Bethesda Talks DLC Size and Limitations 93
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."
Re:Profit-making strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait a sec. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
That instantly ruled out doing a big expansion because those things just take so damn long to do.
Isn't that what Valve said about the Half-Life 2 episodes?
It's marketing crapspeak (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently you're not a console fanboy - this seems to be common parlance amongst PS3/X-Boxers.
The marketing drones clearly decided that "expansion pack" or "add on" or other "English" phrases were too "understandable" for "humans" and so began employing this crappy acronym instead. Another favourite of mine is "SKU" which apparently means "thing for sale" or "item for sale", although I am unsure of its precise meaning.
So get some DLC in your SKU, pronto.
Knowing PS3 is 2nd class customer for Bethesda... (Score:3, Insightful)
I will hold off buying any of their games until I see the DLC available for PS3 first.
Also, as with the "strategy guides" approach of the past, DLC will most likely be used to make you pay multiple times to get the whole game, it becomes simple due diligence to make sure DLC (a.k.a. missing parts of the game) will really be available for your platform before you buy.