Hello everyone,

I'm new here but I've been a massive Bethesda fan since Oblivion on 360.

Time and time again I heard people having problems with Bethesda games, but in all honesty the worst things I ever come across was if I got stuck between a rock, or the game crashed on a rare occasion. Now I'm certain that much like the freedom of speech has been abused by tinterweb cowards *lets not get into that but I'm sure you know what I mean*, I also feel that too many people are spending too much time moaning about games on forums that actually playing them.

Now I used to be a 360 owner and had no problems with games. Great collection, achievements from day one, and the best joypad design every made in my opinion. Eventually I moved to PS3 and thats what I'm currently gaming on.

Now with the PS3 its a different story when it comes to bugs, as at the time and for a long time, many devs had trouble making from scratch, let alone multiplatforming.

So I ask you my fellow Bethesda gamers. Do the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games work just as well on the PS3, or do you think it might be worth buying a 360 to play them?

I don't think it's worth getting a 360 just to play the games. The games run noticeably better on PC than either console, and they aren't really that demanding either so you don't need an expensive state-of-the-art computer and they support the 360 controller too.

As for the PS3 versions, I can't really say, I only played them briefly myself.

As you can see by my sig, I've played some Beth games on PS3, Xbox, and PC.

Like you say, I've only experienced minor probs on Xbox, with any Bethesda game. I've got Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Skyrim on Xbox. Most I've seen is it'll freeze once in a while: maybe once every 3rd or 4th session the Xbox will freeze mid-action.

I also played Oblivion and Skyrim on PS3: Oblivion for about 3 and a half years, and Skyrim for about 6 months. Oddly, the PS3 doesn't freeze nearly as often. Oblivion ran flawlessly (other than some minor slowdowns/skipping, etc.) the whole time I played OB on PS3. I never saw any major problems (despite what "they" say) with Oblivion on PS3, but Bethesda did not port this game from what I understand.

Skyrim on PS3 is a different story. I was there during those first 6 months after 11/11/11, and I did indeed some some major problems with Skyrim on PS3. Lots of slowdowns, frame-jerking & skipping, freezes. It's actually the reason I decided to buy an Xbox; I was still very addicted to Skyrim despite all these problems. I wanted to see the game run like it should.

Granted, I am not sure what happened in the long run. I assume Beth managed to fix the PS3's issues, but I haven't played Sky on PS3 since May of 2012. My opinion is the PS3's issues caused Bethesda to stop making DLC for Skyrim after Dragonborn. I believe they may have had extra DLC planned, but programming for the PS3 is so much different that they didn't want to deal anymore.

Freddo says buy a PC. Problem with PC's is you won't be able to just plug 'n' play; there's more of a learning curve here. You won't be playing the vanilla game (unless you've got a HUGE amount of willpower) you will be dealing with mods, console commands, folder paths, conflicts between various mods. This is all fine if you've got the patience, and plan on putting a lot of time into not actually playing your game for awhile. And then once you start gaming, you'll see things. Things aren't right. Maybe you've installed some weather mod, and now your sky is purple. Maybe you've tried to install a different mod, and now your game crashes to desktop every single time. All these issues can be worked through eventually, but they will try your patience. And you won't be gaming while dealing with issues, you'll be sitting there asking questions to the forums, hoping somebody has the correct answer, and your latest nightmare will be over in 5 minutes (yah... )

If all you want to do is plug in and play, and you don't have much desire for modding (or any of the extras that come with PC) I would go with Xbox. The reason is these games are made for Xbox. Make sure you buy a 250 gb model at least; don't go for the 4gb ones, you'll run out of hard drive space real fast.

I have Oblivion GOTY, Skyrim with all 3 DLCs, and Fallout 3 GOTY on PS3. I've found all 3 run wonderfully. There are minor issues that started to pop up once save files started getting bloated (10+ Mb save files). But even then it was fairly rare for the game to freeze entirely, and was just a matter of letting the game finish chugging away at what it was loading before it returned to normal. I was one of the lucky ones I guess with Skyrim in that I never had any PS3 issues even from launch day.

I also have Fallout New Vegas on 360 and don't notice it to run any better than the other games by comparison.

From my perspective I wouldn't be too worried about picking any of the games up for PS3. I've spent hundreds of hours in each one with no real complaints.

I was lucky too, for awhile. Skyrim on PS3 ran beautifully for the first 4 months, and I was wondering why everyone was complaining in the forums. Then ... it happened to ME. I started seeing all the problems in all their glory. But (like I said earlier) I assume Beth managed to fix these problems in the long run.

Nah, it's still a buggy crashy mess!

Anyway! Oblivion runs perfectly on the Ps3, in the oh couple thousand hours that I played it I only crashed once, and that's because I loaded in a character that did the SI questline and I had uninstalled SI. Lag? Never heard of it! I believe I got a small hiccup during the Battle for Bruma. But thing is, Bethesda did not port Oblivion to the Ps3, 4j did.

Fallout 3, is a tad livable, while I had a few freezes here and there, I could still enjoy it and not worry about crashing as much. And then you add all the DLC, that's when you start noticing more slowdowns, which causes you to notice that in some places you start moving like a slideshow. None of my characters could make it over the 100 hour mark, the game became unplayable after that.

New Vegas? Let's just....not get started with New Vegas, the excuse was "But it's too hard!"

Skyrim? Oh...Skyrim.....Oh...Skyrim. I had nothing but bad experiences with it, you can just tell they did not coded it correctly. Crashes? Happen every other hour, slow downs? Almost constantly. The biggest issue was the save game bloat, which was downright crazy for a developer with the resources as Beth has! I could not just enjoy the game, and had to worry about doing massive corpse clean up after every single fight, that's to say if the game did not crash on me.

Most of my in game hiccups with Skyrim on the PS3 came after getting the Hearthfire DLC. So if I want to mess around with that content I just play my PC version instead.

to the OP I stand by my thoughts that I don't think you need to buy a 360 just to play the Bethesda games. Pick up the GOTY/Ultimate versions of each and you'll be just fine on PS3.

It is horrendous on the PS3.. If I built any credibility from my time on this forum I hope my word gets across.. I owned New vegas and Skyrim on the PS3.. New vegas was buggy but it was a lot like fallout 3 on the 360 in that regard (laggy in places like freeside and such).. Skyrim is another story.. There are 2 bugs you will have to live with if you get the PS3 version.. 1) You can never enter water because your game will freeze and this will never be fixed.. 2) You cannot play more than say 200 hours on a single character.. The game will freeze and lag because of all the data it must store..

...or you could just play the vanilla game on the PC and not deal with problems or learning curves. I'm not sure why you're implying that playing the game on the PC has to be complicated. It doesn't. I'm not saying that the OP should go for the PC version...just that the PC version can be just as hassle-free as the console version.