It's just a thought going through my mind, but although I cannot speak much for the 360 or PC versions of Bethesda's current-generation in-house games, I can attest to terrible quality in terms of their poor handling of their PS3 versions, which are little more than poor ports. Now, Oblivion was great... I was very happy with its performance on the PS3, but it was outsourced to another company (4J Studios) and not actually ported by Bethesda. Fallout 3, however, while not initially a complete trainwreck, certainly was inferior on the PS3 in many ways and only became a lagging, crashing mess post DLC/GOTY edition which was never patched. Skyrim came out of the box just blatantly really poor on the PS3. The framerate is just inherently unstable (constantly fluctuating between 25-30 in the least-demanding area, dropping down to a fluctyuating 15 to 25 fps in many dungeons due to lighting/particle effects or even just water reflections, in heavily forested regions such as the fall forest, and in certain cities) and that's before a variable, potentially game-breaking memory-related issue that can leave the game performing as though it were a slideshow that many are experiencing.

Most other companies are pretty good at ensuring proper multiplatform optimization, but Bethesda... I just don't want to touch Skyrim anymore because of its performance. It's pathetic and something they just don't seem to care much about. In turn, I just can't do it anymore... I cannot follow their games so admiringly and I simply have no trust in the company's coding capabilities whatsoever. They don't care about churning out products that, at least on my platform, are up to par with industry standards and the other versions and they so shamelessly release such an unoptimized product with no regard for expectations that should be placed on such a well-selling supposedly AAA company. I figured the community discussion was the best place to put this as I'm referring to anything BGS develop, including TES and Fallout games. What do you think? Will they ever change?

I could create a long list of games that are being bottlenecked by lack of post-launch support and Skyrim wouldn't be on that list.

They are working on improving the performance of Skyrim as was evident by their latest patch;

Update 1.3.10 Notes (PC)

• Support for 4-Gigabyte Tuning (Large Address Aware)
  
• Fixed issue with accented characters not displaying properly at the end of a line

Update 1.3 Notes (all platforms unless specified)

• General stability improvements
  
• Optimize performance for Core 2 Duo CPUs (PC)
  
• Fixed Radiant Story incorrectly filling certain roles
  
• Fixed magic resistances not calculating properly
  
• Fixed issue with placing books on bookshelves inside player purchased homes
  
• Fixed dragon animation issues with saving and loading
  
• Fixed Y-look input to scale correctly with framerate

Skyrim seems to me to be a minimalist release in many areas, like they ticked all the basiv boxes and then released it.

"Okay guys what do we need to release this game?"
"Marriage?" "Check"
"NPCs?" "Check"
"Relatives replacing dead store owners" "Let's skip that"
"Dragons?" "Check"
"PC UI?" "The console one works"
"PS3 Port? "The game starts up fine, what could go wrong?"


Now I'm sure these aspects are so complicated my brain would explode if I tried to do it, but Bethesda are getting big bucks to optimise the game for different platforms and they have dropped the ball this time, they seem to know that Oblivion was big enough they could release Fable 3 and it would get rave reviews and sell like hotcakes.

You can only polish a turd so far. On the base level, the PS3 version just performs really poorly and isn't well-optimized... I'm not talking about the game being buggy, I'm talking about its base level of optimization and Bethesda's blatant disregard for programming parity (360 version's fit for somewhat smooth release... PS3's not contrary to all the lies they put out pre-release). In addition, they never did much to improve upon Fallout 3 post-release and not even the issues of its DLC/GOTY edition. I doubt a patch will ever magically do Bethesda's pre-release responsibility for them and suddenly edit the PS3 version's rendering path well enough to make up for the base lack of optimization and misuse of the platform's hardware.

BGS games have always been a bit buggy... but they are not alone, there are many AAA titles who have had terrible launches and little post launch support. At least BGS is trying to improve their product.

They could have just released PS3 version later, it's not like they would lose any sales.

Not even Dark Souls managed to keep the framerate issues at bay on the PS3 version: and it was specifically made for it.

There is only one company that really knows how to create games for the PS3; Naughty Dog

Seriously, their game "postmortem" of the original Crash Bandicoot game is amazing. The game was almost created entirely from hacks and things because the PS1 shouldn't have been able to render that game with a decent framerate. It was so incredible that it was rumoured that they had access to some hidden Sony PS1 library

There are restrictions on the engine used by the current generation of TES games to do with memory on large save files. The problem is exasperated by the way memory is allocated in the PS3. It's separated into machine ram and video ram (Like back in the Amiga days with it's chip/fast ram). which effectively halves it's advertised memory in certain conditions.

This doesn't tax most games because they don't require the kind of record keeping open world games like the TES series impose in memory. In effect, the hardware isn't good enough for this type of game.

I remember Blighttown on the Xbox.. The game was basically in slowmotion until I reached the bottom, was it the same on PS3 aswell?

Yes. And it's not limited to blighttown.

Umm..wah? Heres an idea, next time...don't buy a game this large and demanding in places for a console.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; some games are not meant to be played on a console. Ever. Skyrim, FO3, FO: NV, Oblvion are not those games.

Oblivion was a launch title for the Xbox360, as such the engine was designed with that machine as the base. The problem with the PS3 is because of the limited memory. The rest of the machine is fine, if only there was a way to upgrade the memory in the PS3, there would be no problem. It's possible that Bethesda will be able to fix this be changing some core functions, so don't give up hope yet. Maybe SONY won't be so stingy with memory allocation on their next console.

It's a mantra that all computers have had since the beginning. Memory is always the first thing you run out of. Why hardware manufactures keep forgetting this I'll never know.

Unlimited space on PC's seems to have stopped devs trying to optimise memory usage.

Oh definitely. Because the Amiga hardware stagnated for years, programmers were able to do wonders with what they had. But each Windows version just got filled with more bloat. Today, Amiga OS does most things Windows does, and runs on hardware that came out in 1992. Imagine what we could be doing with the hardware we have today if we were as efficient as the Amiga boys?

We'd. We'd be living on the moon by now and stuff.. (Sorry, needed to use the bunny for a while now)

The consoles have been around for a while now as well. Look what can be done today compared to what was coming out on launch year.

I have the PC and Xbox/360 versions of Fallout 3, Morrowind, and Oblivion and they all play pretty well. From what I've heard it definitely sounds like PS3 owners got the short end of the stick, I think there's still a bug in the PS3 version of Oblivion where you can't complete the vampire cure quest, and it's just unacceptable to leave such a glaring problem unpatched years later.

Sorry to be blunt, but I really don't think they are going to fix the PS3 verion of Skyrim besides a few minor multiplatform bugs.

You know when you pay 50 bucks for a game (like 100 bucks in Norway) that Bethesda releases for a console you kinda expect it to work properly, and when it doesn't it's a poor effort by them. I play on the Xbox and therefore bought that version, but more and more issues and bugs turned up, and it seems that is the case on PS3 aswell (maybe even worse). I'm kinda wanting the game on PC now, but I grew tired of the game after a couple of months.

This kind of apologism is disgusting. If the game isn't "meant to be played on the console," then what the [censored] is it doing on it? Bethesda has obviously failed repeatedly to develop a game successfully for the PS3, and their efforts have gotten progressively worse each time. If they can't, either because they lack the skill, don't have the time, or if the hardware really can't handle their products, then they shouldn't be put on the machine at all, period.

PS3, why did you have to try and be so unique. Now no one knows how to properly program for you, and in the future we will look back at this odd experiment with quizzical looks. What were they thinking!?

What they were thinking was "how'd we cut corners enough to not bankrupt ourselves by trying to get our very expensive Blueray format as the industry standard by forcing onto as many people as possible?"

There is a forum section for the PS3 technical issues with Skyrim.