Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night to get $10 day one DLC followed by seven free game modes

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, will get $10 day one DLC, followed by new characters, modes and cosmetics as free post-launch updates, creator Koji Igarashi has announced.

The free updates to the side-scrolling action-adventure game will include a speedrun mode, a boss rush mode, online and local co-op play, a "roguelike mode" and two extra playable characters, according to the game's newly-launched website.

In addition, the game will get a $10 DLC called Iga’s Back Pack on release date, June 18. In the DLC, players will be able to fight Igarashi himself and earn the "powerful Swordwhip weapon" for defeating him.

The DLC was initially promised as an exclusive for those that backed the Kickstarter campaign, which at the time was the richest video game Kickstarter of all time. However, in a Kickstarter update this week Igarashi said the community had indicated it was happy for the DLC to be more widely released.

"We also asked the community a while back if they were against us making the ‘backer exclusive’ content (Iga Boss and Swordwhip) available to all players in some fashion. Almost 30,000 of you replied and the overwhelming response was that in general you were okay with it, and the most popular option was to sell it at a price that would respect the purchase the backers originally made," he said.

Igarashi said selling the DLC was partly about "making money", but the main reason was to ensure "everyone had a safe and legitimate way to get the full game experience"—in other words, he wants to reduce the chances of the game getting pirated.

"As someone who’s pirated games because of bull**** anti-consumer practices, or as a demo to try and then buy (something largely made obsolete by modern refund systems), I wanted to eliminate as many reasons to pirate Bloodstained as possible.

"I understand that not everyone will be 100% happy with this decision, but hopefully this helps in understanding the reasoning behind it. And of course all backers entitled to this content will receive the DLC for free."

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.