Bethesda Softworks Interview
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As a developer of open-world games, I imagine there is some degree of creative restriction on what Bethesda can do with DLC, in that discrete content has to be integrated in some logical way. You can't just add another racetrack to the menu, or whatever. How do you approach that?
Pete Hines: It is a constraint from one standpoint, which is that if you're going to plug it into the existing world then it has to be adaptable for anybody at any level that we discern, at least for the first two [in Fallout 3]. We don't discern whether you're level 1, level 10, level 15, or level 20, so we have to allow for all of that.
But in general, no. We like building our games that way. Having the DLC exist within that world allows us to, once we're done making all the content for the game and we've finished the game from that standpoint and then spent lot of time playing it, look for areas that we'd like to do more of -- to do something different than when you're looking at the whole spectrum of content you've provided.
In the third [Fallout 3 DLC pack, Broken Steel, out this month, which continues the game beyond its original ending], it really allows us to react to what the response was once the game came out. We were genuinely surprised how many people were disappointed or upset that the game had an ending. Because most games have an ending, but most Bethesda games don't.
I guess it was just the case where people have come to expect that our games don't end and that they can keep playing.
So we said, what would we need to do to address that? It has taken us a while because there are all these different ways that the game can end, and we needed to account for them and tell the story of what happens after that. How does that story continue on in the D.C. wasteland?
There are a lot of bases to cover there. There's a lot of things that we want to account for. We don't want to just say, "Oh, you can keep playing but the world feels exactly the same as if you had finished it." We had to go through and spend time doing that.
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It's an interesting evolution, because as Bethesda Game Studios specifically, you've traditionally operated with what some see as a more antiquated development model -- spend three or four years developing a game, ship that big thing, get started on something else. How much have you had to adapt your methods to adjust the way you think about development?
PH: It doesn't change how we think about it. We have always been really good at what you're talking about, which is managing the game's life cycle -- what are you doing with the game three months out, six months out, one year out, two years out?
I think it's actually something we do better than most publishers, if not all publishers. I say that because -- well, what does your average big publisher put out a year? Thirty games? Forty games? Whatever the hell the number is.
They're doing that every year. They have these large number of titles and they just don't think about them like we do, whereas we do something like Oblivion or Morrowind. We're still selling Morrowind on a monthly basis. We still have it out there. Oblivion is still doing terrific for us.
We don't give up on our stuff, ever. There is always a market and a niche and people out there who are willing to buy it. DLC is just another component of that. We make games that have legs and that stick around and that people will continue to be vested in and play for a long time.
This is just another way to reach out to those folks to say, "If you really like this, here are some more things that you might like." It's the lifecycle of the product as a thing you sell, as well as the game as a thing you play. It allows people to keep coming back to it.
I have people who ping me about this -- I was just talking to a press guy who said, "I just had a friend start playing Oblivion. He had never played it and now he's really into it." That guy's going to go out and start buying downloadable content. He's probably going to go buy the much-maligned horse armor.
There are people who are coming into our products years and years after folks like you or your readers have moved past them. There are people who are experiencing it for the first time.
That DLC stuff is great because it's still there and available and working with them, and for them that content is still a new experience, both from a product standpoint as well as within the game itself.
