Bethesda Talks DLC Size and Limitations

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."

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[TheFlyingBuddha]

Too bad Bethesda can't seem to patch their games. VATS (the over-hyped, poor attempt at appeasing turn-based combat fans and only marketable aspect of the game's combat) has been broken for months now. I'd take "see you in a year" if it meant they actually fixed more bugs than they made. http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=973957 [bethsoft.com]

Precisely

[caitsith01]

As far as I am concerned, Bethesda still hasn't released a final, stable build of the base game. Instead of wasting time with minor content additions, they should really sort out the fundamental stability problems the PC version of Fallout 3 continues to have.

In particular, I have personally seen severe stability issues with this game on three completely separate PCs (out of a total of three that I have tried it on, so 100%). Two of these were built in the last 12 months (one, sadly, for the express purpose of playing Fallout 3... a friend of mine is a tad obsessed with Oblivion and got rather overexcited about F3). All of them contain nothing but quality brand name parts etc, and all of them run other games well. Two of them even run Crysis well at very high detail.

Yet Fallout 3 three crashes on all of them - not just nice crashes, but serious, OS-killing crashes as well as crashes to desktop. On one, it's every hour or so. On another, when specific events happen (like opening VATS, shooting things... BAM back to desktop). On the third, it's around 5-15 minutes between crashes. On all three of them, it's basically not worth playing - you just know that the game is going to die on you unexpectedly sooner or later, which really breaks the immersion and doesn't exactly promote investment of time into playing it.

Over at the Bethesda forums, gangs of fanboys ramble on about how the game works well for them on their systems so therefore anyone who has issues must be experiencing a problem with their PC, not the game. But when you have multiple PCs, which otherwise run well in a variety of similar applications, and one particular game causes serious and replicable crashes, then there is something wrong with the game. And it's clear from the forums and from a quick Google search that there are many, many others who have similar issues.

So less DLC, more properly tested and polished games!!! Dammit Bethesda, I loved Oblivion and you've pretty much burnt through your credits with this farce.