. .

games

Resource Sink?

March 12, 2014 9:49:19.152

This sounds good - Peter Hines of Bethesda talking about regular updates to ESO - but I'm skeptical:

"We want to do the version that we think is the best game and the coolest experience," Hines continued. "And that means putting a lot of people and a lot of content creators towards having stuff that comes our regularly; every four weeks, five weeks, six weeks. Big new stuff that you want to do."

Why am I skeptical? Look at the timelines for the DLC packs for the last few games they've done - Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 3. The gap between the significant chunks of content was long, and the stream typically dried up around the 1 year mark after release. I simply have my doubts that they can sustain a system of significant DLC size output at that rate without completely burning out their content development teams. I also wonder what that kind of schedule will do to the development of the more interesting (to me, anyway) single player games they do. Sure, the studios aren't the same ones, but resources from corporate are not unlimited....

Tags: ,

posted by James Robertson

Comments

Re: Resource Sink?

[John Dougan] March 12, 2014 15:44:51.963

While I have no idea if Bethesda can do it, it is possible in general. For an existence proof all you have to do is look at the every 2-4 week release cycle that ArenaNet is using with Guild Wars 2. It is pretty clear you have to organize differently to make it work and that the actual internal timeline for a release is much longer than the gap.

 Share Tweet This