Skyrim - Interview Dawnguard DLC @I.Eat.Games

The blog I.Eat.Games has talked to Bethesda's Lead Artist Matt Carafano - they've talked about process behind creating the DLC for Skyrim, what the new consoles mean for Bethesda's development of games, and much much more. Link to the blog:
http://eat-games.tumblr.com/post/25927693759/interview-matt-carofano-skyrim
A quote about the creation of additional content, DLC, for Skyrim:

Creating additional content for a AAA game like Skyrim well after it’s shipped doesn’t appear to be the norm in the industry. Does this speak to the culture at Bethesda Game Studios? Do you think future DLC is going to develop this way too?
When we were looking to do the Dawnguard DLC we were just looking to see how we could make the game even better, how we could add to Skyrim but tell this specific story. It was something we didn’t plan when we were working on Skyrim, it actually happened afterwards. You know, we kicked around a lot of ideas so we could see what would be a good fit. For future DLC maybe we’ll do something like that again.

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And a question about if Bethesda have any plans to update their Creation Engine:

As we transition over to a new generation of consoles, I’m curious if Bethesda Game Studios has any plans to build an entirely new engine from the ground up? Update the existing Creation engine, or perhaps utilize the latest IDTECH?
We’re really happy with the creation engine. We remade every aspect of it for Skyrim and it’s a really good base for us to do the types of games we want to do. So I suspect, going forward, I don’t know what we’re going to end up doing. This engine has been really good for us and [The Elder Scrolls games]. I mean everything is brand new from Fallout 3.

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More information.

I am sorry but "I mean everything is brand new from Fallout 3." - who is he trying to kid? Everyone knows Creation engine is just rebranded gamebryo with better animations.
File structure is the same, streaming is the same, pretty much everything is the same, just improved, slightly.

They should really toss it out the window and get going on something advanced.

Couldn't disagree more. The TES engine is perfectly suited for the mod community. If they would have reinvented the wheel, it would have required thousands of modders to start all over from scratch, learning the nuances. With the heavily tweaked engine that uses the same formats, it has been great to see the mod scene explode so quickly for this game.

We still don't have a proper import/export tools for 3D meshes, so the (.nif) file format seems to have been almost completely rewritten.. The renderer seems to be based of Gamebryo (we can still spot same type of bugs that occurs in FO3, FO:NV or Oblivion, for example the Z-fighting bug) and the tools they've done since Morrowind are still in there, updated / rewritten. TESIV.exe is still refering to things like "NiAnimation Gamebryo Version 2.2.0.0". I can't say if they've rewritten everything from scratch though, but i doubt that.

But yes i rather the have mod tools / editor than something new that could leave us without any modding tools at all..

Very doubtful they rewrote things from scratch. Many of the mesh related bugs are the same.