When you grab downloadable content for a game, generally, you’re expecting more of the same experience: a few extra hours, some new gear, perhaps a boss fight the base game didn’t have room for. What if, instead of new outfits and a handful of fetch quests, a DLC decided to crown you the new god of madness? What if it dropped you into hell to stop a president’s wedding, or handed the entire story over to a teenager narrating her own homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign (complete with a dragon she very clearly made up five minutes ago)?
The best DLCs of all time took their main story and had the confidence to dream up wild new experiences for dedicated players. Each of these nine game expansions took a big swing, and has been remembered for that creativity ever since.
9
Fallout: New Vegas – Old World Blues
How this one broke its game: Your brain gets stolen by talking robot scientists… and you spend the whole DLC chasing it down in a jar.
Obsidian’s expansion to the sixth major Fallout game opens with the Courier waking up on an operating table in a secret 1950s research facility called Big MT, missing their brain, heart, and spine. Where have your vital organs gone, you ask? Fabulous question. They’ve been stolen by the Think Tank, five disembodied scientist brains floating in jars. They don’t remember why they took your spine, so don’t ask them! Getting your organs back means wandering a pulp sci-fi wasteland full of talking appliances, a sentient vacuum named Muggy who’s obsessed with cleaning your face – lovely, thank you Muggy, now stop that – and a rogue scientist hiding out as a floating robobrain. Fallout: New Vegas built its reputation on grounded factional politics. Old World Blues concentrates on mad-scientist slapstick, instead, but does so with writing as good as anything you’ll see in the base game.
8
Mass Effect 3 – Citadel
How this one broke its game: You fistfight a clone of yourself in a museum, then throw a dinner party for the entire crew like nothing happened.
By the time Mass Effect 3: Citadel dropped, protagonist Commander Shepard had spent two full games holding the galaxy together through sheer force of will. This DLC’s answer to that pressure was simple, and extremely relatable: Let Shepard punch a clone of themselves through a museum, then throw a dinner party where the entire crew – living, dead, everywhere in between, across the whole trilogy – shows up to roast each other and relive the glory days. There’s a heist in this DLC. There’s a casino. There’s a moment where the game stops pretending it’s not fan service and just gives you exactly what you want. After three games of nonstop apocalypse, Citadel lets its characters just be happy for a minute, and it feels incredible.
7
Saints Row 4 – Gat Out of Hell
How this one broke its game: You fly through actual hell on demon wings to stop the president from marrying Satan.
Saints Row 4 already had its Boss-turned-President fighting off an alien empire with superpowers. Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell escalates from there… somehow. Satan has struck a deal with the alien overlord Zinyak, and part of the arrangement involves marrying off the Boss to seal it. Johnny Gat and Kinzie Kensington fly into hell itself – using literal demon wings, because why wouldn’t you, given the opportunity? – to crash the wedding before it happens. You’re rewarded with an original, fully staged musical number where Satan, voiced by Travis Willingham, belts out a Disney-villain-style showstopper about controlling his daughter’s fate. What else are you looking for in a DLC!?
6
Borderlands 2 – Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep
How this one broke its game: A teenage bomb expert narrates the entire game as a D&D campaign, and the “dragon” is a skeletal robot she made up on the spot.
For just one DLC, Borderlands 2 stops being a sci-fi looter shooter and becomes a tabletop RPG, narrated live by teenage bomb expert Tiny Tina as she runs her homebrew “Bunkers & Badasses” campaign. Guns get reskinned to be swords and staves, bandits are now orcs, and the game’s own environments warp mid-sentence based on whatever Tina decides to improvise next… including a dragon that’s really a jury-rigged robot. Underneath the fantasy chaos, Tina is struggling – she’s working through grief over a friend’s death by burying it in dice rolls and made-up monsters, but the game chooses to let players figure that out while keeping the main focus on the wild Dungeons & Dragons shenanigans.
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5
Red Dead Redemption – Undead Nightmare
How this one broke its game: John Marston hunts Bigfoot and fights off zombie hordes with a co-op survival mode bolted onto an elegy for the Old West.
Red Dead Redemption spends its entire runtime being a slow, mournful ode to the vanishing American West. Undead Nightmare responds to that vibe by unleashing a zombie plague across that same frontier and handing John Marston a shotgun. Suddenly, you’re hunting undead versions of legendary animals like Bigfoot, fending off zombie hordes in a new four-player mode, and watching familiar towns get completely overrun while side characters react with the same deadpan seriousness they’d bring to a cattle dispute. It’s a full genre swap, but one the game takes completely in stride.
How this one broke its game: You become the new god of madness by winning a jester-and-jailer power struggle nobody saw coming.
Cyrodiil, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion’s main setting, is a fairly conventional medieval fantasy province. Shivering Isles, Bethesda’s 2007 expansion, drops players into the realm of Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. This particular realm has two distinct halves to explore and, ah, enjoy: Mania – a garish, hyperactive land of manic joy; and Dementia, a dark, paranoid world of gnarled roots, decay, and general gloom. Working through both halves of this odd place earns players the realm’s throne – thereby transforming them into the new god of madness. In addition to a crown, though, you also get the Wabbajack, a staff that transforms anyone you swing it at into a random creature. (A sheep? A crab? Another god?) That weapon alone is worth downloading the DLC.
3
The Sims 4 – StrangerVille
How this one broke its game: Your Sim goes grocery shopping in a town secretly infected by a parasitic alien hive-mind, and someone (you) has to save it.
The Sims has generally been a chill, cozy game about paying bills, building relationships, and occasionally setting a kitchen on fire. StrangerVille, a 2019 game pack for The Sims 4, interrupts that comforting gameplay experience with a full government conspiracy. In this DLC, your Sim moves into a quarantined desert town where residents are getting infected by a parasitic alien hive mind, complete with glowing crystal growths and unnervingly synchronized dialogue. It’s quite the sci-fi swing for a life sim, but you’re never allowed to forget for a second that you’re still playing The Sims. Want to investigate a body-horror alien conspiracy while still making sure your Sim’s using the bathroom and eating enough? This is your DLC.
2
The Witcher 3 – Hearts of Stone
How this one broke its game: You crash a wedding, fight a man’s reflection, and cut a deal with a merchant who’s running all of existence.
Most of The Witcher 3 is about monster contracts and continent-spanning politics. Hearts of Stone, CD Projekt Red’s 2015 expansion, narrows down to one man’s bad deal with the devil. In the DLC, Geralt gets hired by the wealthy, cursed Olgierd von Everec to complete three impossible tasks… including crashing his own ex’s wedding and fighting a living reflection of himself, all brokered by a merchant named Gaunter O’Dimm who, spoilers, turns out to be running something much larger than just one contract.
1
Outer Wilds – Echoes of the Eye
How this one broke its game: A space mystery hides a village that erased its own memory… plus something in the dark that’s stalking you.
Outer Wilds is a gentle, melancholy game about looping through the last 22 minutes before a sun dies. You’re piecing together an ancient mystery with a curiosity that the game’s time mechanic grants you (instead of more of a race-to-the-finish, wracked-with-dread situation). Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, the game’s 2021 DLC, introduces a sixth location to explore, one hidden in plain sight: A cloaked structure orbiting the sun, containing an entire simulated village who erased their own history out of collective guilt. You’ll spend a lot of this DLC navigating in near-total darkness…or being chased and actively hunted by light-sensing elk-birds. Your choice!
Even the wildest DLC needs a solid game to swerve away from, or the swerve doesn’t land. Every base game on this list was already strong enough to stand on its own – New Vegas didn’t need brain-jar scientists to work, and Oblivion didn’t need a madness god to be worth playing. That’s the common DNA here: Studios that had built something sturdy enough to trust it, confident enough to hand players a portal to hell, an alien hive-mind under a suburban cul-de-sac, or a crown that makes you ruler of an entire realm of madness…. and bet that players would play anyway. For these nine DLCs, that confidence turned out to be well-placed.
