Bethesda Dev on Horse Armor DLC Lessons

Bethesda senior level designer Joel Burgess gave a speech about the company’s commitment to modding and how it would later help set up its DLC pipeline. Polygon has reported on the talk, in which Burgess apparently explained that the infamous Horse Armor pack for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was also a stepping stone for Bethesda’s DLC strategy:

“Back in 2005, developers were wondering, well, what does DLC even mean?” Burgess said. “How do we make it? How do we expect to know what people even want to play or what it’s going to cost? … We didn’t even know what we should charge.

“So we needed to come up with the right idea. We needed something that would test enough of our systems, add some new art, add some new dialogue, add some new hooks and quests to the game; something that would test the pipeline and just sort of feel out the market for what was the best thing we could possibly do. So what we came up with was horse armor.”

…

“At a time when other developers for the most part were constrained to doing things like gun packs or cash packs for games, we were releasing content like Knights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles for Oblivion, some very very big DLCs that had content on par with some other full games being brought out.

“All those more interesting DLCs were built on the back of the horse armor.”