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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."
...that the DLC model was supposed to be modeled after the mod communities for Quake and Unreal. Yet somehow, I have seen almost no sign of anything that looks like post-release modifications. Studios seem to hold back a bit of content, then release that as DLC. Not exactly the original intent. Especially when the game is incomplete without the DLC.
(Interestingly, Mega Man 9 walked a fine line there. Technically, all the "DLC" was already in the executable. Yet the stuff you paid for was truly above and beyond the primary gameplay. Which made it ideal as either Easter Eggs or DLC. Kudos to Capcom for at least getting that right.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yea, and it makes sense too on the player's end. I'd rather pay $15 for some more really fun experiences in a game that I already know I like, than waste $50 on a game that I might not really enjoy all that much.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Am I the only person who hasn't a clue what DLC means? Neither the summary nor the fucking article can be bothered to tell me.
Downloadable content
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downloadable_content
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
The point of the article, though, isn't whether they should make DLC. It's whether they should do additional content in a DLC or as a full expansion. If you remember Morrowind, there were two huge expansion packs (Bloodmoon and Tribunal). Each with an amount of play almost equal to the original game.
But Knights of the Nine, a DLC for Oblivion, only gave 10 - 15 hours of play (that of a standard primary quest line).
Easier and quicker to release and sold for less than an expansion.
Personally, I'd like an expansion over DLC (if this is the given choice). I'm ok waiting.
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?
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
I read the headline, and was trying to think why the military hospital was using an old network protocol.
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.
Read Pynchon.
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.
Read Pynchon.
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.
Oliver.