STACK NZ Nov #79

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Skyrim Special Edition

shouldn’t end, I want to keep going’ concept going on. So, the third DLC was a response to that idea, because we have to now account for what players had done in the game - a lot of people end up dying at the end of that game when they play through it. That DLC could not possibly have

they see people wanting; folks really like this, let’s do this, or let’s do that. It’s always a mix. Finally, how do you go about preventing things leaking to the public perhaps before you want them to? Part of that is born out of

Skyrim Special Edition

“No, you can’t add another texture for that building, you might break the game. Stop touching it. Leave it alone.” While these guys are waiting for the programmers to be finished, they’re often sitting around writing up new quests and new dialogue, and that’s usually where the DLC comes from. They’ll come up with their own little strike teams where they talk about what they might want to do, and eventually go to the programmers with their new ideas. You look at Fallout 4 - all this stuff that they’ve added with contraptions and everything else, it doesn’t just work like that. Somebody had to add the functionality for different devices and stuff. It’s a collaborative effort amongst a variety of folks, either maybe ideas that they pitched for the original game that didn’t make it, or again, things that

existed until we got that initial reaction of, ‘I don’t want the game to end;’ so it’s a good example of listening to players, what they want, what they like, or what they don’t want. ‘I want to increase the level cap’, ‘I want to remove the game ending’ – a lot of it is up to the player’s responses. As far as the teams behind the DLC go, it’s always the same folks that have worked on the base game. You have a team working on a project, and they are often working on it in very different ways. So, when you get to the end of the game, you have lots of programmers that are working on it just trying to fix bugs, but you also have all these people, like artists and writers, who are now done, because no-one’s letting them touch the game anymore.

the fact that we’re a private company, so we are already used to holding things close to the vest anyway. Doing things our own way. It’s just kind of part of who we are, to be a little secretive and to not sort of talk about our stuff until it’s time. Our success level of that varies depending on who you ask, because one person might say there were no leaks, but I always end up seeing things out there; some of which can be true, some of which were not true, but all of which make me insane. You know; having to come up with 10 different project names for a single game just because you can’t even trust all of the same people to use the same code word - you have to mix it up. It’s ridiculous. I just wish people would be quiet and not talk about it.

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