10 Real Endings Hidden In DLC

You had to wait (and pay!) to get the proper endings to these games.

By Jack Pooley /

It's a general expectation that, after sinking potentially ungodly hours into a video game, you're going to be rewarded with a fitting ending - or if we lower our standards for a moment, at least an ending of some kind.

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But sometimes it's painfully clear that the real ending requires a little more effort - and perhaps some more investment - from the player.

Yes of course, we're talking about the mighty double-edged sword that is DLC. At the best of times downloadable content can offer a worthwhile expansion to a game you already love, and all the better if it's a free update.

But some DLCs are clearly designed to wring a little extra dough from players for content that, let's be honest, should've probably just been included in the O.G. release.

And so, given how definitive and fleshed-out these DLC endings felt, it was absurdly obvious that each really should've been the ending of the main game you originally threw down your hard-earned cash for.

Again, not all DLCs are egregious rip-offs, but it's frustrating that buying a game these days is no guarantee of getting an actual, proper conclusion...

10. Mass Effect 2

There's good reason that many Mass Effect players were left rather confused by the start of the third game, because it follows on not from Mass Effect 2 but Mass Effect 2's final DLC, Arrival, which released more than a year after the main game.

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Arrival was intended to serve as a bridge between the second and third games, and for all intents and purposes feels like the "proper" ending of Mass Effect 2.

Arrival revolves around Commander Shepard attempting to prevent the Reaper invasion on Earth, and in addition to setting the stage for Mass Effect 3, fills in a ton of story gaps that will otherwise confuse anyone who moved straight from "vanilla" Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3.

While certainly not among the very best Mass Effect DLCs, it does feel like Arrival should've either been appended to the end of Mass Effect 2's core campaign, or turned into a genuine prologue at the beginning of Mass Effect 3.

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