Todd Howard, game director and executive producer for Bethesda Game Studios, has stated to Kotaku that Bethesda’s DLC packs, specifically for Skyrim, will start to feel more like expansion packs, and that smaller add-ons will be released in between. He stated,
“For Fallout 3 we did five DLCs,” Howard told me during an interview last week at the DICE Summit. “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.”
“With Fallout 3, it was, ‘Ten dollars is the sweet spot for us and we know we want to put out five of them. And we had overlapping teams. We were coming off Fallout 3 and right back in.” He describes that development cycle as “a real hardcore loop,” but adds, “we just think we can do better content if we approach it a different way.”
“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.”
Howard continued specifically about Skyrim, saying,
“So I think we had more of a plan and thought process of ‘We want to make the game better after it’s out.’ We don’t know what that means yet. People will tell us. But maybe we want to rebalance it. Maybe we want to add some features and patch them in, whereas in previous games, like Oblivion or Fallout 3, our thinking was just to patch it, fix the big problems. Our bandwidth at that time was that we needed to work on Skyrim. But now, with the game’s popularity, we really want to do all that stuff.”
There are no specific release dates for the DLC, yet it sounds as if Bethesda has some big plans up their sleeve. Who is excited about this news from Bethesda?
