DLC down to a science

During the time that I have been playing games while DLC has been a factor, many times I will come across a piece that will be woefully inadequate relevant to the money that I have paid for it. When a person pays 10-15 dollars for a piece of DLC to add to their game, it stands to reason that since they are likely spending about 1/4th of what they spent on the initial game, they should receive something that is at least a few hours worth of extra play.  Too many times I have dropped large amounts on DLC and received maybe an hour at most of extra play with only the barest, paper-thin additional narrative and no real increase to the depth of the game. 

EA vs. child Bioware

Many times habitually bad DLC can be attributed to an individual publisher or developer. EA for example has a notorious reputation for the games under its umbrella releasing very poor DLC. However, it would appear that EA’s child company Bioware goes against the grain on this pattern by continuously releasing high-quality DLC for their games.  It’s rare that a piece of DLC will actually make me feel at the same level of much of the rest of the content of the game it’s for, but Bioware consistently pulls this off with DLC like Project Overlord, Lair of the Shadow Broker, Leviathan, Omega, and Citadel.  I wish more developers would show as keen an interest in delivering high-quality DLC to their fans, but of course one must understand the constraints placed on companies whose games don’t do as incredibly well as the Mass Effect or Dragon Age franchises. 

What do you think? Have you been let down hard by a piece of DLC in the past, or seen any patterns in DLC quality for developers or publishers, whether good or bad? Let me know in the comments, I would be interested to hear your stories.