Interview Todd Howard interview at IGN

[Lumpy]

IGN: Are all of the add-ons going to ship with it or will they still be extra?

Howard: The downloadable content is actually designed to work with a game that is in-progress and doesn't work as well with a new game.

OMFG! He just comes out and admits in so many words that the add-ons are designed to take more of your money, and have no actual bearing on the game, especially if you start a new game.

No, what he's saying is that you would get all the stupid "Your relative gave you a house" pop-ups at the same time, at the beggining, while in prison.

 

[Shoelip]

Oblivion isn't a threat to JRPGs. Not by a long shot. They are separate genres, and they each cater to a very large amount of the console market. There's some crossover, too. There's no reason why someone who's always loved and enjoyed the Final Fantasy games is suddenly going to lose all interest in JRPGs just because Oblivion exists. Chances are, he'll play both and enjoy them equally, as separate products.

What I'm worried about is other console game developers trying to make their games more like Oblivion. Oblivion is already a crappy mishmash of the western rpg and action genre, if they try to mix that with jrpgs it'll probably get even crappier

 

[dongle]

No, what he's saying is that you would get all the stupid "Your relative gave you a house" pop-ups at the same time, at the beggining, while in prison.

What he's saying is the devs didn't spend more than 30 seconds thinking about how their add-ons might be used beyond next week. Popup->quest->done. With the term "quest" used very loosely there, mind you. No effort at all to integrate the content into the world in any way, or allow for users doing anything as silly as starting a new character. Absolute minimum effort cash-in, with a minimum quality level stuff.

I could spend an afternoon and solve the "popup in prison" issue. Trigger where the player arrives outside the sewer, set a global variable, wait maybe 12 hours to give the player a chance to fart around a bit, or wait until they arrive in a major city, then pop away, increment your global based on the plug-in release number, pause for a minute so all the pop-ups don't fire in rapid succession. Simple. That's only if you want to preserve the popup->quest->done insta-gratification model. Proper way would be to integrate it seamlessly with the game, only tell the player about horse armor when then actually go to the stables, or add a few uber-warriors with decked out mounts you can talk to about it, etc.

 

[HanoverF]

Have you been reading the other threads? These are Beth fans we're talking about, they don't know how to cast spells or talk to NPCs, if they didn't immediatly recieve a pop-up from the downloaded content they would assume it didn't do anything and demand their money back.