Just a quick thought on something I’ve noticed in Dragon Age: Origins. Downloadable content is nothing new, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen extra downloadable content marketed from within the base game before. In Dragon Age, there’s a guy in your campsite offering you a quest. But the quest he’s asking you to do isn’t included in the main game – you have to buy it separately. So while he’s saying “Help me! Please help me!”, you can’t do so without shelling out some real-world Benjamins.

This makes me wonder if Borderlands would have let you see the distant Zombie Island of Dr. Zed over an impassable ocean channel or if Rock Band would mix in downloadable tracks with all the other songs in the list, but not let you access them. It’s an odd new model, and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.