Bethesda knows about their fanbase and they knows the Elder Scrolls games are games which are played for a very long time. It shouldn't happen no matter how long you play.

well your quite lucky then arnt you 200 hour save with long ass marathons just like you seeing as i am currently unemployed so have a lot of free time on my hands
and iv had to reset the PS3 at least 40 times maybe more due to crashing alone between 1.2 and 1.4 infact before 1.4 i could guarantee a crash every hour, however i didnt get very bad framerate problems and now that im getting them back i see that all the crashing was masking any framerate issue as it would crash before they could kick in
now patch 1.4 framerate issues have come back at 15MB save file but the crashing is gone and im able to use my auto saves pitty about the FPS drops, when you can accurately count the FPS with the naked eye something is very wrong

um not really. Month is a long time..... But a way your statement is kinda true

It definitely isn't the game. The game is is is absolutely 101% perfect.

I am probably experiencing lag, freezing, broken quests and slow controller input, for a number of reasons ;

1. Ambient temperature
2. Had the temerity to buy a console
2a. bought a console that followed 2 of the most successful home consoles ever (obviously they can't design them properly )
3. Had the stupidity to play an open world random game in an open random fashion (Who knew?)
4. play for more than 15 minutes at a time
5. Didn't clean up after myself.
6. Got on a horse and ran (jeez am I stoopid or what?)
7. Have the cheek to have other games on my HDD
8. Actually like playing the game to death.
9. Accidentally paused the game or stopped moving and didn't know it.
10. Bought the game

Seriously though, a console is a fixed platform and developers have code within the parameters, push the boundaries, yes, but stay within them.
Pop a skyrim disc onto a P3 PC with 256 memory and 256 GPU and watch it fly...NOT!!
Those specs would be from ten years ago, and you wouldn't see a game from then, on PC pushing that kind of code around.
Which kind of highlights how phenomenal current gen consoles are, at keeping up with high end PCs of today.

Congrats Todd. You've taken the first step, admiting that you knew there was a problem.
I doubt it will be enough to convince me to buy another Bethesda game ever again but at least you're being honest for the first time in your life.

Just read this remarkable statement and I'm shocked but not surprised. It's just confirmation of what we already knew about Bethesda and their attitude toward PS3 users and the console in general. In their eyes (and proven by the comment re: "Memory situation/Memory short comings) the PS3 is inferior and by default so are PS3 gamers, so why should Beth worry about our product.

What's slightly more concerning is the fact that Beth probably could have done a better job of correcting these issues before the game was installed on our systems.

Yes, I would have moaned like a baby about PC/Xbox favoritism if the game had been delayed on the PS3 but I would have been overall happier at the prospect of having a fully workable product if the PS3 version was delayed.

Now this game is 'out there' and Beth are attempting to patch it but it's always going to be an inferior effort/result compared to a full product/code correction.

Am I the only one who finds it amusing and interesting that a certain someone who rarely posts has now posted twice in this thread, in as many pages?

Anyhoo, immediately following 1.4 my game was smooth as butter... and now 20 or so hours later the lag is starting to creep back in. I really wanted this to work to. I was purposefully withholding my praise until I could get some hours testing it in front of me and now I'm glad I did. Some things seem better still, so perhaps by 1.7 or so they will have it hammered out.

Also, please don't discount other peoples anger and disappointment over info like this coming out... they did spin doctor the hell out of this thing pre-release. Stuff like this only confirms peoples already tender notions of what to expect from Bethesda.

Couldn't let this go by either Wilco sorry:
"Just tack it onto the rather long list of game developers, other corporations, and government agencies that do the same thing day in and day out."

Complacency is why they get away with it. This means we should speak louder, no?

Can't help but feel sick in my stomach the more I read this.

The vitriol that is brewing inside me is palpable.

We can talk about it till we're blue in the face, but as long as people keep buying the games then this is what we can expect. Personally, I'm done with any project that Mr. Howard is leading any part of. It's been sliding downhill for awhile now. I'll shelve Skyrim for awhile, but if it doesn't start to get better then there's only one thing left to do.

I dont really care much for console players.. but i feel that PS3 users should get a free tiny DLC.. a weapon pack or some new house or something, just for all the trouble.

PC on the other hand, got poor UI and mouse lag, which can be resolved with mods.. and is not litterly gamebreaking but annoying..
I've had to reload my savefile several times because somehow, the mouse did not indicate the right dialoge and i end up failing a quest or something.

November 11th...1...2...3...yep +90 days later and a statement about the games inherent design fault comes out. Coincidence?

Unfortunately, Bethesda is only following this consoles' generation trend: taking the easy way out in multiplatform developing.
Valve, Codemasters, Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Bioware (check out the PS3 demo of Mass Effect 3) and so many others.

They use the xbox or the PC (it's basically the same) as leading platforms and then port to the PS3. A console that has the opposite strengths and weaknesses of those two.
A platform that bottlenecks when it comes to memory and gpu but has a multicore processor with a different architecture that overpowers the xbox and can make up for those weaknesses as long as it is used properly.
When you port the software to the PS3 you can only tweak it around. The PS3 needs to be treated separately. You have to design the software for it, not try to force the code in making simple alterations and conversions.

The ideal situation would be to have two full teams of programmers. Those who specialize on one platform and those on the other. Each team would have to make the game for their platform from scratch. They would have to be competent and know their stuff. Unfortunately that requires resources that gaming companies are not willing to provide.

The PS3 is perfectly capable of running games at least just as good as the xbox. This is apparent in the few cases where they used the PS3 as lead platform and the end result was true console parity and in rare occasions a very slight advantage. The PS3 has the best exclusive games from a technical perspective and luckily it has a lot of them. They were made specifically for it. The xbox though has the developers in it's favour due to it's developer friendly architecture.

I hope this is not the case in the next console generation. I hope that we will see true console parity in the years to come because it doesn't matter what console you own. You should be able to enjoy it as much as everybody else.

I may be recalling a different game but I could swear that Todd said the Beth has a dedicated PS3 team working on Skyrim.

Your point still stands though and it's one PS3 users have known for a long time, you can't muscle in alien code architecture in to the PS3 build and expect a working title. If developers took the effort and did it properly from the outset, multiplatform developers would garner a lot more support from the PS3 community.

I just re-read all the posts in this topic. I feel stupid. I owned Oblivion and Fallout 3. Played them to death. I was frustrated and disappointed many a time playing both. I was all over these boards then too. Many, many of the problems with those games have existed since the beginning of using this engine. All I can say now is... I'll be just as stupid when the DLC hits and buy that too. I know if enough uf us keep buying this stuff, they will keep making it, and probably badly. ...and I know that even if I wait two years for the game to hit the "bargain bin" that Beth will still have my money.

I really feel, as many here do, that until one of the "BIG" gaming websites is really honest about Beth games (or other large producers) that this cycle will repeat. Having said this...No Mutants Allowed from the Fallout community trashed Fallout 3 from day one. They took umbridge with the direction of the franchise. However, underneath that they documented ALL the technical problems with the game and DLC. You can argue that their site is not big enough to make a difference, but many people working on New Vegas have admitted to trying to address concerns brought up on that site.

Being vocal on the boards makes a difference. Some people at the gaming companies do try to address things they have read here. Not buy games doesn't make life fun for me. Nor does being frutrated with technical problems with one.

Companies need to listen and hear and we need to be honest and constructive. We need to realize that everone at a company doesn't care about good product. They never will. It will always be bottomline numbers to them. We need to speak past them to the people who WILL listen to us and keep trying to give us fun experiences while they fulfill their dreams of making video games for a living.

It has to be a mutally beneficial relationship or it will collapse.

Ah, interesting. The save file size is only an indicator of what is going on in the game at one time, this increases based on activity. This certainly explains why not finishing the main quest past Whiterun significantly helped my gaming experience (no dragons).

But this doesn't really tell us the truth. The fact is that a lot of their patch work was to clean up the dead bodies. We all see this and it can't be in the patch notes as anything else but one of the vaguer "Longterm Play" sections. So there are other elements of memory. As all this increases, the game keeps track of it and the save file increases really quickly. Now that the game doesn't do a lot of those actions, the save file isn't increasing rapidly.

So I know he says it isn't the save file, but the save file is absolutley the pulse of the problem. I posed this theory back in November. That it was directly related to actions and that the save file just reflected that. Don't know why it took them so long if they tested it so thoroughly. If a software tester like me can root out the problem, a gaming software testing engineer should have caught this right away. Then again, I love testing software, maybe they just hate their work?

I may be recalling that Todd said a lot of other things too

I love the bit:


We've got one guy who has seven dragons on the other side of the world, and a siege about to happen in this city and another 20 quests running. And, ok, this is what the game is trying to do and it's having a hard time running that."

Let this be a taste of PC gaming for ya, we're used to being beta testers.


...how many would really not want a game of Skyrim's caliber at all?


At least you can sell used console games or you can shelve it for now and let the patches sort it out, see how it is when the 1st DLC hits.


As for the PS3 [I have an original 60GB], it's 256+256 memory setup was just made things harder. I hope for once that the console makers don't skimp on RAM so much. The manufacturers want these consoles to have a life cycle a good deal greater than consoles used to and the one area they can really "future proof" the console doesn't get any attention. I think the next consoles should get like 1.5GB unified or 2GB [1GB + 1GB] if split, especially if going for a true 1080p gaming system.

My best guess is that they admit it now because really fixing it cost to much money or isnt even possible.

Beside the PS3 fiasco the worst part about Skyrim was the horrid quests. Todd can talk about the game doing all the is great stuff but to the player the quests still boiled down to go get\kill that and fast travel back to me for reward. It's not like the game broke any new ground in epic quest adventures for the player in fact Skyrim was easily the worst most predictable and boring TES game when it came to storyline, factions and quest structure. The only thing it had going for it was the graphics and scope of the world and they couldn't even get that right with all the technical issues going on.

No, my guess is that they finally fixed it. 1.4 does solve the problem more than sufficiently. So that's why they'd wait this long.

Bethesda knowing about this problem before shipping is no great revelation. It was clear from their attempts to hide the PS3 version before release that they didn't have a handle on these things, not to mention their inability to solve the same problem across multiple releases on this engine. What I find most offensive is how they played dumb afterwards, claiming that most users weren't seeing this and acting like it was a big surprise. Show us a little respect, please.

Whatever, it is what it is and it can't be undone. What matters now is what Bethesda plans to do going forward. GStaff, we know DLC is planned for this title, and we also know how DLC made your PS3 issues even worse in the Fallout titles. Now that you've made some progress in fixing the base game, what steps will be taken to prevent history from repeating itself? I'm sure Microsoft will once again be given preferential treatment on the DLC release date, so it would also be nice if some gesture were put out there for us PS3 users who have been consistently treated as second class citizens.

No man, my game freezes last night as usual, what are you talking about? the game is still broken.... FREEZES FREEZES and MORE FREEZES....

The worst thing about this is they knew, and only because the number was so large did they have to fix it.

THAT MEANS, that had the number been small, they would have just ignored the needs of the few.

Thanks Bethesda. I'll certainly remember that.

Know that game Rage? Yeah, not gonna get that one after all.