Paid, Played, and Possibly Robbed: The Definitive DLC Tier List From 'Instant Buy' to 'Actual Scam'
Let's be honest. The moment a game ships with a Season Pass option on day one, something inside every gamer dies a little. We've been conditioned — trained like Pavlovian dogs with controllers — to hand over an extra $20 to $40 for content that may or may not have been sitting on the disc the whole time. The DLC era has given us some of the greatest expansions in gaming history. It's also given us horse armor. We will not be forgiving either side anytime soon.
This is SW Tier List's full breakdown of gaming's most controversial paid expansions, ranked ruthlessly from "Worth Every Single Penny" down to "Sir, This Should Have Been Patch Notes."
S Tier: The Expansions That Ate the Base Game for Breakfast
The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine / Hearts of Stone
If there is a gold standard for what DLC should be, it lives here. CD Projekt Red dropped two expansions that individually could have been sold as standalone games, and collectively clocked in at more hours than most titles on the market. Blood and Wine introduced an entirely new region — Toussaint — that looked like Burgundy, France filtered through a fairytale fever dream. Hearts of Stone gave us Gaunter O'Dimm, one of the most unsettling antagonists in RPG history. Both were priced reasonably, both were massive, and both made you wonder why other studios couldn't just... do this. S Tier. No debate. Sit down.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
FromSoftware said "here's an expansion the size of a whole game" and the community collectively lost its mind — in a good way. Shadow of the Erdtree dropped in 2024 and immediately became a conversation about whether it was the best DLC ever made or the best Soulsborne game ever made. The boss quality alone could carry a lesser franchise. Yes, it was $40. Yes, it was worth it. The only controversy here is that it ended.
A Tier: Genuinely Great, But Let's Not Pretend They Were Perfect
Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare
Zombies in the Old West. Rockstar took their prestige Western and said "what if we just broke the vibe entirely" — and it worked. Undead Nightmare was weird, funny, and genuinely eerie in ways the base game never attempted. It's remembered fondly for a reason. The only thing keeping it out of S Tier is that it was originally a standalone disc release, which means the pricing conversation gets complicated depending on how you bought it.
Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City
A brutal, beautiful sendoff to the Dark Souls trilogy. The Ringed City had FromSoftware operating at peak atmospheric misery, and Slave Knight Gael might be one of the best boss fights the studio has ever designed. It costs money, but you feel every dollar in your bones — specifically when Gael is breaking them.
B Tier: Solid, Functional, Occasionally Inspired
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
CD Projekt Red clearly wanted to redeem themselves after the 2077 launch disaster, and Phantom Liberty was a genuine step in the right direction. Idris Elba showed up, the spy-thriller tone was a fresh angle, and the new district felt lived-in. But at $30 for a story expansion that most players finished in about 10 hours, it sits comfortably in B Tier — good, but not the redemption arc some were hoping for.
Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep
This one is emotionally complicated. Dragon Keep was clever, heartfelt, and creatively ambitious — a D&D parody inside a looter shooter that somehow made you feel things. It later got a full standalone release, which retroactively makes the original DLC pricing feel fine. B Tier because it was great, but the standalone release kind of undercut the urgency of buying it back then.
C Tier: We Paid. We Played. We Shrugged.
Most Destiny 2 Annual Passes (Pick One)
Bungie's relationship with its playerbase is a masterclass in how to keep people paying for things they're not entirely sure they want. Some Annual Pass content was genuinely fun. Some of it was three new strikes and a handshake. The inconsistency is the problem. You never knew if you were buying Blood and Wine or buying a slightly fancier loading screen. C Tier for the vibes, the hope, and the mild disappointment that followed.
The Sims 4: Any Given Stuff Pack
EA has turned The Sims 4 into a subscription to your own imagination. You want spiral staircases? That's a pack. You want your Sims to have a functional laundry machine? That was a pack. The individual stuff packs hover around $10 each, which sounds fine until you realize completing the full Sims 4 content catalog will run you upward of $800. C Tier on a good day. We're watching you, EA.
D Tier: The Content That Had No Business Costing Money
Street Fighter V: Character Pass 1 (Without CFN Online Dependency)
Street Fighter V launched in 2016 with a roster that felt aggressively incomplete and a story mode that should've been a cutscene compilation on YouTube. The first character pass was fine in theory — new fighters, new moves — but the base game's issues made paying more money for it feel deeply offensive. Capcom eventually patched the game into a solid product, but the early DLC era was a rough ask.
Call of Duty: Map Packs (2009–2015 Era)
Fifteen dollars for four maps, one of which was always a remaster of a map you already owned. Activision perfected the art of splitting communities and charging people to stay in them. The real crime? It worked for years. Millions of players paid it. We were complicit. D Tier, and we're including ourselves in the indictment.
F Tier: The Hall of Shame
Oblivion's Horse Armor DLC (2006)
The origin story. The Adam and Eve moment. Bethesda charged $2.50 for decorative armor that went on your horse. Your horse. The horse you used to travel between locations you fast-traveled to anyway. It launched a thousand think-pieces, a decade of discourse, and possibly the entire microtransaction economy as we know it. Horse Armor doesn't just belong in F Tier — it IS F Tier. It invented F Tier.
FIFA / EA FC Ultimate Team Packs (Every Year)
We could write a dissertation. Loot boxes dressed up as card packs, real money converted into in-game currency to obscure the actual cost, and a system specifically engineered to make you feel close enough to a great team that you spend just a little more. Regulators in multiple countries have flagged this model. The players keep buying. F Tier. Historically, aggressively, unapologetically F Tier.
Final Verdict
DLC isn't inherently evil — Blood and Wine and Shadow of the Erdtree exist, and that matters. The problem is that the industry has proven it will test exactly how much it can get away with, and the answer, historically, has been "a lot." Your wallet is the only vote that counts here. Spend it on the expansions that respect your time. Boycott the ones selling you cosmetics for $15 a pop.
And for the love of all things sacred, stop buying horse armor.
