News: Bethesda Talks DLC Size and Limitations

[News Bot]

Gamasutra has an interview with Pete Hines, product manager for Fallout 3, about Bethesda's philosophy for DLC, and how it's changed over the years. Quoting: "All these people are out there playing our game by the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis and we want to be able to bring those folks something they could do in a much shorter time frame, rather than just saying, 'See you next year.' That instantly ruled out doing a big expansion because those things just take so damn long to do. So we started looking at the biggest stuff we'd done that people really liked, but that we could do in smaller, digestible chunks. That's where we came to the Knights of the Nine model -- it's substantive and it adds multiple hours of game play and new items, but we can do it in a time frame that allows us to get it out without waiting forever. That's what we've gone for with Fallout 3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[sahel]

My guess is that the financial risk for developers is smaller when they release smaller updates (the downloadable content upgrades), instead of big expansion packs. I'd prefer one big expansionpack over a larger period of time though, instead of having to buy several downloadable content packages to get the 'full' game.

[Cid]

Pete Hines, product manager of fallout 3?
Isn't there a Pete Hines in Circle Of Lootius?

[Ze-Tomb]

Well it sounds like Bethesda are trying to think from the majority of players PoV with this. Kudos to them for thinking like that.
With the smaller packages, you can get your hours of play, items and wait till another one in a respectable timeframe and the company wont have to take big risk.
Also with this, you can choose what parts of that Xpack you want, e.g. Say you want the 'Knights of the Nine' but not 'Mehrunes Razor' (all oblivion I know) you can just Download the Knights & not Mehrunes.
In my opinion, Bethesda have done some good thinking once again.