Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night will offer up six optional modes of play plus other playable characters, for free, after the game’s launch in June. Some of this content will even be available day one, publisher 505 Games said on Thursday.
The day one freebies will be the Boss Rush and Speedrun modes, as well as a Pure Miriam outfit for the main player character. Later on, Bloodstained will get two more playable characters, the Roguelike, Chaos, Classic and Boss Revenge modes, plus multiplayer (local and online) for some cooperative and competitive modes.
As for the premium content, there will be that, and it will also be available on launch day. The rub is that the $9.99 “Iga’s Back Pack” offers two things — the Swordwhip weapon and an in-game Koji Igarashi himself to fight — that were originally promised as exclusives to backers of the crowd-funded game.
A 505 Games representative acknowledged that DLC made for a sensitive topic. But, about 30,000 backers were surveyed a year ago about their feelings on DLC, and most of them said they were OK with selling it “at a price that would respect the purchase the backers originally made.”
“Making this content available to everyone wasn’t just about making money,” said 505’s Robert Angel-Corlux. “I mean obviously that’s a part of it, but the chief things I was considering was making sure everyone had a safe and legitimate way to get the full game experience no matter when they find out about Bloodstained, whether that’s 5 months ago or 5 years from now, and that we were being respectful of the price backers originally paid (hence the DLC pricing).”
Nonetheless, some donors have chosen to complain about the premium DLC offering in the comments beneath the post.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night began life in May 2015 as a Kickstarter project by Igarashi, the longtime Castlevania producer for Konami. It raised $5.5 million from fans, a record that was quickly surpassed by Shenmue 3 a month later. Originally due in 2017, the game launches June 18 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One, and June 25 on Nintendo Switch.
