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. 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.'īethesda's commitment to modding helps keep Skyrim selling

… This also meant that out modders could draw upon a decade of experience. 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. 'We did that again with Fallout 3 and our latest game, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, which came out in 2011. It was successful enough that in 2005, when The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion came out, we wanted to continue it. And so that decision really helped establish and empower our mod community to start growing. 'Everyone had access, at retail, to build a mod. ' Morrowind had two discs it had the game, and it had the editor right there,' Burgess said. That commitment was renewed with the 2002 release of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. Modding has been part of The Elder Scrolls series since 1996, when Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall.

That $2 piece of content is a part of his career for which he is sorry, and also not sorry.Īt 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.

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.

Skyrim shivering isles mod