Skyrim DLC Will Be More Like Expansion Packs With Free Bits

It’s no secret that Skyrim has seen massive critical and commercial success all around. We even gave it our Game of the Year award last year. From the sounds of it, the folks over at Bethesda have big ideas in mind when it comes to giving players a reason to return to the land of dragons once more.

Speaking with Kotaku, Game Director Todd Howard broke down how Bethesda is approaching post-launch support in a different way than they did for Fallout 3 or Oblivion.

Here are some of the juicier bits of the interview:

For Fallout 3 we did five DLCs. That was a very aggressive path for us. Our plan now is to take more time, to have more meat on them [for Skyrim]. They’ll feel closer to an expansion pack.

On taking a different approach to DLC:

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. We just think we can do better content if we approach it a different way.

On the gap between expansions:

Because that gap is going to be bigger, we want to put litle 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.

On new capabilities for greater projects:

So I think we had more of a plan and thought process of ‘We want to make the game better after it’s out.’ We don’t know what that means yet. People will tell us. But maybe we want to rebalance it. Maybe we want to add some features and patch them in, whereas in previous games, like Oblivion or Fallout 3, our thinking was just to patch it, fix the big problems. Our bandwidth at that time was that we needed to work on Skyrim. But now, with the game’s popularity, we really want to do all that stuff.

Believe it or not, a lot of people within the community are thinking that this new perspective on DLC means players will, at some point, be able to travel to the regions of Cyrodiil and Morrowind, the settings for Elder Scrolls IV and III, respectively. If you climb high enough in the mountains, you can visually see these regions, and there are even roads leading right to them. Approach them, however, and they’re blocked off.

I’m just excited when someone within a development team uses the words “free” and “DLC” in the same sentence.

What say you, gamers? What do you want to see within the world of Skyrim?