I was actually a bit disappointed with the DLCs.
Legacy of First Blade had its obvious problems of course, not gonna rehash the old discussion about it. Darius was one of the better characters, but everything else about it was... well, stupid.
As for Atlantis... well, it had cool new locations at least, but it had many problems too.
- The fetch quest nonsense with the tombs and modern-day crap to even get started was pure padding. Hated it.
- I felt the writing was still really bad there too. A lot of the time it felt like nothing I was doing made any real sense. I wrote more details about my impression of the first chapter in the OT
here.
- In the second chapter it felt even more "video game logic" than ever before. Like they weren't even trying to have logical reasons for Kassandra to be there doing stuff.
- Still in the second chapter, the character assassination of
Brasidas was absolute garbage. Probably the worst writing in the entire game. I rarely get angry or frustrated at bad writing in video games, but this honestly pissed me off because of how terrible and nonsensical it was. Felt like it was written by David Cage, I swear.
- I'll admit, the Mordor look was kind of cool, but it also could have looked... better? It felt a bit washed out, which is odd for a game that's normally heavily saturated.
- Atlantis itself looks absolutely gorgeous (the annoying "we're in simulation" bars everywhere annoyed the shit out of me though, what were they thinking?), but it's kind of tedious to navigate at times, and I found most of the gameplay to be really boring. Maybe I was just kind of fed up with the game by then though.
So basically, I wouldn't say it was bad DLC exactly (despite my complaints), but it's still got the immense Ubisoft bloat, maybe more than ever, and I was just glad to be done. I played AC:O a year ago so there was a decent amount of time between the main game and DLC but even so, I felt like it overstays its welcome. Sadly, I don't expect Ubisoft to actually trim down the content in future installments, they seem to double down on the massive bloat every time. And yes I know I don't have to do all the side-quests, but here's the thing: sometimes the better content is tucked in side-quests (the coloured ! ones at least) and sometimes it's just garbage filler and there's no way to know which is which until you start them... so yeah I really wish they'd cut the bloat and focus on quality instead of quantity, but it probably won't happen.