Hines: Don't carve off content for DLC

The developers at Bethesda "don't believe" in cherry picking core content to sell as DLC, preferring to stick all its best ideas in the base game before launch.

"If you are nine months out and you are still thinking of good content, then that probably goes into the game, right?" executive Pete Hines asked MCV.

"... But there’s no point in planning the content that comes after because what if this content makes the base game better? We want the base game to be the best thing possible. We don’t believe in carving out a little part to sell as DLC later."

Hines said designers and artists work on the game until it goes gold, and only then start looking at DLC. The studio prefers not to make concrete plans for new content because that rules out the possibility of meeting player requests.

"With Fallout 3 we knew what the first one or two pieces of DLC were going to be, but the third one was a reaction to the release of the game and the feedback we got from people wanting to raise the level cap," he explained.

"If we went out from the start and said: ‘We’re doing five pieces of DLC for Fallout 3, here are these five,’ then we wouldn’t have been able to be as reactive or responsive to what the fans said. I think that’s what allowed us to be so successful with that DLC, not just that we had them but that they were more of what people said they liked and not something set in stone six months before launch."

MCV has now made the full Hines interview available online, so hit the link above for more. Hines discussed Brink's mixed reviews, Wii U and Kinect support, and Bethesda's acquisition goals and much more.

Bethesda's next major release is RAGE, the id Software shooter due in October, followed by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in November.

Thanks, That VideoGame Blog.