Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is a spin-off based on beloved DLC for Borderlands 2, which frankly seems like a safer option than following up on the underwhelming Borderlands 3. Likewise, the Zombie Army series spun off from some popular DLC from the Sniper Elite games. What expansions or add-ons do you like enough that you’d rather see them get a follow-up than the actual game they came from?
What DLC should get a standalone sequel?
Here are our answers, plus some from our forum.
Evan Lahti: There are shockingly few games exploring climate change, the issue that will most shape the human experience for the foreseeable future. But an expansion that did is Civ 6’s Gathering Storm, which “turns climate change into an end boss” and tracks CO2 emissions as a new system, and folds global cooperation against the crisis into the World Congress. With so many upsetting climate-related catastrophes in 2021, I’m hopeful that we’ll see more games tackle this subject, and I don’t think it strictly has to be the management/strategy genre that does it.
Natalie Clayton: This is mostly just because I want more people to play Absolver, but Absolver had this brilliant DLC pack called Downfall that added a simple procedural dungeon to its open-world punch clubs. Yes, I know Sloclap are doing Sifu now, but I still reckon Absolver’s sheer fashion sense and delightfully arcane setting remain ripe for a more story-focussed adventure—one where you and your mates can dive into ancient temples and impossible folded dimensions to smack up masked men.
Robin Valentine: Hearts of Stone, The Witcher 3’s first DLC, is probably my favourite expansion ever. A direct sequel to it would basically just be The Witcher 4, which I’d be into but isn’t really what I’m imagining here. What I think would be really neat would be a sort of spiritual sequel to Hearts of Stone. I love the feel of its smaller, stranger story, and I think you could make a kind of anthology game of tales inspired by dark, Eastern European folklore in a similar vein. Did anyone ever watch Jim Henson’s The Storyteller? Basically I want a videogame of the first season of that, please.
Jody Macgregor: I want an entire Elder Scrolls game set in The Shivering Isles from the Oblivion expansion, but I also really want a follow-up to Nightmare in North Point. It was DLC for the open-world crime game Sleeping Dogs that filled Hong Kong with jiangshi, the hopping vampires of folklore and cheesy kung fu horror movies. The tone of it was completely different from the rest of Sleeping Dogs, even though it followed directly on from the main storyline—resurrecting one of its villains to be the antagonist. Give me a whole game of that.
Graeme Meredith: The Sonic Mania DLC, Sonic Mania Plus, should get a sequel. And they should call it Sonic Mania 2.
Mazer: The Undead Nightmare DLC for the first RDR got me hankering for a full zombie game in Rockstar’s style of painstakingly crafted open world adventures. The hunting and camp maintenance of RDR2 would be a great fit for a more survival based experience too.
The Far Cry games have a history of DLC’s which shake up the genre and formula, from Valley of the Yetis for FC4 which had some of The Long Dark’s DNA infused with Far Cry gunplay, to the tryptich of sci-fi, horror, and Vietnam war DLC for Far Cry 5. It would be great for Ubisoft to fill in their off years between major Far Cry releases with more risk-taking side entries to the series like Far Cry Primal, which repurposed the FC4 map to speed up development, or New Dawn which did the same by turning FC5’s map into a colourful post-apocalypse. Why not shift the colour palette of the FC5 map and make it a wild west FPS? With zombies, because why not?
XoRn: This is a no brainer for me. Opposing Force for the original Half-Life ends with Adrian Shepard being voided by the G-Man, presumably stashed away to be unleashed on the Combine when it would most benefit G-Man and his mysterious overlords. Shepard has his own destiny of course, something supplemental to Gordon’s. Perhaps he find the means to discover the Borealis, or maybe he ends up back at Black Mesa (which wasn’t as nuked as we thought it was). Hell, maybe he’s dropped on the combine home world where he wages an all out guerrilla campaign to cause as much havoc and destruction as possible.
Whatever the plot, it would be a welcome (long over due) addition to the Half-Life universe. I can already hear a friendly Vortigaunt companion. “The Shepard will lead us.”
mainer: There is the Kasumi: Stolen Memory DLC for Mass Effect 2, that introduced Kasumi Goto, voiced by Kym Hoy, that left me wanting more. The DLC itself was fairly short, but I felt she was such a strong character and I was somewhat disappointed that after her mission was over, she just sat in her cabin without much dialogue or interaction. True, you could take her as a companion on missions, but there was very little banter with crewmates or interaction with Shepard. I don’t know if an entire game could be based around her, but there’s a depth to her character and mysterious background that might warrant a spinoff game with her as the main character.
McStabStab: The Alien: Isolation DLC that had you play through the events of 1979’s Alien by Ridley Scott. I’ll take any excuse to have more content for that game.