Are we counting old-school expansions as DLC? If so, then, aside from the infamous Horse Armor, the Elder Scrolls series seriously raised the bar for what to expect from RPG add-ons. Tribunal and Bloodmoon were massive expansions that set the standard early on.

Knights of the Nine might’ve been a bit weaker, but Shivering Isles is one of the GOAT expansions and is arguably better than the base game.

Skyrim kept the momentum going with Dawnguard and Dragonborn, both of which added tons of new content.

The series is straight-up GOATed when it comes to expansions that are actually expansive: new locations packed with quests, items, monsters, spells, etc. They take already huge games and somehow make them even bigger.

Reminder that there are video games in the MoMA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_in_the_Museum_of_Modern_Art

The collection includes games like SimCity 2000, Dwarf Fortress, EVE online, and Minecraft.

I still enjoyed the first game but wasn’t one of the lead devs on KCD a capital G Gamer? I remember some… interesting tweets from him. Was he booted or did he change his ways?

Edit: Derp, should have just read the article before commenting. Fascism eats its own yet again.

One RPG that does a really great job of circumventing this is Morrowind. Early in the story there are several natural breaks where the PC is encouraged to do side quests and immurse themselves in the world. Once the main quest gets going it starts to take precedence, but the world ending threat builds slowly at first.