So, when Skyrim was released a year ago (man, time flies!), a number of features from previous TES games were removed. A lot of outrage ensued, as many people, including myself, were disappointed and did not understand the reasoning behind this 'streamlining'.

Since release I've played the game on and off. Lately, with the release of the DLCs, I've been playing again, and the whole game seems better to me. Next to adding much-missed content such as arrow forging and adopting children, it seems to me the whole game got better, whether it's pathfinding, NPC responses to your character and what is happening in the world around them, etc.

Now with rumours going around that spears will be added, and dragon riding, I start to feel Bethesda finally adopted what I call the 'The Sims-technique' of purposely stripping some features from the vanilla game, so you can release them as separate content later.

If this is really the case, how do you feel about it? Personally I think it's a valid sales model, and in a huge sandbox game like Skyrim it actually makes sense to build upon the game gradually, since we all know that more features/freedom = more potential for bugs.

The alterative theory for me is that Bethesda in fact did not plan all of these features ahead of tme, in which case they actually listened to the community pretty well and they built some of the stuff we missed in the game. Which is great too!

So Beth, thanks for adding these things and making the game so much better in the last year, I still enjoy it thorougly, maybe even more than at release.

Oh, and I should mention, I don't own a playstation. Had I been on that system instead of the Xbox, this topic might have very different content.

I don't really mind. I mean honestly, we're going to shell out 10 bucks every now and then for any game's DLC. In my eyes, as long as we're getting the needed mechanics as well as more game content... Who cares?

I think they had things planned but didn't have the time nor the money to continue until after the release.

Most likely because they were really pushing towards the 11-11-11 date. But hey! At least they didn't pull a Bioshock Infinite on us

This. They set a very ambitious release date and kept it. I'm impressed with what they got out and how many bugs were not in the final product. At least they aren't like Bioware and their day one DLCs.