The days of the Shivering Isles are long gone suggests Pete Hines, it took ”so damn long” to get out they’d rather focus on ”much shorter” time frames.
The developers will follow their Knights of the Nine example for Oblivion, offering players a ”substantial few hours” more play-time without an ”excessive amount” needed to make it.
”We did the entire spectrum for the most part. We did small things and then we did the really huge thing,” Hines tells Gamasutra, referring to Oblivion’s Shivering Isles expansion DLC.
”We did what I think was the first ever full expansion on a console for download. We looked at what we liked and what we didn’t, and what the people liked. What we discovered was that we want to be able to do stuff that doesn’t take a year to come out.”
”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,” continued Bethesda’s VP.
Knights of the Nine is the way to go: ”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,” Hines concluded.
Click here to read the full interview between Peter Hines and Gamasutra. DLC: Bite-size snacks or full-course meal?
Fallout 3’s The Pitt
