but I haven't got that back in the day, only tried it later.

That was the best of the bunch when it came to DN3D, had a lot of effort put into it to convert everything into something vacation themed and made the game feel fresh. Sunstorm were always underrated, they gave us the last good Duke Nukem game when they released Manhattan Project in 2002. And Sunstorm will continue to be underrated. In the original console port and DN3D revival published by Devolver they got the rights to Life's a Beach and bundled it with the game in their Megaton Edition, only for Gearbox to buy the IP and remove it in their re-re-release, 20th Anniversary World Tour, since Randy is a cheap fuck.

 

[Lucumo]

Another "Add On", with a very prestigious cover, this wasn't published by WizardWorks.

Yeah, there were a lot of unofficial add-ons back in the day. Never played any of them though.

Spoiler

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Take Retribution for Starcraft for example.

After you posted this, I got to thinking, "I wonder if they ever released one of these for Total Annihilation?" Apparently, they never did. I have to wonder why since Total Annihilation came out first, but at the same time, TA maps were a LOT larger than Starcraft maps. TA maps were a couple of megabytes, which would limit the amount of maps they could advertise on the box. There's also the situation with custom units and there wasn't really a good time while the game was popular that they could release a definitive unit set.

 

[Fargus]

The East Empire Company guild questline was really good.

It has some cool quests, but also rather annoying fetch x quests and running around Solstheim.

So does every other questline in that game. Fetch quests is something we Morrowind players have to live with.