Good grief.
Let’s be clear, no one gives a shit about a story expansion for this game. You’ve got half the playerbase begging you to skip the campaign entirely, which should tell you everything you need to know about where the value is, and what people think of the story/writing. People play an ARPG like LE because they want new builds, better loot, and actual endgame to push. That’s it. Nobody is logging in because they’re excited for another mediocre quest chain with forgettable characters.
So this whole “the expansion is free” angle does not land. What it sounds like is that you built a DLC, saw the pushback, carved out the classes from what you were going to sell, and then tried to frame the leftovers as generosity. I’m not stupid. This is paid DLC with a cheap disguise slapped on it.
The part that really bothers me is that this wasn’t the promise. You were supposed to fund the game with cosmetics. That was the deal. Except the cosmetics have been mostly forgettable, so the funding model never actually materialized. Then the players are blamed, implicitly, for the game not making a profit. Meanwhile EHG is more than happy to overlook a 10 month gap between seasons 1&2, and an extremely underwhelming S3 update. (Pssst, look in the mirror if you want to know why profit never materialized.)
PoE manages to fund itself off cosmetics alone and does it at a pace that puts LE to shame. All of it sustained by MTX that people actually want. People like to say “PoE is free but you have to buy stash tabs.” Sure, and the long-standing wisdom is that $30–40 in stash tabs is all you need to make PoE feel complete. Which, funny enough, is the same price EHG charges for LE! The difference is PoE actually delivers more content, more often, under the exact funding model you originally said you were following.
Meanwhile the core issues everyone has been talking about for years are still sitting there untouched. The list is long. None of it gets touched by this “free expansion” announcement. But the one thing that actually matters in an ARPG, the classes that change up builds and the loop and gives players a reason to reroll, that’s the part you pulled out and sold. This is exactly what people were worried about after the Krafton acquisition. You can say nothing is changing, but the timeline says otherwise. First major announcement after the acquisition, and it’s the first P2W update in the game’s history. Everyone saw this coming, I just prayed we were wrong.
So no, I’m not clapping because the story portion is “free.” The part with gameplay weight is the part you’re charging for, and treating the leftovers like a gift is insulting. This isn’t generosity. It’s pay-to-win wearing a fake nose, moustache, and glasses.
