Outrageous Day-One DLC for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12
Hitting the golf course will require some downloading before you can become a legend of the Masters.
EA Sports’ Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii released earlier this week with an incredible amount of downloadable content for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Besides the $9.99 Online Pass, there’s 52 items of downloadable content in the PlayStation Store, all which were available on release day. Some of the items include:
- “Eagle Pack” (13 courses): $34.99/2,800 Microsoft Points
- “Birdie Pack” (five courses): $14.99/1,200 Microsoft Points
- individual courses starting at $3.99/320 Microsoft Points
- various golf equipment
- various clothing apparel, some starting at $0.99
- game unlocks like sponsorships. Some cost $2.99; Nike’s costs $6.99
- “Prototype Starter Suit” which gives the player a boost in stats before they play: $4.99
At retail, The Masters includes 16 courses in the game. On Xbox 360, all the additional course packs would cost 4,000 points ($50) to buy. In total, there’s 20 total downloadable courses. The Birdie Pack is included in the exclusive PS3 Collector’s Edition.
If you were to buy every single piece of DLC, it would cost $211.48. With the Online Pass, it would cost $221.47.
According to IGN’s review, the downloadable content is directly tied into the game’s career mode. The full career mode can’t be completed unless additional content is purchased:
“On Xbox 360 and PS3 Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 features 16 courses on the disc, and 20 available as DLC. The game finally incorporates DLC courses into the career mode, though in an awkward way. As you play the career, you’ll try to enter a tournament attached to a DLC course. The game will stop you and inform you to go purchase the course from the store, or skip the event. Having a good chunk of my career mode blocked off sucks, and comes off as crass. By comparison, the Wii version of the game, which features no DLC, comes with 25 courses.”
There’s six in-game courses that require downloadable courses. According to Planet Xbox 360’s review, there’s 25 weeks in a tour, and 19 of those events are available on the disc. The downloadable courses needed to complete the tour are Greek Isles ($6.99/560 Points) and The Els Club ($6.99/560 Points). The other four DLC courses are randomly chosen. Essentially, you would need all the downloadable courses in order to not skip any of the events in career mode.
Currently, the complete game would cost players more than $110.
Some achievements and trophies are tied to being Rank # 1, which are impossible to get without downloading additional courses. Not only are achievements and trophies affected, but not having some of the downloadable events impacts your in-game player rank and ability to enter into the Masters, according to GameRevolution’s review:
A good portion of the event calendar is based on these DLC courses, which if you don’t have, must be skipped. But instead of letting bygones be bygones, you are effectively penalized by having the CPU be able to compete and collect points on the FedexCup Leaderboard and EA Sports World Rankings due to your absence. Even after I placed first in every non-DLC event leading up to the Masters, I placed only 101st on the World Rankings list (if you can believe it), one place shy of the required Top 100 for the Masters invitation, which forced me to spend three additional hours completing all nine Masters Moments instead. This is the very definition of invasive DLC, an unfortunate side effect of EA’s aggressive campaign for extra cash.
The Wii version of PGA Tour 12 doesn’t have these issues.
Photo by Electronic Arts
Quarter Disorder 
3 Responses to “Outrageous Day-One DLC for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12”
This trend will continue on throughout the year, just watch. Mortal Kombat is already going to have 2 characters ready for download when it releases.
I wish I had realized this absurd fact before I purchased the game. It’s excellent in every other aspect, but this is just bullshit.
They also trap you into buying all the courses, spending $50, because you can’t get all the real courses in one pack. It’s so unfair, that if this game wasn’t as good as it is (and I hadn’t already of paid for it), I would refuse to buy any DLC at all.
With that said, the best courses are great, and I want to play them, and unfortunately, I have to buy them, thus furthering EA’s business practice.
I’m not happy about this, but I’ll end up spending the extra $50 eventually. Fuck you EA. Fuck you very much.
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