Bethesda: Skyrim DLC to follow different model to Fallout 3

DLC for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will be more expansive than the five add-ons released for Bethesda's last title, Fallout 3, but you'll have to wait a little longer to get your hands on it, the developer has revealed.

Speaking in an interview with Kotaku, studio chief Todd Howard confirmed that work is underway on DLC but gamers shouldn't expect the rapid-fire add-on releases offered following Fallout 3's launch back in 2008.

"For Fallout 3 we did five DLCs. That was a very aggressive path for us," he explained.

"Our plan now is to take more time, to have more meat on them [for Skyrim]. They'll feel closer to an expansion pack.

"With Fallout 3, it was, 'Ten dollars is the sweet spot for us and we know we want to put out five of them. And we had overlapping teams. We were coming off Fallout 3 and right back in."

That turned out to be "a real hardcore loop," Howard added. "We just think we can do better content if we approach it a different way."

Though it seems you'll have to wait longer for the expansions, the studio is planning on smaller updates to keep you busy in the meantime.

"Because that gap is going to be bigger, we want to put little things out for free in between. We've already done that for PC with the high-res pack. We're trying to figure out what those things are."

Elsewhere in the interview, Howard explained that some of the additions shown off during a video montage at the DICE summit in Las Vegas last week could make it into these DLC packs.

"There are definitely things in there that we are planning on exploring," he confirmed.

"It looks like a ton of stuff that could ship right now, but it's in a sizzle video. It's, you know, it's not bug-tested, polished, balanced.

"That wasn't all of it. It's probably 60 per cent of it. The other 40 per cent doesn't show as well in a video or we didn't have good footage."

Howard didn't put a date on when we might see the first batch of new content for the game, saying only that development was in the "very early" stages.

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Bethesda knew Skyrim could run into "a bad memory situation" on PS3

UPDATE: Bethesda has contacted Eurogamer to clarify Todd Howard's comments on the performance of the PlayStation 3 version of Skyrim.

Bethesda's statement is below:

"The team knew the PlayStation 3 version could [Bethesda's emphasis] run into a 'bad memory situation' and they coded solutions that they felt would work - and in their tests the solutions did work. Post release a 'small percentage' of users were still experiencing issues where it couldn't keep up, and the team went to work hard on solving it."

ORIGINAL STORY: Bethesda knew before Skyrim launched that there would be gamers on PlayStation 3 that would face a "bad memory situation", director Todd Howard has revealed.

But he believed only "a small percentage" would be affected, he told Kotaku. (A small percentage of 10 million shipped copies of a game is still rather a lot - a victim of your own success, you could say.)

Howard recalled how it was "obvious" when testing that Skyrim got in "situations where it taxes the PS3".

"We did a ton more testing this time around," Howard said, "so the game is definitely our most solid release regardless of platform.

"Here's my saved game!"

"The way our dynamic stuff and our scripting works, it's obvious it gets in situations where it taxes the PS3. And we felt we had a lot of it under control. But for certain users it literally depends on how they play the game, varied over a hundred hours and literally what spells they use, did they go in this building?"

The "common misconception", Howard revealed, was that PS3 frame-rate problems were caused by large game-save files. "No it's not," Howard said. "It's literally the things you've done in what order and what's running."

Howard thought Skyrim patch 1.2, the one that broke resistances and made dragons fly backwards, "took care of a lot of it". And he was stumped when this wasn't the case.

So Bethesda asked users for their saved games and set about putting together Skyrim patch 1.4, which Howard hopes has solved the problem. However, having been in this position before, he's hedging his bets.

"Now that we've been through this we're not na?ve enough to say 'we have seen everything', because we have to assume we haven't," he verbally shrugged. "There are still going to be some people who have to come back to us and say, 'OK, my situation is this.'

"'OK, send us your saved game.' We literally need to look at what you have running. We tried doing it through e-mail. We need to open the saved game and look at it.

"We've got one guy who has seven dragons on the other side of the world, and a siege about to happen in this city and another 20 quests running. And, OK, this is what the game is trying to do and it's having a hard time running that."

Analysing the latest patch's performance.

Video(Playlist,1);

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Only Modern Warfare 3 made more money than Skyrim in 2011

No exclusive PS3 or Xbox 360 game sold more copies than Bethesda's formidable open world fantasy romp Skyrim last year.

No, not Gears of War 3 on Xbox 360 (in North America); and no, not Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception on PS3.

On PC, Skyrim outsold all other PC games 3:1 during November, and is Steam's fastest ever selling game.

In terms of money made worldwide, Skyrim was the second most successful game of 2011. Only Modern Warfare 3 will have finished higher, which puts Skyrim ahead of even FIFA 12 and Battlefield 3.

Who said fantasy RPGs were the pursuit of lonely nerds? They're not any more, although for fellow RPG makers this is both a boon and burden.

Bethesda had shipped more than 10 million copies of Skyrim within the game's first month on sale.

With quantities like that, it's no wonder the Creation Kit toolset has been popular on PC. More than 2500 free, user-created mods were made within three days of the Creation Kit launching, and more than 2 million separate mods have been downloaded.

No specific, Bethesda-made DLC has been announced for Skyrim, although we do know it will be released as a timed-exclusive for Xbox 360.

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Reckoning dev's biggest concern is you're still playing Skyrim

The biggest concern at Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning developer Big Huge Games right now is you're still playing Skyrim.

According to lead designer Ian Frazier, if you and lots of other gamers are still playing Skyrim, you may not be interested in Reckoning, out next month.

Reckoning is a huge, open world high fantasy RPG. Sound like a game you've played?

"Frankly, Reckoning is either going to do well enough that we're going to be in a good place or people are going to go, nope, I'm still playing Skyrim, I'm not interested, in which case we're hosed," Frazier told Eurogamer.

"It's going to be one of those extremes."

Frazier described Skyrim as "our big competitor". "It's hard not to go, it's the devil! It's evil!" he said.

But, he's a fan - perhaps not as big a fan as others, but a fan. "It's a good game. It's got problems. It's not God's gift to gaming, as some are describing it. But it is good. It's a lot of fun. They do a lot of stuff really well.

"But a lot of folks are still playing it, and that's been one of my biggest concerns. It's the same thing as if we had released first. It's hundreds of hours of content and it's a high fantasy world. Are people just going to be bored? Are they just done with high fantasy for a while? I hope not. But that's the big concern at the studio."

Alternatively, Skyrim's incredible success - 10 million players and counting - suggests interest in fantasy RPGs it at an all-time high.

"Not just Skyrim, but RPGs in general have been in an upswing over the last few years," Frazier explained.

"Skyrim in particular, here's a giant open world game where you can do whatever you want in this fantasy setting, and everybody goes, wow, this is fun, I like this. And a few months later, oh, this is the same sort of thing I like except I can do a lot more awesome stuff in combat. Let's hope that is the thing that makes us succeed."

Gamers and press have been quick to compare Reckoning to Skyrim ever since it was announced.

This situation has "its ups and downs", Frazier said, but he's happy to discuss his gargantuan rival - even if it's bad PR.

"PR wise it's not a good idea for us to talk about any of our competitors too much, or anything else in the RPG space because we're trying to sell Reckoning," he said.

"Our livelihood depends on it. But I'm not going to pretend that Skyrim doesn't exist and it doesn't have a pretty big bearing on our success in both directions."

Reckoning chief Ken Rolston - who led development on Elder Scrolls games Morrowind and Oblivion - raised eyebrows earlier this week when he said his game "has the best, coolest, fastest-paced, most tactile and silly-exciting fantasy combat of any RPG".

Frazier echoed those comments - indeed he went one step further.

"The combat - I'll be very blunt - it is leagues better than Skyrim's. It's better than pretty much everything in the RPG space. I'm proud of our combat," he said.

Frazier pointed to Reckoning's Destiny System, which governs the game's class system, and its art style, as other points of difference.

Reckoning's art style in particular is "a big selling point".

Skyrim "is a little monochromatic, and it's snowy. It's just very white," Frazier said. "It's snowing, it was just snowing and it's about to start snowing again.

"It is cool, it's just it is samey throughout. And it's a big world, so it's like, I just want some variety.

"One thing I think we've done a pretty good job with is the art for each major zone and each of the dungeons is completely different. It's like, I'm in a desert, I'm in a swamp - really radically different environments.

"We embrace colour left and right."

Reckoning has over 130 hand-crafted dungeons, Frazier revealed. "We just made them" with "brute force"," he said.

"Our level design pipeline is great. You can make a dungeon that's pretty cool-looking pretty darn fast. So we've been able to craft a lot of them with a lot of variety to them across the course of development."

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