With Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards recent gaming nominees, fans have been clamoring about the existence of DLCs in the Game of the Year category. This sparked lengthy and obnoxious discourse about what makes a game GOTY-worthy.
Now that The Game Awards is set to include DLCs as GOTY contenders, we made a list of games that COULD HAVE WON if Geoff Keighley can retroactively give them awards.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood & Wine
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a modern-day masterpiece for CD Projekt Red. It was a giant leap from Witcher 1, where Eurojank was the name of the game. Geralt’s adventures in Part Three were packed with gorgeous open-world vistas, monsters, and sexy sorceresses.
The Blood & Wine Expansion was a massive DLC that took us to the Nilfgaardian land of Toussaint. A land where aristocrats mingle and drink to their death. Apart from the bloodthirsty vampires and alluring fairy tales, it was also the perfect epilogue for the White Wolf’s story, making room for Witcher’s imminent fourth entry.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - Future Redeemed
This section is dedicated to the die-hard Xenoblade fans. Of course, we could always swap this for the Torna DLC, but Future Redeemed is the more recent addition to the franchise’s confounding lore.
With Future Redeemed, all our questions are finally answered… most of them. It finally told us what Aionios was about and how it connected to the first two Xenoblade titles. Without spoiling anything, this final expansion proved that all those years of theory-crafting worked.
Cuphead - The Delicious Last Course
Five years after the world went on a collective rage with Cuphead and Mugman’s challenging adventures, Studio MDHR gave everyone a massive expansion to test our patience again.
The Delicious Last Course was the icing on an tasty and challenging cake. It added a new playable character, Ms. Chalice, with her own moves and specials. Apart from that, what makes the D.L.C great is the new bosses and levels. If you think the first game had bosses that could make you throw your controller, you better get an extra one with this.
Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty
Witcher 3’s Blood & Wine Expansion was terrific, but let’s not forget about Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc. After 2 years of suffering from game-breaking bugs and terrible optimization, CD Projekt Red’s cyberpunk RPG is finally good. And what better way to celebrate its best state than with Phantom Liberty?
Like all of CDPR’s expansions, Phantom Liberty also gave us a whole new area to explore. If Toussaint was Blood & Wine's, this DLC has Dogtown. This lawless cityscape is packed with would-be criminals waiting to seize power. V gets caught up in a government conspiracy involving the President of the NUSA and Idris Elba.
It’s a spy thriller reminiscent of Mission Impossible movies, and the campaign makes good use of our hard-earned cyberwar and upgrades.
Outer Wilds - Echoes Of The Eye
Mobius Digital’s stellar science fiction adventure is a personal favorite of mine, and I always find a way to recommend it to anyone interested in metroidbrainas.
Outer Wilds is best played blind, but the gist is that it’s about exploring a simulated solar system. See that planet over there? You can go there. The moment you take off with your spaceship, it’s a deeply profound experience with existential proportions.
Echoes of the Eye is the only expansion of Outer Wilds. It takes place in a new ‘orbit’ in its solar system, hidden in plain sight. As much as I would love to discuss it in more detail, I shouldn’t spoil anything. Try it for yourself.
Monster Hunter: World - Iceborne
None of the DLCs on this list could top Iceborne’s scale. It’s a massive expansion that adds… probably a thousand more hours to our monster-hunting adventures. (No sane Monster Hunter fan will play this game in less than a hundred.)
Iceborne was a complete package that could even work as a standalone title. It took us to a new region, the Hoarfrost Reach, a land teeming with a biting frost and home to the legendary Elder Dragon Velkhana. It also gave us G-Rank, or Master Rank, MH's highest difficulty level. That means enemies are more aggressive, and they hit hard.
Also, its selection of new monsters and the Grinding–Guiding Lands gave us more reasons to play.
Bloodborne - The Old Hunters
If Shadow of the Erdtree could get nominated for Game of the Year, there’s no doubt that Bloodborne’s Old Hunters DLC could also receive that same level of prestige. Before Elden Ring’s Malenia or Radahn, Lady Maria and the Orphan of Kos were a pain in the a** for many Soulsborne players. Yet they LOVED it anyway.
The Old Hunters may be brief, but it was enough to give players another challenging bout against incomprehensible horrors. Bloodborne was at its peak, with new trick weapons and fantastic bosses to fight.
Dark Souls III - The Ringed City
Another FromSoft DLC that Geoff Keighley would gladly nominate is Dark Souls III’s Ringed City. Compared to Shadow of the Erdtree, this expansion isn’t as massive, but it still had Miyazaki’s signature challenging boss fights and fantastic art direction.
The Ringed City was a follow-up to Ashes of Ariandel, DS3’s first DLC. If Sister Freide’s three-phase boss fight gave you trauma, The Ringed City’s difficulty spike will add more to the pile. It is a brutal and unforgiving expansion set in a whole new area. Once you get past that ‘git gud phase,’ you’re heading to the best final boss in a FromSoft game ever.
Grand Theft Auto - The Ballad Of Gay Tony
Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV revolutionized the open-world genre of games. From the moment our cousin Roman invited us to Bowling, we embarked on an unforgettable journey filled with cars blowing up, guns blazing, and visits to strip clubs.
The Ballad of Gay Tony is a separate work, but it takes place concurrently with the events of GTA IV. It follows the story of Gay Tony and Luis, who work together to grow their budding crime empire.
That simple premise alone was enough for players to approve of this DLC, which many considered the highest standard of GTA DLCs. It’s like watching an episode of The Sopranos, but you’re playing out the scenes.
Splatoon 2 - Octo Expansion
Nintendo’s not really into big-budget expansions and DLCs, but the Splatoon series is known to defy that notion. With Octo Expansion, we got Agent 8 and a mission list that adds an extra hundred hours of playtime.
Not only does it contain 80 inventive new missions, but it also takes the game’s usual third-person shooting mechanics and takes them to a whole new level, adding new depth to its puzzles and ink physics.
And for the Splatoon fans who had been dying to play as Octoling, Nintendo finally allowed them to do so.