It's well known that the PlayStation 3 version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim suffered from some bugs, some players stopped playing due to lag. Now Todd Howard, Bethesda chief game designer explains why the bugs happen, and how Bethesda understood they had been ironed out before release.
Howard said: "The way our dynamic stuff and our scripting works, it's obvious it gets in situations where it taxes the PS3, and we felt we had a lot of it under control. But for certain users it literally depends on how they play the game, varied over a hundred hours... It's literally the things you've done in what order and what's running."
This is similar to comments made by Fallout: New Vegas project coordinator Joshua E. Sawyer last year. He claimed that the small adjustments to objects in the world add up, particularly on the PlayStation 3, and large save files can be "crippling." Howard calls the save file size theory a "common misconception."
Howard says that Bethesda knew the PS3 would hit a "bad memory situation," they took steps to adjust for this. Bethesda clarified the solutions worked during their testing. However a "small percentage" of gamers still suffered. "There were clearly people that weren't okay after patch 1.2," Howard said. "We didn't know why. So we asked them to send us their saved games."
These comment were released just after the v1.4 patch was rolling out, Howard said: "We're very confident a lot more people are going to be in a very good situation, but we're not naive enough to say, 'We have seen everything,' we have to assume we haven't." the next step will be to continue looking at users' save files, and try to diagnose the problem.
The 1.4 update did make a better situation for most PS3 players. Those still having issues might have it mitigated by making a post-patch new save file.
Bethesda have asked PS3 gamers to follow these two steps after they have applied the new patch:
- To ensure the fastest jump in performance after applying the patch, be sure to first create a new manual save by entering the save menu and choosing “save game.” You should then restart your PlayStation 3 before continuing to play.
- If you encounter strange behavior while playing immediately following application of the patch, do not be alarmed – this is a temporary effect of Skyrim scripts correcting themselves after the update. Once this process runs its course, be sure to make a new save and restart your PlayStation 3.
