Bethesda promises ‘expansion pack’-style Skyrim DLC

Posted February 20, 2012 by Luke Stratford in News.

News: Good news for fans of Skyrim, as Bethesda aims for fewer, ‘meatier’ DLC installments for the award-winning RPG.

‘For Fallout 3 we did five DLCs,’ explains Bethesda‘s Todd Howard to Kotaku. ‘That was a very aggressive path for us. Our plan now is to take more time, to have more meat on them [for Skyrim]. They’ll feel closer to an expansion pack.’ This comes as a great step forward for Bethesda in terms of post-release content, which has been checkered to say the least. With Oblivion and Fallout 3 managing to score some hits, marred by more middling content, Skyrim appears to mark a change in Bethesda’s approach to delivering DLC.

Covering Bethesda’s post-release content for Fallout 3, he described their attitude to developing the supporting DLC content as, ‘Ten dollars is the sweet spot for us and we know we want to put out five of them.’ In theory, a reasonable plan, but the quality and scale of some packs was criticized by players for linear, minor additions to the core game, whereas others, Point Lookout in particulr, mnged to do so much more. As Howard went on to explain, the learning experience lead them to believe that ‘…we just think we can do better content if we approach it a different way.’

Although this would mean that Skyrim fans will have a longer wait in store between DLC packs, and to clarify, no actual content has been outlined yet, the mount of extras teased during last week’s DICE Summit has a lot of people interested. New AI behaviour, Thief-style water arrows and tweaked creature models comprise of what Howard described as ’60%’ of what Bethesda was currently working on.

In the interim, Howard still assured fans that Bethesda would remain at work on smaller updates, provided for free. ‘Because that gap is going to be bigger, we want to put litle things out for free in between. We’ve already done that for PC with the high-res pack. We’re trying to figure out what those things are.’

Tagged as Bethesda, DICE Summit, DLC, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim, Skyrim DLC