That’s true, IF AND ONLY IF the game in question has failed to retain players that long…

The issue is doing DLC for an open world game is hard. The way it’s been done in the past is broadly one of the following:

• add a new zone that doesn’t interact with the rest of the world
• add a new location, a few new maps that link to the original zone and some quests The issue is that that’s not enough to necessarily make an entirely new playthrough worthwhile, but also an existing near-end save might trivialise loot and content.

The solution is so some combination of the following:

• Make the content spread throughout the world
• Balance the game so that new gear are choices rather than straight upgrades.
• Add new systems to engage with.

Fundamentally Bethesda as discounted the latter. It’s done with classes, it’s not added races, or new systems or new skills in years. They can’t add content throughout, that would require creating the space for the content to exist in ahead of time.

Not that it can’t be done, but that they don’t have the future awareness to make room for it.

Factorio: Space Age has entered the chat

I was still interested 2 years after Elden Ring came out for its DLC because Fromsoft’s DLC has commonly been like expansions of old.

Maybe if the industry actually made expansions more than drip feeding meaningless, smaller bits of content, people would stay interested longer.

It’s not like the desire for old school expansion packs went away. Y’all just stopped making the damn things.

IMO Bethesda games are perfectly positioned to get a lot of initial interest because they look great and seem like they are full of depth, especially when in the midst of the opening quest chain, but the longer I look around, the more disappointed I end up with it all and then lose interest.

It’s this weird mix of deep and shallow. Like in starfield, I walk up to a building and see a rich interaction between an NPC that wants to go in to talk with someone but the guard won’t let her in because he’s busy and no one can see him but then doesn’t bat an eye as I just waltz right past him and talk to whoever I want in there.

Or I watch a confrontation between other NPCs and then try to interact with them after and it’s just generic responses, not a word about the heated argument that just ended.

It’s like it’s in the uncanny valley, where it looks good enough to think you can RP at a certain level, but when you try to do so, it turns out to be all a facade unless there’s a quest.

And in Skyrim, the NPCs were completely unable to handle stealth characters. You’d figure someone would have a magic spell or think to use a torch or raise an alarm when they get shot with an arrow. Nope, must have been the wind or my imagination that killed my buddy over there. I didn’t try stealth in starfield to see if they had improved on that at all.

Each of their games feels like the same game with a new skin. It was fun for a while, but I’m over it now. I tried starfield on xbox game pass but have since cancelled. It’s on my steam wishlist but I won’t be grabbing it without a heavy sale, and even then I’m not really sure I want to allocate the disk space it wants to it.