The studio is giving you a chance to grab the pre-order incentives you might have missed.
Rockstar raised a few eyebrows when they offered full cases as pre-order exclusives for L.A. Noire, but the content was inevitably going to be sold as DLC and we now have the details. The studio has announced a new Rockstar Pass, and it’s essentially the Rockstar response to Project $10 that allows anyone with a Pass will be able to download all of the upcoming L.A. Noire DLC for free as it becomes available.
Getting into the details, the Broderick/Sharpshooter detective suits, the Badge Pursuit Challenge, and two cases – “The Naked City” and “A Slip of the Tongue” – are all available as of today (or whenever the PlayStation Store returns), while two additional cases will hit consoles in the coming months. The “Nicholson Electroplating Disaster” goes on sale on June 21
, while “Reefer Madness” follows on July 12
. Purchased individually, the Detective suits will set you back a buck (or 80 MS points) each, while the Badge Pursuit Challenge costs $2 (160 points) and the cases are $4 or 320 points apiece.
The Rockstar Pass nets you everything and will be available for $10 (or 800 Microsoft points) until June 14
. At that point the price jumps to a still reasonable $12 (960 MS points).
The downloadable content would normally cost a total of $20, so the Pass is a solid deal any way you slice it. The problem, however, is that it’s not doing any favors for the people who actually pre-ordered the game. If you’ve already got one case, getting a full Pass is still the best way to gain access to the rest of them and you’re not saving any money if you’d like to pick up all of the extra content.
So while I don’t have an issue with the Rockstar Pass in concept – it’s a great way to repackage isolated content for players interested in an affordable compilation – I’m starting to get a little annoyed with companies who don’t seem to understand the point of a pre-order incentive (I’m looking at you, Warner Bros.). I always thought the goal was to thank loyal fans for showing their support, but the Rockstar Pass rewards the people hopping on the bandwagon more than the people who have been driving it since the beginning. It’s great for the rest of us (I didn’t pre-order L.A. Noire), but it definitely seems like something that publishers could be doing better.
