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Generally speaking, we’re looking
for studios that have a decent amount
of experience. We want to work with
people who have proven that they
have figured out who they are and
what they’re about. I mean, when you
look at the Arkane guys - even before
we acquired them, they were just a
studio that we really wanted to work
with, because we really respected
and appreciated stuff they’d done in
the past. There was this really clear
dedication to immersive, first-person
games that they had, which fitted
with our sensibilities and trying to do
unique things. When you think about
working with external developers, like
one we’re working with right now, Dire
Wolf Digital, doing the Elder Scrolls
online – we thought, ‘look, these guys
can take what they know, and work
with us to take something that
we know and love, which is the
Elder Scrolls, and make something
cool and unique.’ It’s not that
anything that we do sets out to
be earth-shattering, necessarily;
it’s just if you can do something
in a way that is different enough,
or brings enough new content in,
you can breathe a lot of new life
into a very familiar experience. In all of
these cases, we try and look for that
mix of experience and creativity, and a
willingness to try and do new things.
What about DLC for your games? Is
that something that’s thought about
during the development of the main
game?Who ends up working on it?
For the most part, it really gets no
thought or attention until we’re done
making the base game. That doesn’t
mean the game has to have shipped
first - it just means that there’s a point
at which you stop making content, and
stop making the game in order to finish
it, right; you have to stop changing
quests and changing things. You have
to let it go. It gets to the point where
it’s like, we’re wrapping it up and
squashing bugs and so forth, and maybe
somebody will start to think about
what the first drop of DLC may end up
being. But, you know, a lot of the stuff
we come up with, we don’t really do
a lot of work on until after the game is
out, because then you can start to see
what people are reacting to, what they
enjoy, what they’re asking about, the
things they want more of. Otherwise
you end up doing a bunch of stuff with
no information, and potentially releasing
a lot of stuff people may not care
about.
Fallout 3
is a perfect example;
much to our surprise, although maybe
it shouldn’t have been, people didn’t
want the game to end. We were like,
‘wait a minute, all the previous Fallout
games ended, and everybody else’s
game ends, what do you
mean you didn’t want it
to end’. We just thought
that’s what you
guys expected?
It’s a Fallout game.
Fallout games
have an end.
There was this
whole, ‘No, it
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Fallout 4
Fallout 4