Update: Hearthfire was actually popular, so my idea's been blown out of the water. I'm sure discussion will continue, but it might have shifted if you're a new poster.

Edit: Apparently nobody gets what I'm trying to say, so I'll summarize it.

1. Bethesda may want to expand housing further with a Hearthfire type DLC.

2. Housing DLC does not typically do well on PC due to the presence of player mods.

3. Consoles now have player mods.

4. The season pass may be used in part as a way for Bethesda to continue making housing DLC, as it would be part of the season pass.

5. I'm not implying that Bethesda is scummy or using scummy tactics. It's what I would do if I was interested in making DLC that people might initially pass up.

So why do you guys think Bethesda went with a season pass? At first, I thought it was a very odd decision, but thinking about it, it makes more and more sense.

One thing Bethesda has (fairly) consistently done was make housing mods for their bigger games, with the exception of Fallout 3 for some odd reason. However, as I looked at their history, a certain pattern emerged. Oblivion's DLC tried to to cater to players by inundating them with several different downloadable player homes. Fast forward to Skyrim and Hearthfire and we see that the homes were meant to be customizable and usable for any playstyle. It worked...kind of. Now, we can make our own, customizable houses and towns. The sizes seem to be constrained only by the material you can gather in the surrounding area (it was implied that materials were finite and were transferred to a local workbench).

However, if memory serves, these housing mods did abysmally on PC, likely due to the existence of player mods, which consoles now have, as well. So...perhaps Bethesda is doing a season pass in order to "sell" a planned housing DLC?

I'm sure there are a ton of other reasons, but this is something that just occurred to me and I wanted to know what the community thinks. Keep the discussion civil and tell me what you think it might be!

What do you mean Beth housing mods? Beth never made anything like that I'm aware of, Skyrim has a player housing that's it. Housing mods are made by modders not Beth. Season passes have been a standard practice for years. Get players to buy 4 DLC's which is the usual number for a game at a discounted price. Housing doesn't have anything to do with it really.

And no idea what you're talking about "Housing mods did abysmally on PC", what are you expecting? Did you ever do After School Special in FONV? Easily one of the most fun mods to date.

umm, no. The "houses" as you call them will be like small settlements and they are a part of the base game. Its not DLC. The season pass will be more likely for future installments of more quests, new area, NPC's, weapons etc...

Bethesda is no so underhanded to sell you pre-made settlements, more likely modders will create and offer those like they have with Skyrim.

Money now is always better than money a few months later. There is no better reason for Bethesda to implement a Season Pass.

That's the rub of it.
Bethesda has high visibility in F4. They are attracting a lot of people who aren't necessarily Bethesda, nor Fallout fans. Even if they haven't played many RPGs (in any capacity), most gamers have likely heard a friend go on forever about their hopes for F4. Season pass is pretty standard lingo these days, and with this being their first game on the now current gen, they essentially have a new target demographic. To some extent, Bethesda has to be hip to what current gaming trends are in order to catch that new demographic and, more importantly, their dollars.
Having a discount on all DLC is probably the easiest way to market your DLC.

I still maintain that for those of us familiar with their DLC, this is merely a nice bit of value.

Lastly, OP, while I don't think it's the reason for season pass, I most definitely expect DLC geared towards the settlement portion of the game. It's gotta be much more simple to produce than expansion DLC, and I have a feeling that quite a few will spend more time dealing with their settlements than playing quests.


Cheers!

Uh, have you ever played Oblivion? That game had tons of housing DLC released specifically by Bethesda. Skyrim and Oblivion's housing mods did abysmally in terms of sales because modders consistently made better content.

My whole point is that Bethesda likely wants to make housing DLC for the game, but it likely wouldn't get as much attention due to the universal presence of fan-made mods.

On PC, few downloaded Hearthfire or Oblivion's housing mods and opted in most cases for player mods.

@Assassin Joke

You completely misinterpreted what I was saying.

No Bethesda Game Studios will not be selling mods anymore.

Todd Howard at Microsoft's E3 2015 conference said mods will be coming to the Xbox One version of Fallout 4 for FREE.

Todd Howard said FREE in a excited voice. Mods are also coming to SONY's PlayStation 4 (PS4) version of Fallout 4 as well now.

...by mods I meant DLC. Player mods will be free. Bethesda's mods (dlc) won't be.

... what are you talking about? Housing DLCs? Why would Bethesda use a Season Pass to try and sell housing DLC?

It seems like the push towards mods on all platforms will push Bethesda to trying to give us a better value for our DLC. That means they can't just do weapon and armor packs, or housing mods; even Hearthfire had some competition, although only Bethesda could have added the new voice acting that came with it.

Ugh. Let me explain this a little better. It's likely that Bethesda would release one DLC (like Hearthfire) that expands even more on housing as time goes on. However, Hearthfire, as well as the housing DLC in Oblivion, did not sell well on PC due to player mods. The season pass would essentially help to ensure that sort of DLC sells better, despite the presence of player mods on all systems. Hearthfire, despite being fairly in depth, just did not sell well on PC when compared to console.

I'm not saying that Bethesda will milk this and just give us BS DLC as filler. What I am saying is that the season pass may be in order to compensate for potential lost revenue due to the new competition a smaller DLC would now be facing.

...A DLC...for a feature that's already in the base game...

Sure, but I don't think housing mods were the main reason they went with a season pass, or if they even factored into things at all. And, do we actually have numbers on how well Bethesda's housing mods have performed? I mean, they pretty much admitted they didn't know what would work for DLC when they tried it with Oblivion, but most comments I've seen about Hearthfire were pretty positive (and now a lot of housing mods support or outright require Hearthfire's features); especially at a $5 price point.

I don't think Bethesda cares as much about housing DLC as you think they do.

I would consider a housing mod to be the "free"" content in a season pass bundle, if past FO games are any example. 5 add 4 story based dlc for f3 and nv, respectively. I don't think its unreasonable to expect at least 3 this time around. So anything else is free.

Who knows though. If "what I think" were cheerios, Bethesda would have pissed in them numerous times, at this point.

I was just looking at Steam achievements and about 20% of Skyrim players have the landowner achievement. Although that's not a super reliable way of telling (some people download the DLC and never touch it), we can safely say that's our minimum number of downloaders. Landowner is buying a plot of land, by the way. There wasn't a huge adoption rate, despite the small price-tag.



I do agree with you on this point. Chances are good that we'll get three or four good sized DLC. Without a doubt, the season pass will save you money. I know I'll get it. The only point I was trying to make is that it's a good way for Bethesda to keep that sort of DLC a good seller and relevant. Additionally, the wide adoption rates may encourage those that don't buy the pass to download the smaller packs anyway.

It gets Bethesda money early, it helps sell some of their less popular content, and it likely serves as a form of advertising. On top of that, it saves people like me money.

Bethesda will release dlc and it is extremely possible that certain settlement items will be available through the mission dlc like Ronto settlement items. However, these settlement items would already be used for the dlc and might require your character to finish the dlc to use the settlement items. So in order to use Ronto settlement items, the character would have to go to Ronto and finish off the main mission there. The chances of Bethesda releasing settlement dlc is extremely low since they can easily attach it to mission dlc. If Bethesda wants to release content that is unrelated to any dlcs they are currently working on, then they can always add additional settlement items to future patches.

I feel like the DLC model will be more like Skyrim's than Fallout 3, where they drop two large $20 expansions instead of four smaller $10 expansions, and then they sell something smaller on the side and offer even smaller things for free within the patches. Which could be an add-on to the settlement mechanic, or something we couldn't even expect at this point.

Anything that modders put out a lot of, like new weapons, armor, or companions, will probably be tied into the story expansions like Bethesda's always done. I think what I want from any "small" DLC, is something modders can't really do that easily but Bethesda can. Like something that necessitates adding new voice acting to existing NPCs (or the player character, now), or something that incorporates new animations. Maybe a "slice of life" mod that adds mini-games with NPCs and other things like fishing? I dunno.

I still don't understand the weirdness this season pass thing has caused. Most big games these days have season passes with absolutely no clue given on what those season passes will give you... and best of all, you don't even have to purchase the season pass until all the dlc are known. It's not like the season pass goes away when the first dlc drops. Hell, you can still buy the watch dogs season pass.

Ok I think I fully understand what you are saying now.

I think Bethesda Game Studios should not sell player mods like house modifications, settlement modifications, and weapon modifications for Fallout 4.

I did not like that Bethesda Game Studios sold Hearthfire for $5 dollars (USD) for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim it should of been added for free in a patch.

I want Bethesda Game Studios to sell Expansion Packs for Fallout 4 like Bloodmoon and Tribunal for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Shivering Isles for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Operation Anchorage, The Pitt, and Point Lookout for Fallout 3, and Dawnguard and Dragonborn for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

I want to see Fallout 4 get at least up to 5 Expansion Packs. 1 Expansion Pack or 2 Expansion Packs is not enough for me.

Yeah, it seems there's a lot of misunderstanding about it. From what I've pieced together, most people complaining seem to think it's preorder thingie only. But that's not the case. What we do know for a fact is that the pass gives 40€/$+ worth of DLC for a price of 30€/$. One can buy the pass before a single DLC is released or when all of them are released. The pass is just a method to get some discount.

I agree with you on the point that housing stuff will likely appear in separate DLC. However, I'm sure that once we know more about how building works, there will be things that we'd like to have but don't. As you say, they might just continue adding stuff to housing through regular DLC, but it likely wouldn't be anything in depth. That stuff will either be patched in, as you said, or they'll go all out and make it a small DLC. I'm sure it'll be fairly wide sweeping like it was with Hearthfire, but again, some intrepid modder will make something similar to that anyway. A season pass is a new tactic for Bethesda, and I'm sure it wasn't just a spur of the moment thing. Whether or not Bethesda took what I'm saying into account is beyond me. However, I do believe it would boost the sales of smaller DLCs, and encourage people that didn't get the pass to make spur of the moment purchases due to the price tag.



I think some people are afraid that Bethesda will have less incentive to put out good content. If it was a company like EA...I'd agree. They get shady when it comes to DLC. Bethesda hasn't ever really done that, save for horse armor. However, I am interested in their reasoning for going with a season pass. I doubt they did it out of peer pressure. Fallout 4 strikes me as more of an experiment than anything. Comparing it to the jump between Oblivion to Skyrim, it feels much more...new.

As such, I'm expecting their DLC to be more experimental in nature. We started to see that mindset with Skyrim. Every DLC added in new stuff to try and change playstyles, including Hearthfire. Some of those new things are popular, some of them aren't. The season pass could really help them get creative with what they do, as some of the risk would be mitigated. Hearthfire, despite being an excellent piece of content in my eyes, was seemingly overlooked by a large number of players.

The settlements opens up a whole new aspect of the game. I guess they tried it out a bit with Heartfire in Skyrim, they way you had to gather materials to build your house and so on. And then you could have a little farm going on. And you would also need to have a housecarl that would protect your house since it would eventually get attacked by giants or bandits or wild animals. In my opinion, that was a bit dull since the whole experience was a bit of a "Meh!" experience, specially when thinking of the fact that there was some mods around that would do the job much better.

anyhow, I think this Settlement idea sounds great and I'm looking forward to it. I have always built my own places starting in Ultima VII back in the days, then following through and I love to have a "side project" going on while doing all the other quests and such. I see the settlements opens up for a whole new way of game play which ought to be very interesting!

Still think you're really reaching here... Possibly add a feature to settlements. But I definitely dont want them focusing on settlements as such a big part of the game.

They won't be selling housing as dlc lol...I never felt housing itself brought much to the game. Storage yeah, a place for weapon/work benches. A place to dump companions. Even in skyrim never used the house in whiterun.

I myself definitely wont be using settlements and whatever hodge podge housing they put in. I'll wait for After School Special to be remade.

Not really. here's what I've gathered.

You're speculating that there will be one or more housing DLC included in the season pass because there was alot of housing DLC in oblivion.

Not only are the two worlds apart but i'm not the only one thinking you're a little crazy for worrying about what the season pass will be for.

Also idd like to point out that when you said housing DLC does poorly due to the presence of player mods. That statement is incorrect. The player mods should have been updated with the game DLC in mind. So basically the PLAYER mods did "abysmally" not the company's DLC. You're implying that Bethesda released broken DLC. Which is not what happened.

All in all I just want to say you should have nothing to worry about. The season pass will have good DLC, Bethesda has alot of eyes on this game, they're not going to release shotty DLC. Thats what a season pass is, your trust in the company to release content you'll want for a discount. Its nothing new, season passes have been around for years.

If you're still worried about paying for a season pass because you're outlandishly speculating about housing DLC then simply don't buy it. That simple.

[edit: the closest thing i can think of to worry about when it comes to season passes is what bungie did with Destiny which was and still is greedy and inexcusable, but I believe in Bethesda, they're good people lol]

Bingo...