Skyrim DLC in ‘very early’ development stages

Before The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released, we heard a great deal about Skyrim DLC and how it'll have an "expansion pack feel" to it.  At the time director Todd Howard said they'd do less DLC for the game, but each one will be packed with more content.  In December, a month after the game's release, Howard revisited the Skyrim DLC topic, saying it will be focused on "ways to make the game better."

So it should come as no surprise that when talking to Kotaku, Howard's latest remarks about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim DLC echo what we've heard: Skyrim DLC will "feel closer to an expansion pack."

"For Fallout 3 we did five DLCs," Howard told Kotaku. "That was a very aggressive path for us. Our plan now is to take more time, to have more meat on them [for Skyrim]. They'll feel closer to an expansion pack."

Unlike Fallout 3, which was a mix of smaller and larger DLC packs, Howard admitted, "We can do better content if we approach it in a different way."

"With Fallout 3, it was, 'Ten dollars is the sweet spot for us and we know we want to put out five of them. And we had overlapping teams. We were coming off Fallout 3 and right back in," he said in a development cycle he described as a "real hardcore loop."

Howard said that in between these larger DLC expansion packs, there will be smaller pieces of free content released for Skyrim.

"Because that gap is going to be bigger, we want to put little things out for free in between. We've already done that for PC with the high-res pack. We're trying to figure out what those things are."

 "We knew before release that we were going to support it in a larger way, with lots of updates every month," Howard said. "We knew we wanted to do more stuff to bring mods to people."

One of those plans included the recently released Skyrim Creation Kit and Steam Workshop – which has already had 2 million mods downloaded.

Howard said the dev team is "very early" into the development of Skyrim's DLC.