"Creating Downloadable Content" by Jeff Gardiner

Morbus

Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
He's one of Bethesdas's Senior Producers, and has written a lengthy piece about... well, about downloadable content and his job as a producer. Here's a snippet:<blockquote>As Fallout 3 was nearing "true Beta," most of the content developers, our Artists and Designers, were playing the game around the clock. That process comes to an end once we start locking down the content for Beta, so this is the time we transition the team onto our additional content, now and forevermore entitled "DLC." To kick the DLC off we held a large team meeting in our theatre, where developers came with ideas, slides and stories. We heard from everyone; ideas included costumes, weapons, sweeping gameplay changes, new settings, alien worlds, even a crazy-clown carnival. What we ended up with were two great quests that were in some ways amalgams many of the ideas pitched in the meeting. Those being Operation: Anchorage, which was an attempt at a more traditional shooter experience and The Pitt, which is Fallout at its best with a new settlement, faction, and morally ambiguous quest line.

The creation of Fallout 3 DLC is about taking a critical look at the game we just made, and deciding where to experiment. What to add. What would we, as fans of the game, like to try? Like to experience? All of us at this point have played Fallout 3 for hundreds of hours. You begin to identify missed opportunities. Stories that need to be told, weapon lists that need filling out, creatures that need allies. Enter the DLC.</blockquote>He also talks about Fallout 3's next DLC, "Broken Steel", and how it continues the main story and increases the level cap.<blockquote>Broken Steel has presented several of its own unique challenges. The first one that gave me pause was the need to reprise the roles of so many voice actors. We're actually wrapping that up now under the watchful and masterful eye of Mark Lampert. The next thing that was a concern was 'fiddling' with so much of our existing content. One of the scariest things about making DLC that drops right into an existing game is the potential to create new bugs. I've worked on 13 of these things now, and something always goes wrong in the 11th hour. It's very rarely easy to fix or benign, so we're keeping a cautious and watchful eye on Broken Steel. So far, so good.</blockquote><center> </center>

You can read the whole thing, of course, at Fallout (3) Official Site.
 
ugh.
I must say that bethesda seriously needs a doce of reality.
o:a was a horrible inconsistant pile of bad fps garbage.
They should face it, their DLC ideas are horrible and not good enough.
and...
"Critical look" :lol: :lol: :lol:
yeah right.
The bugs and bad design choices make me think otherwise
 
The way he said it, looks like they were "tempted" to make a new combat system and deliver it as a DLC. That would be kind of nice, even if worthless. It's the ever present combat and the crappy plot/writting that need to be replaced in a DLC, the combat can wait.
 
Gardiner said:
One of the scariest things about making DLC that drops right into an existing game is the potential to create new bugs. I've worked on 13 of these things now, and something always goes wrong in the 11th hour. It's very rarely easy to fix or benign...

That explains the price tag for that horse armor mod. :roll:
 
The total absence of any design philosophy beyond
A. it's cool
B. throw it against the wall and see if it sticks
C. let's pander to the munchkins
is reason enough to write Bethesda off as bush league RPG designers.
They are hopeless IMO.
 
Wait, did I read that right? They transferred most of the team onto DLC design while FO3 was in the final stages, instead of fixing up the remaining bugs and clearing out the plot/design inconsistencies?

How entirely prudent of them.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
Wait, did I read that right? They transferred most of the team onto DLC design while FO3 was in the final stages, instead of fixing up the remaining bugs and clearing out the plot/design inconsistencies?
You either read that right or Mr. Gardiner is very bad with words.

The worst part is, I'm sure that none of the higher-ups there can even see what's wrong with that.

And considering this guy is a Senior Producer at Beth and he seems to think that this is a great design process they have... just ugh. No wonder Bethesda can't turn out anything but crap, empty open-world hiking-simulators.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
Wait, did I read that right? They transferred most of the team onto DLC design while FO3 was in the final stages, instead of fixing up the remaining bugs and clearing out the plot/design inconsistencies?

How entirely prudent of them.
Why pay devs when the modding community can fix it?
They've got lucrative DLC to focus on man!
Coming soon: Deathclaws on Roller-skates.
 
Bawls caps are worth 50 normal caps in FO:BOS, so I bet the Bawlslurks are also 50 times stronger than Nukalurks.
 
Ausdoerrt said:
Wait, did I read that right? They transferred most of the team onto DLC design while FO3 was in the final stages, instead of fixing up the remaining bugs and clearing out the plot/design inconsistencies?

How entirely prudent of them.
I missed that the first time through and assumed he meant his team started to get to work but you're right, he says that the content developers transition to DLC. That's ridiculous and explains a lot, though I can't say that I'm surprised.

All of us at this point have played Fallout 3 for hundreds of hours. You begin to identify missed opportunities. Stories that need to be told, weapon lists that need filling out, creatures that need allies. Enter the DLC.
Yet you fail to address the broken leveling system, crappy story, probably traditional ending slides, bugs, crappy combat, limited quest options, and the VATS cam which cannot be disabled (something people have been asking for for as long as they knew about the slow-mo cam) amongst many complaints. In not one of these have I heard anything about creatures getting new allies or filling out weapon lists (add a few per DLC which does not fill it out). Instead you make a FPS DLC, which your own lead producer says that the FPS parts of the game suck, The Pitt (we'll see about this), and Broken Steel for a handful of TES fans who whine about the game ending (because they can't load before the end and keep playing but have no problem keeping track of their save file at the end of the tutorials).

Operation: Anchorage was changed mid-course in development, was under a brutally tight schedule (after a brutal crunch,) all while we're still working out our new team dynamics and production schedule.
So it sounds like Bethesda cooperate is at least partly to blame for being brutally strict on schedules and not allowing enough time for development, though I have to admit that it still sounds like they had a lot of time to make 2-3 hour long DLCs with minimal new mechanics. The bulk of the work seems like it would be on their 3D artists, making all of the extra textures...

Operation: Anchorage was originally supposed to be sort of… an RTS. A Real Time Strategy simulation, using the Fallout 3 assets. While it does have customizable strike teams and a branching mission structure, it's just not an RTS, clearly
Well that explains where the broken promise came from and it's an interesting idea. It was probably canned because the system made sucked and there wasn't enough time to make it mediocre.

But, we kept the overall story of the content intact, and were able to introduce some unique gameplay and lots of ridiculously powerful weaponry for players to experiment with. All of this and we were able to get it in the hands of the fans at a very rapid pace.
What was the unique gameplay? And "lot's of ridiculously powerful weaponry" is a good thing in DLC? Sounds like bragging about introducing overpowered weapons which break your game to me...

Now to Broken Steel – which continues the main story and increases the level cap. We had no intention of doing this, or continuing the story, at all. The idea for Broken Steel was not finalized or even talked about in the big team meeting I had mentioned earlier. It came about two months after the game was on the shelves, right before Christmas.
To be fair, it sounds like they listen to their TES pets, maybe they use their mods on their forum as a focus group?

The last hurdle for Broken Steel was actually raising the level cap. The conundrum was not only how to continue the quest where the player dies, but how to make the game challenging for the player who has maxed out six of their skills and has Tesla Armor and a Gatling Laser. Al Nanes and Brian Chapin have done wonders with the story, while Jeff Browne and Bruce Nesmith have stepped up and created a game that will definitely challenge even the most veteran Fallout 3 players.
What about the player's who have maxed out every skill, ie the real "veteran Fallout 3 players"? Oh right, they don't count because they understand your system and have shown how broken it truly is...

And that leads us back to Production. With Operation: Anchorage on the store shelves of cyberspace, I'm left with wrapping up The Pitt and Broken Steel. That entails... working on a strategy guide...
Maybe it's just me but it seems like the lead developers, or any developers for that matter, shouldn't be involved with making a strategy guide until they are done with their work (ie the game is released). :confused:
 
All of us at this point have played Fallout 3 for hundreds of hours. You begin to identify missed opportunities

So after hundreds of hours playing the game, they just began to identify missed opportunities? Then i wonder how much time will they need to understand that their game is boring and broken? Oh that's right, when the next TES game will be announced, and they will boast how they fixed all the bad aspects that were in F3....
 
UncannyGarlic said:
I missed that the first time through and assumed he meant his team started to get to work but you're right, he says that the content developers transition to DLC. That's ridiculous and explains a lot, though I can't say that I'm surprised.
That's not really ridiculous. When they hit "true" beta, the content developers are done. Now, their beta testing might not be robust enough for your tastes, but that doesn't mean that it would be helped much by a bunch of artists. If anything, they would need a bigger team of QA people.

Anyway, that was a moderately interesting article. I wonder why they cut so much of the DC map.
 
Jeff Gardiner
Al Nanes and Brian Chapin have done wonders with the story, while Jeff Browne and Bruce Nesmith have stepped up and created a game that will definitely challenge even the most veteran Fallout 3 players.

The hype, the hype…feel the hype man!! Aaaarrgg!!

Sorry guys, I’m all out of mana after casting a lot of “protect-from-hype” spells. :)
Seems like modesty is a rare commodity at Bethesda. The marketitis hypethemus virus hit, has caused a lot of victims down there.

Jeff Gardiner
As Fallout 3 was nearing "true Beta," most of the content developers, our Artists and Designers, were playing the game around the clock.
All of us at this point have played Fallout 3 for hundreds of hours. You begin to identify missed opportunities. Stories that need to be told, weapon lists that need filling out, creatures that need allies. Enter the DLC.

So after the extensive-to-death analysis of the game, with all of Beth’s team involved, none of them noticed the poor writing, the shallow Main Quest, the fraudulent sensation of choices & consequences, the strong absence of diversity in character development, the horrible ending, etc,etc.

But they were eager to add new content, and charge for that, even long before the game had entered its gold phase.

Greedy, greedy Bethesda, greedy as a pig.
 
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