DLC announcment

[Zor2k13]

The only additional voice acting will be MOAR garrus! oh and that guy that did mercer and belethor voices from skyrim he seems to be doing nick valentine voice. So those two pretending to be every new npc added. I wonder if they get paid extra to fake additional female voices somehow?

[DupaStupid]

So are they increasing the price and announcing it the way they're to milk everyone before modders make free. better versions?

Just thought of something evil they may pull. All DLC required to use any mods. 

[DocClox]

Just thought of something evil they may pull. All DLC required to use any mods.

Nah. I've been thinking about this. The plan is better than that.

 

What they do is make DLC with base functionality for all the popular mods. So the Autowhatsitsface is the base for any robot stuff coming up. The Wastland Workshop is going to be the foundation for a lot of slavery and settlement expansions. So all the modders use the DLC as starting points. I mean they're cheap, right?

 

And anyone who wants to use the mods needs the DLC.

 

They learned this from the problems with the paid modding debacle, where no one could sell anything without permission from the SKSE and SkyUI guys. Get your name on the basic building blocks and the money just rolls in.

 

Then again, maybe I should just take this tin-foil helment off. Who knows?

[Zor2k13]

Yeah look at what came with dragonborn besides content was bug fixes I think and dawnguard too. You won't be able to use some big mods without the DLC this is just a given.

 

History is a record of what people have done it is also a map of where we are going too since all we ever do is repeat history over and over again. We are living on a planet full of insane people! Most of these insane people run things like govts and companies.

[Halstrom]

I have no idea what you just said since it's a bunch of double talk, but whatever.  Bethesda won't be making more dlcs than they planned for and the season pass that was $29.99 will provide for the same content a $59.99 season pass.  End of story.

By their statement it sounds like they probably will unless you have a 100% inside source to back up your statement.

It's not end of story by any means, well at least till 2017 anyway.

[Kendo 2]

Nope, nothing to back it up...other than what's typed on that page and Bethesda's track record for being honest or showing even a smidgen or accountability or integrity.

For FO4 alone; New and improved Creation Engine (okay that wasn't true).  No loading screens (okay that wasn't true).  Improved AI (not true).  Dynamic quests (not true).  The next generation in open world gaming (okay, that wasn't true either).  Do I really need to continue or are you beginning to see the light?  And FO4 is NOT the first time Bethesda has pushed Todd Howard out in front of a world-wide audience to LIE HIS ASS OFF.  They've misrepresented every game since Oblivion.

 

I take nothing Bethesda says at face value because I have no reason to, and neither does anyone else...but they do.  Can't wait for the shit storm when they release the FO4 CK.  THAT will be a real circus considering what the current EULA states.

[windu190]

Automatron = $9.99

Wasteland Workshop = $4.99

Far Harbor = $24.99

Total = $39.97

This is only the first series of add-ons along with the Creation Kit.

There is another $60.00 worth of add-ons later in 2016 which is the reason for the price hike  a total of $99.97 worth of add-ons for $60.00 if you already have the $29.00 season pass

 or plan to get it before Marchy 1st. then your set, and it will cost you nothing extra for the add-ons coming after this series of add-ons..

 

And this is from Bethesda.net and yes I DID read the whole story.

 

I think Kendo knows that, he simply says Bethesda is lying. Which I suppose is possible, even though I somehow doubt it. I guess we will find out later in 2016. 

[Kendo 2]

What I am try to say (which is being ignored in favor of disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing) is that Bethesda has a set number of dlcs for FO4 and they will not be making new packs above an beyond what is already budgeted for.  YES, they are saying more packs are coming (that's a given looking at previous games).  What they are not saying is that they are making more packs than they intended to from the start.  If they intend to make 12 packs that's how many they will be making, regardless if people paid $30 or $60.  They are simply raising the price of the season pass.  They say exactly that, and it's one point I believe them on because it's a chickenshit way of doing business and that's what Bethesda is about these days.

 

What I predict:

After Far Harbor there will be at least two more major dlcs, maybe as many as five (but I doubt it).  I am not counting tinker toy packs like Automatron and Wasteland Workshop.  For Oblivion they made 8 like that; Vile Lair, Fighter's Stronghold, etc.

[greyscale]

I guess it depends on how many season pass they sell now which will determine how much extra DLC we'll get in the future. Personally I've never really liked a lot of the DLC bethesda made, a lot of time there just seems to be big difference in quality. Example with Fo3 the dlc Anchorage and Zeta was just trash and completely took me out of the exploration part of bethesda rpgs since they were so narrow, but dlc like point lookout and specially the pitt were far better in quality.

 

I know it can be interesting to make a new setting and area as DLC, and is probably also why beth seems to do that every time, but I just wish some more content was made for the original game. Going to a place and then have a loading screen and be in a completely new zone is fine and all, but it would be so much better if they were to actually just expand the current zone itself with new towns and "dungeons".

 

[carnifex]

What I am try to say (which is being ignored in favor of disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing) is that Bethesda has a set number of dlcs for FO4 and they will not be making new packs above an beyond what is already budgeted for.  YES, they are saying more packs are coming (that's a given looking at previous games).  What they are not saying is that they are making more packs than they intended to from the start.  If they intend to make 12 packs that's how many they will be making, regardless if people paid $30 or $60.  They are simply raising the price of the season pass.  They say exactly that, and it's one point I believe them on because it's a chickenshit way of doing business and that's what Bethesda is about these days.

They explicitly said they're upping the season pass price "given the expanded DLC plan". So yes, they are saying they're making more packs than they intended from the start, unless the word "expanded" has some alternate meaning in English that I'm not aware of.

 

Granted, we don't know what the original plan was, so they may as well be shitting us, but that's purely conjecture.

 

So no, people aren't disagreeing with you for the sake of disagreeing, they're disagreeing because you're misrepresenting facts to lend credence to your opinion.

 

 

Just thought of something evil they may pull. All DLC required to use any mods.

Nah. I've been thinking about this. The plan is better than that.

 

What they do is make DLC with base functionality for all the popular mods. So the Autowhatsitsface is the base for any robot stuff coming up. The Wastland Workshop is going to be the foundation for a lot of slavery and settlement expansions. So all the modders use the DLC as starting points. I mean they're cheap, right?

 

And anyone who wants to use the mods needs the DLC.

 

They learned this from the problems with the paid modding debacle, where no one could sell anything without permission from the SKSE and SkyUI guys. Get your name on the basic building blocks and the money just rolls in.

 

Then again, maybe I should just take this tin-foil helment off. Who knows?

I think you may be right. We'll know for sure when they release the CK.

 

For the record, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing if they're doing that.

[Kendo 2]

*sigh*  Here's the pertinent lines from the Bethesda.net page.

 

And more important, that this is only the beginning. We have plans for more. More than $60 worth of new Fallout adventures and features throughout 2016.

Well no shit they have plans for more dlcs.  No one thinks they are going to let it rest at one real dlc and two content packs.

 

Given the expanded DLC plan, the price of the season pass will increase from the current $29.99 to $49.99 USD (£24.99 to £39.99 GBP; $49.95 to $79.95 AUD) on March 1, 2016. However, if you already purchased the season pass for $29.99, nothing changes - you still get everything at no additional cost— the full $60 offering of add-on content for the original price of $29.99. In addition, if you didn’t buy the season pass yet, there is still time: anyone who buys the Season Pass for $29.99 before March 1st will get all $60 worth of content. This is our way of saying thanks to all our loyal fans who have believed in us and supported us over the years.

Expanded dlc plan does not automatically translate to 'more dlcs than we budgeted for'.  Can someone please point out where they specifically state they are making more dlcs than they planned for to make up for the $20 price difference between season pass versions 1 and 2.  They don't and that's what I've been saying all along.  You can get all of the dlcs for $29.99 before March 1st or wait and get the same dlcs for $49.99.

 

Whatever, I'm never right about these things.  I wasn't right when I called bullshit for monetized modding and that it would turn out to be a mod grab scheme.  That happened on this forum.  I wasn't right when I said that Bethesda would intentionally sabotage FO4 mods not made with their editor when they started updating the game.  That happened here at LL too.  And I'm not right about this either.

 

And you're right.  Sorry for trying to bring a little common sense to the table.

 

 

Well for someone that says they no longer mod for Bethesda games your still going on about them as if they did something to you personally. You hate Bethesda we get that and that is fine, but why are you still going on about it. why must your negativity trump anyone else's enjoyment of this or any Bethesda game. Every thread that's been started about Fallout 4 even before it was released you've been one of the first to reply with nothing constructive but everything negative and it's getting very old.

True, after getting screwed one last time by Bethesda I walked away from them.  And I do indeed hate Bethesda for the shit game that FO4 is and the fact that they lied YET AGAIN about what it would be.

Untrue that I have hated on FO4 from day one.  I was positive, kept an open mind and was hopefully looking forward to a new Fallout I could mod and enjoy.  My posts prior to playing FO4 demonstrate that without question.  I was just as excited as everyone else was, until I played it.  And then it was 'Really, Bethesda?  You're doing this AGAIN?'  They took a giant shit on me and I paid them 60 bucks to do it.  I have the right to be disappointed and mad.

 

As far as 'trumping anyone else's enjoyment' you're giving me too much credit.    And you're under no obligation to read my posts or even acknowledge my presence. 

 

[Zor2k13]

The only reason why threads like this end up in double talk and talking in circles is because beth supporters and promoters also most people just don't care and want to pay all their money away to dlcs. Just to refresh everyone minds on what DLC really is: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=433742322

 

Before steam we would get whole games now we get fucked over a barrel every single time. The gaming market in general will not get better any time soon unless we the customers stand up to this shit with our wallets. Don't buy anything from any game company, get a second job or go spend more time with your gf get into kinky sex in some random hotel room whatever just don't buy games lol. Or you know just uh, play other games and stuff whatever it takes to keep you from bothering with new games at all. After a week goes by you won't even care about what new game is coming out anyway because you will all be so into whatever else you are doing.

 

We don't really need video games we just think we want to play them but what we really want is an escape from all the bullshit in reality everyday with taxes fees fines lies politics blah blah you get it. I think traffic alone drives people nuts then pile all the other shit on top and we have current society.

 

I really wish we had holodecks or neural interfaces dammit because reality just sucks. Don't buy or care about any games except stuff you already have for the rest of the year, if the majority of the gaming public did the same thing we could kill DLC once and for all certainly now with the bad economy they would listen to our wallets now more than ever.

[AVS]

Of course they had more stuff planned than they had budgeted. Planning and concept work is fairly cheap, it's all the man-hours that go into building assets and code that we're paying for. And even then there's stuff that they can't get done within the constraints of money and time, once they set a target release date. That's where cut content comes from; it's the stuff that they decided could be sacrificed in order to get the core parts of the game out on time and within cost. Same as pretty much any other business.

 

And like any other business, they don't just pull those budget numbers out of someplace unmentionable. They calculate out how many units they can reasonably expect to sell at the market rate, and set the budget at something that their estimated sell-through will cover. The low end of the estimate, because, y'know, they do want to make a profit on this. Those sales expectations are based on prior sales data. How well previous games in the series have done, how well the company's other games do, even how well similar games from other developers have sold. 

 

DLC is a bit different in that its budget is also affected by how well that particular game has sold. They may draw the initial plans and budget up based on prior data, but there's not much point into putting more effort into a project that's already gone soft.  A game that underperforms expectations is likely to have its DLC pared down or even cancelled outright. But a game that's exceeded expectations is just as likely to get further DLC. Take Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and compare it to Borderlands 2. The Pre-Sequel's sales were mediocre, at best, and it got far less DLC than BL2. It even had one pack that was cancelled outright due to the dev studio closing down entirely. BL2, on the other hand, did gangbusters. It got a crapton of DLC, with a full 'season one' of regular expansions and a 'season two' for the Headhunter packs. And that's the other difference in DLC budgeting: it's a lot more flexible. Since you're releasing in relatively small bits, you have points where you can easily stop. You can make plans for all these side areas and add-on features without taking time and money way from developing a coherent main game. Those Headhunter packs in particular are pure bonus content. They may have been ideas that they had early on and cut, they may just be stuff they whipped up post-release. It honestly doesn't matter. If the main game hadn't done as well as it had, Gearbox would've never bothered to make them, and no one would have ever noticed.

 

FO4 is selling very well. It's exceeding Bethesda's expectations. Whatever their initial DLC plan was, it was a plan constrained by those expectations. They no longer have that constraint. They now have a new plan, and it has significantly more budget than the previous one, which gives them that much more freedom to develop and release content that would have been cut for cost under that previous plan. Their 'we would like to do' list just got turned into their 'we're gonna try to do' list. There's probably still gonna be stuff that they won't manage to get working in time and under budget. There always will be. 

 

But the fact remains that they're giving us a chance to get all this New Plan content effectively for free. Gearbox made you pay extra for their 'season two'. 

[Guest Comrade DR. MAHUJ DIK]

Ive said a 100 times and Ill say again: LOOK THE FUCKING FILES!!!!!

Fallout 4 is the game with the highest ammount of uncomplete and cut shit I ever saw. My guess is that they wanted to make a great game and got too enthusiastic so they planned too much content for he time they had and had to cut it and put on a DLC. Its not a case of taking money with dlcs to fix a uncomplete game, they need to pay for rights, energy and to feed theyr fucking employees! Its a fucking business if they dont think about moey theyll brteak and well never asee fallout or elder scrolls again. Seriously Why the fucking hate? Every bethesda release We pass through the same shit, people bitching about the game not being as good as the ones that came before, yen after some time pass and some DLCs come they start seying the game is great. Seriously fallout 4 is a grat game and I love it, it have some problems, but all games have! FO3 is my favorite game on the frachise , but it dont make FO4 a bad game just beacuse I like it more, serriously FO3 didnt even had sights! The vats stopped time and the guns couldnt be modded, and yet people are bitching about FO3 being the best game ver and being pwerfect and FO4 being useless shit and a offense for the fans. It was dumbed down, I admit but It wasnt Todd howard or the designers fault, if you look into the files there was lots of cut complete stuff, several evil soutions were cut, togheter with the more fucked up stuff and some really amazing queslines. I work as a freelancer 3d modeler and I know how its to have a great idea and make a great work, but the money guys decide to scrap it because they want an "ample public", as soon Ive seen the cut content by myself i SAW ITS THE CASE. They probaly removed content because it could end in bad media or prevent parents from letting its kids play, no one gives a fuck about ratings anymore, nowadays kids see any game with guns and play it believe me I went to the shopping last week and saw a 12YO boy complaining about fallout 4 not having enough assault rifles to kill enemies and the snipers beig shit because it was too hard to quickscope! He even said that ghouls were radioactivwe zombies, for fuck sake! This kind of people that cause the dumbing down! not the designers, not the writers, not the programmers, but retarded customers and greedy CEOs.

I actually had to leave the store, because I was almost trowing a book at his head.

 

 

[Arhon]

I already saw all these Cut content... Honestly I agree that they wanted to make the game alot better but had to cut content in order to release the game.

 

Here's hoping some dlc will include the Cut content and when the GECK is out we can add the rest of the Cut Content in by mod(One such example is the Cutting Room Patch from Arthmoor).

 

From my view however the Workshop Tools DLC seems its going to be the base for alot of slavery and other types of mods. Altought the Robot one is something we could add as a mod, however since its going to be DLC we might be able to build on top of it by adding additional functions to the Robot after the Quest is done(Provided we can still use the robot after the quest).

As for the new area well... I will first check it out then talk about it.

[Abyssal Scholar]

My magic ball tells me in the future there's going to be a gambling DLC at the robo horsetrack, and it also confirms that suspicion of the Nick centred DLC being the first in a series for the major followers. They better not forget Strong!

 

I'm also really hoping they put in good tentacle mechanics and models in Far Harbour. 

Gotta get you underwater somehow!

[DocClox]

I don't mind DLC as such. I mean not if the DLC is basically an expansion pack similar to Shivering Isle or Tribunal and they just use the internet for distribution, I don't have a problem. My concerrn is that the practice provides an incentive for developers to hold back content that would once have been part of the game in order to sell it as DLC. You end up paying twice as much or more for the game, or else settling for a bare minimum product.

 

Now, not being privy to Bethesda marketing strategy, I can't say that such is the case with F4. But I do k know that the game felt sparse, even before the DLC announcement. And I know that this is the first ever Beth game where I've lost interest in playing it inside of three months (or fairly patchly play at that).

 

It's not that the crafting and settlement stuff isn't neat - it is. It's just that while it would have made a great addition to a full compliment of quests, I'm not sure they make a good substitute for a full compliment of side quests. At least not for me anyway. Tweaking settlements and the like isn't enough to hold my interest after the main quest, I know that much for certain.

 

This is exacerbated by both the cut content and by the lack of a CK that could probably re-enable a lot of that content.

 

If there was more to the base game, I suspect none of this would bother me. Id be too busy having fun playing. As it is, I think I'm going to do something else until I cat get everything at once in a GOTY edition )or whatever they're going to call it having lost most of the GOTY awards to TW3).

 

At the end of the day, this isn't a marketing trend I really want to encourage.

[Kendo 2]

This is exacerbated by both the cut content and by the lack of a CK that could probably re-enable a lot of that content.

One more reason for Bethesda not to release the CK.

[Hanson]

What I am try to say (which is being ignored in favor of disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing) is that Bethesda has a set number of dlcs for FO4 and they will not be making new packs above an beyond what is already budgeted for.  YES, they are saying more packs are coming (that's a given looking at previous games).  What they are not saying is that they are making more packs than they intended to from the start.  If they intend to make 12 packs that's how many they will be making, regardless if people paid $30 or $60.  They are simply raising the price of the season pass.  They say exactly that, and it's one point I believe them on because it's a chickenshit way of doing business and that's what Bethesda is about these days.

 

What I predict:

After Far Harbor there will be at least two more major dlcs, maybe as many as five (but I doubt it).  I am not counting tinker toy packs like Automatron and Wasteland Workshop.  For Oblivion they made 8 like that; Vile Lair, Fighter's Stronghold, etc.

 

I get what you are saying, there is just one problem with your statement. You cant prove it's true (and I cant prove the opposite is true), so right now it is a statement and discredits Bethesda...

[Kendo 2]

My statements do indeed discredit Bethesda.    Guilty as charged. 

[GrimReaper]

I don't mind DLC as such. I mean not if the DLC is basically an expansion pack similar to Shivering Isle or Tribunal and they just use the internet for distribution, I don't have a problem. My concerrn is that the practice provides an incentive for developers to hold back content that would once have been part of the game in order to sell it as DLC. You end up paying twice as much or more for the game, or else settling for a bare minimum product.

 

 

There's a few devs and publishers that do this (the main culprit from the top of my head is creative assembly and sega with their Total War series) but most companies don't. Cut content is mostly just that, unfinished and fragmented stuff that didn't make it into the game because of whatever reasons. That's hardly enough as a foundation for any kind of DLC. Even CA doesn't rehash cut content, they simply lock finished parts of the game that are already there and playable behind a paywall.

 

That being said, most DLCs feel lackluster and tacked on, adding nothing of value to the game. Some bonus mission or an added companion that rarely does anything outside of the content that the DLC provides isn't worth what publishers usually ask for.

[DocClox]

There's a few devs and publishers that do this (the main culprit from the top of my head is creative assembly and sega with their Total War series) but most companies don't. Cut content is mostly just that, unfinished and fragmented stuff that didn't make it into the game because of whatever reasons.

Well yeah, and what I wrote was intended more as me being worried than as me making an accusation.

 

The bottom line though is that if this had been F3 or Skyrim, or Oblivion or Morrowind for that matter, I'd still be too busy having a good time at this point to worry about it.

[Ernest Lemmingway]

 

This is exacerbated by both the cut content and by the lack of a CK that could probably re-enable a lot of that content.

One more reason for Bethesda not to release the CK.

 

 

If that didn't make horrific sense I'd dispute it more. But as they've marketed Failout 4 as having mod support on consoles as well as PC they have to release it eventually. All the time and money put into figuring out how to make mods made on computers compatible with the PS4 and XBOX One will be lost if they don't. Not to mention lost consumer trust if they don't, which translates to investors selling off stock when they realize the company isn't profitable anymore. Appeasing investors, more than consumers, is what leads to garbage like this. I've seen other major franchises try to appeal to the masses as opposed to their core market in attempts to make investors happy. To date all of them were disasters that cost the companies both money and reputation. It wouldn't surprise me if Bethesda leases Fallout back to Obsidian in an attempt to recoup. That's SOP for any company.

[DocClox]

If that didn't make horrific sense I'd dispute it more. But as they've marketed Failout 4 as having mod support on consoles as well as PC they have to release it eventually. All the time and money put into figuring out how to make mods made on computers compatible with the PS4 and XBOX One will be lost if they don't.

Well ... there are a lot of mods on Nexus already, and most of them are of the sort most likely to work without problems on the consoles. Texture changes, tweaks to global variables and nif nodes, maybe a little simple scripting. Anything that doesn't need either F4SE or an exe like bodyslide can run as-is. The main problem has been getting the platform owners to allow the uploads.

 

Long story short: They can do "mods on consoles" without releasing the CK at all. I'm not saying that's necessarily the plan, but there's certainly scope to put off releasing it until they've milked the minor DLC market for all its worth, if they had a mind to do so.

 

Appeasing investors, more than consumers, is what leads to garbage like this. I've seen other major franchises try to appeal to the masses as opposed to their core market in attempts to make investors happy.

I was thinking they'd just been letting the marketing department write the specs, but that makes sense too. If Zenimax decide to squeeze the franchise till it bleeds, there's probably not a lot Bethesda can do about it.

[Kendo 2]

From a business standpoint it seems Bethesda is stacking the release of the first three dlcs to pad their second fiscal quarter.  FO4 was released at the end of last year's third quarter (November).  That means they will have been theoretically in the red with FO4 for six months by the time this year's first quarter starts (March).  So, the first dlcs will have staggered releases throughout the first quarter, with Far Habor hitting Steam sometime in May.  That will put Bethesda accounting books back in the black at the start of the second quarter.  This is standard business practice.

And before anyone here starts, it doesn't matter if FO4 has sold millions of copies and Bethesda has tons of money.  Product sales have nothing to do with department project planning and operating budgets.  The money to R&D and dev FO4 was considered spent when the projects were initially budgeted and that capital is not part of the fiscal cycle.  For accounting and tax purposes those funds are frozen.