Joel Burgess, senior level designer at Bethesda Game Studios, was part of the team that made The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion's now-infamous horse armor DLC. That $2 piece of content is a part of his career for which he is sorry, and also not sorry.
At this year's Game Developers Conference, Burgess explained how Bethesda's commitment to building a community of modders contributed to the success of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and how the structure of their game itself helped them have success early on with DLC.
Modding has been part of The Elder Scrolls series since 1996, when Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. That commitment was renewed with the 2002 release of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.
"Morrowind had two discs; it had the game, and it had the editor right there," Burgess said. "Everyone had access, at retail, to build a mod. And so that decision really helped establish and empower our mod community to start growing. It was successful enough that in 2005, when The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion came out, we wanted to continue it.
"We did that again with Fallout 3 and our latest game, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, which came out in 2011. Even though we had moved on to a new engine under the hood, it was really important to us to maintain the same workflows, the same editor tools, the same pipeline we were used to, because that way our content creation process wasn't going to be disrupted. … This also meant that out modders could draw upon a decade of experience. Anybody who had done modding for any of our previous titles would be able to mod for Skyrim and have a familiarity with those tools."
Bethesda's commitment to modding helps keep Skyrim selling
That commitment to modding is, Burgess says, one of the key reasons that Skyrim remains among the top 10 games on Steam, and is still a popular title on YouTube and Twitch. Without that diversity of user-generated content, sales of the nearly three-and-a-half-year-old game would have plummeted by now.
But during the last console cycle, it was that commitment to modding that also allowed Bethesda to be a leader in DLC. Back when other developers were still trying to figure the concept out, Bethesda simply treated DLC like any other mod for their games.
"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."
Lessons learned making horse armor contributed to every other piece of DLC
While that early DLC pack is now a running joke, it helped Bethesda prove its pipeline. The developer used it, and their ravenous community of fans, to test the market, but also their own processes. And that experiment led directly to all the other DLC that followed.
"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."
And, Burgess said, while horse armor still gets "trotted out" as an example of bad DLC, for him it remains a point of pride.
"And you know, there's something to be said for giving the internet something to make fun of. You know you've made it, I guess."