Laughable. Where did I compare an PC FPS with a PS3 open-ended game? Please tell me, because I really want to know. I compared a PC open-ended game with a PS3 open-ended game. There are way way way more possible permutations for Skyrim on a PC than on the PS3. If you disagree with this, then I must say I wouldn't hire you to do testing on the software I write.



No, modified engine and the development was outsourced to Obsidian, yes. The game was still published by Bethesda. Besides, Fallout 3 has the exact same problem. Get Fallout 3 GoTY, put 150 hours into it, play all the DLCs, do the main story line and so on, and if you're not having serious problems with save file bloating, framerate dipping, and freezes after that I'm calling you a liar.

Fair comments. I agree not all bugs can be found beforehand. Lag that affects a significant percentage of players would be found though. And pretty easily too. So I find it very hard to believe they didn't know about the lag, or the extent of it. e.g. they must have found this issue during play testing, and they must know what percentage of their play testers found an issue. Or maybe like the review copies, they just play tested on PC and XBOX only?

The bit that annoys the most is that they clearly new something was up, since they chose not to provide review copies on PS3, despite being asked for them.

Ya it was around that time i was getting a bit nervous. My excitement for the game got the better of me though and i bought it for ps3.

20 frames per second? Are you guys kidding me?

the game should be playing at a minimum of 30 frames per second, not 20... jesus some of you people are willing to accept even lower than the lowest standards of gaming... which is 30 frames...not 20...

playing at 20 frames per second is complete choppy [censored]fest

You didn't mention a PC open ended game v PS3 one, you just said PC will always have more premutations than PS3 and I pointed out that is not true with my scenario and I am correct...

From a technical point of view with drivers for PC then yes there are more TECHNICAL permutations with a PC game over a PS3 but the lag is linked not just to technical issues but rather data issues ie what you do in the game..start the game on the PS3 or PC and you see no difference in performance and face no issues...

Lag only comes in after a length of time and the sheer number of permutations makes it hard sometimes to capture, there are over 5 million Skyrim players yet a fraction of them are on this forum, I know some players who Platinumed the game with no issues whatsoever...

The whole point is though that it will get fixed at some point...

This is false. The "lag" occurs from the very beginning of the game on the PS3 varying on area. FPS fluctuations are, as proven by framerate digitial anolyses, inherent to the PS3 version even in relatively smooth areas. Nobody playing this game on the PS3 has a stable framerate... nobody playing this game on the PS3 can go to Markath, Riften, the fall forest, the foggy swamps around Morthal, or inside a surprisingly large number of the game's dungeons and get a framerate that maintains itself even near 30. This game simply isn't as well-optimized to make efficient use of the PS3 as it should... it's clear that whatever they're pushing through the PS3, they're pushing it through in a way that completely overwhelms the GPU, at times, and at others just pushes it to its limits. Something's wrong there and I take it that they simply haven't paid much attention to the PS3's architecture, given the improper estimation for the PS3's RAM, as well (in the saved data file correlation issue that only further increases "lag").

No, but I thought that was obviously implied considering what we're actually discussing here.


Apart from the PC having better graphics in general, much stabler framerate (which by the way, is the case for the Xbox-version as well) from the get go and so on - no I guess there is no difference in performance *facepalm*.


Sigh. You can platinum this game (and a lot of others) by only doing a fraction of what's available to you. They could have probably included dozens more trophies/achievements, but they didn't because there are probably limitations in place for both the PS3 and the Xbox. To platinum a game rarely means 100% completion. In the case of Skyrim, it probably doesn't even mean 25% completion.


That remains to be seen, doesn't it? I've been around Bethesda games since Daggerfall, and every single game from that point on has had it's share of problems that never got fixed. The primary examples in recent years would be Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

Don't get me wrong, I really do hope you're right, but the empirical knowledge (which is primarily their track record with previous titles) I possess about the current situation means I won't hold my breath.

Personally I am getting really frustrated. I have an older PS3 (fat) where I have over 100 hours on one character and it will freeze/die/lag every 2 hours or so. I also have a *brand new* PS3 slim, (both have 320Gb HD's running PS firmware 4.0/Skyrim 1.03 and the new one *only* has Skyrim on it) and a new character with roughly 20 hours on it. The new PS3 lags/dies within 1 hour of playing. This has gotten beyond annoying. i guess I am in the minority in that I never once had a FO3 error and I've played waaaay too many hours on it. But Skyrim on 2 separate consoles bugs out this consistently?!?

um i think somethings wrong with your PS3 if it hard freezes every 4 hours of game play..........mine never froze untill skyrim and well theres times iv played on my ps3 for a good 14 hours straight
even had 4 PS3s all different models one 60 gig one 120 gig mine 80gig and my brother 80 gig in my household again not one of them froze untill skyrim for me and fallout for my brother so i dont know what going on there with yours......

as for fixes i to begin with had some faith in bethesda and thought they would fix it when i first started having issues with skyrim but that was due to my na?vety, as i had never heard of there track record with broken PS3 game and the only other game i owned by them at that point was oblivion which i got quite some time after its release (bought it used just last year) so of course oblivion worked flawlessly, but since the patches that have already come out for skyrim and reading up on fallout 3 and NV and other such games they've release iv lost that faith and i think thats probably what's most damaging to bethesda, there loosing customer trust by being so vague i can understand the arguments that they cant tell us exactly what's in a patch because if they do then at certification said fix doesn't pass and they have to pull said fix there would be an uproar, but thats not an excuse for there dodging on this subject matter "were working on it" doesn't exactly fill us with confidence especially with the track record bethesda have I'm pretty sure bethesda told players of fallout NV "were working on it" and well that still remains unfixed which is an insult to the customer if you ask me, i don't see why they cant release a "what were hoping to put in the patch" before certification with a disclaimer saying some of these fixes may be removed at certification for unseen reasons......thats reasonable right least we have a base idea of what to expect, instead of sitting hear on the forums like a bunch of headless chickens hoping for some sort of news that well never get.
Now because of all the dodging questions lack of proper customer service and lack of trust and faith in bethesda i now wont pick up a game with there name on it and if i do it'll be pre-owned just like i did with fallout 3 (got that for 3 pound just 1 week ago) and thats not a good thing cause well bethesda show they have potential to make a well deserving game of the year....however with all these issues for many players out there its most likely worst game of the year.
I think Bethesda need to issues something official soon and actually fully fix this game and i mean 90% fix at least, cause if they don't i don't see good things for them there are already some people threatening law suits, and FCC (i think its FCC) and BBC watch dog complaints which should not be taken lightly by any company and people are within there own right to do these as well this game was miss advertised and miss sold, also the article about the skyrim "scandal" in the official playstation 3 mag and this is the first western RPG game to hit big in japan (if there having the same problems as we are that is going to be very bad you do not want to piss the Japanese off) all this must be giving bethesda a lot of bad press pete hines i hope your feeling the heat cause someone really does need to present answers to us soon or i see some bad s**t heading bethesdas way and this time try not to lie to your customer base it wont work in your favor this time

If you only care enough about The Elder Scrolls series to have registered on the official forums in the forth quarter of 2011, thus coincidentally coinciding with the release of the fifth game in the series, then perhaps you should set aside your defense force leanings and take a bit of advice from the people who have been dealing with Bethesda's poor memory utilization in regards to the Gamebryo engine for a decade now.

Many of us have been dealing with this since Morrowind and have also seen it first-hand in the various toolsets and across multiple platforms so to come in here praising Bethesda and giving them the benefit of the doubt to fix the problem after 10 years of not fixing said problem rings completely hollow to those of us who have been shouting it from the mountaintop for years now.

Directed at me?

I have been a developer/games tester for years now on another game series/company and merely stating what games company do...this thread was about Bethesda telling us what IS fixed in 1.4 and I am merely pointing out that all developrs do not work like that, ONCE we did do it and had to pull a fix and it caused outrage...

And as I have stated I am sure Bethesda will fix the drop in framerate so its not game crippling, but whether as to they eradicate it completely remains to be unseen and as you say past engines, games and experience shows maybe not...but one thing is clear...

...they can't leave it in its current state so the framerate issue wil get addressed to the point where it will be playable for most if not 99% of Skyrim gamers.

And you may have joined in 2006 but you only have 300 posts, 50 posts a year one a week, hardly shouting from the mountaintops is it?

Of course you can't test every scenario, you never can. Gamers are funny that way, they tend to do unexpected things.

But the magnitude of the PS3 issues should by no means have gotten past testing, that just implies horrible QA overall or a really absurd standard on what is acceptable. I'd not be surprised if Bethesda actually KNEW about the problems though, and hoped no one would notice until they could fix it. Since it's essentially the same issues Fallout and New Vegas suffered from only on a larger scale, I'm not sure I understand how they could not have known about the issues.



Different version of the engine. It's not brand spanking new, that's fairly obvious. It's likely just reworked and rebranded since Bethesda knows how negative the name "Gamebryo" is at this point.

As for New Vegas, yes it had a different development team, but Bethesda was still the publisher. They likely provided quite a bit of assistance in the development for obvious reasons. Not that any of that matters anyway, Obsidian, if any company, has likely a worse track record than Bethesda on bug ridden games. So it's a company known for their bug filled games assisting a company known for their bug filled games, really.

It's definitely part of the update. As soon as I have more I can share on the update, I'll let you know.

Thanks for keeping us posted GStaff. I understand that until it passes certification you can't be 100% sure what's included.

To the people complaining about release notes for 1.3, those were for the PC version and those came out *when* it was released, and if you read carefully it says that the console updates release notes are still subject to certification.

Nope. And it wasn't meant in an antagonistc or derisive manner.

Every single Bethesda game, whether they be the developer or publisher, which uses the Gamebryo engine is broken in this exact same way on every single platform.(Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and now Skyrim) What we have with Skyrim on PS3 is simply the latest and most glaringly obvious example of Bethesda shoehorning Gamebryo into performing in a way in which it was never intended and that's further exacerbated by the relatively low amount of system RAM in the PS3.

Plainly put; it's always been there in all of their Gamebryo releases but it's never been this bad this soon after release hence the, finally, properly volumed outcry by users.

There is no reason to hope for this company, no reason to hope for the fans, no reason to hope for them to put people before payment, and no reason to hope that they'll ever move to an actual new engine or hire people which can finally fix Gamebryo. They don't know how and they don't care to.

1.4, if anything, is the final band-aid before the DLC begins to roll-out and further bork the PS3 version of Skyrim thus removing any effects the band-aid had.

We've all been here before and we know what happens and how the story ends.

My goal is to keep you guys updated on anything I learn.

And yes, the 1.3 update released on PC first so we released notes... there's no cert process there. If there's specific changes for consoles, we note that in the release notes.

Good, because as a long time player of TES and Fallout games whose patience is frankly growing really thin, I have some questions I would like answered:

1. Will Patch 1.4 completely and permanently fix the framerate issues (aka the 'lag') OR will it just be improved upon? I need to know this, because if it's only improved upon adding further content through DLCs is likely to make the problems resurface.
2. Will Patch 1.4 completely and permanently fix the freezing issues, especially - will it be completely safe to turn the autosave options back on?
3. Why is the performance AND graphics on the PS3 version of Skyrim inferior to the Xbox 360 version? Follow-up question: Will this be addressed at some point?
4. Will future titles (TES and Fallout) be released on the PS3 and if so, will they be inferior to their Xbox 360 counterparts?

I'm eagerly awaiting your response. It will probably determine my continued investment in your franchise.

Feel free to PM me if you for some reason don't want to publicly address these questions.

The PC version does that too...

You still have not answered a single of my questions.

I deserved to know this game would not be fixed before 12/11/2011, which was my last day to try and return it.


I now feel that the public has a right to a bona fide timeline to when your flawed product will deliver on the claims YOUR company made.

I don't want to keep trolling the web, or re-playing a new character only to find out every time that the game is STILL broken

+ + for those defending the closed doors policy here, it's called a bug tracking system. Lots of companies use them. There are lots of free and high quality implementation to choose from... At this point trying to track bugs through a forum is a real exercise in futility. And the bts automatically provides a transparent view of the process and it's rationale.

I keep telling you guys...Gstaff, who is not an employee doesn't know the exact details nor can release that info until Bethesda know FOR SURE what is in the final 1.44 patch, and the fact that they are notr finished with it yet means you will never know specifics until they release the patch notes which isn't until one of the platform patches is live...they will not answer your specific questions...all they can say is they are working on the lag issue...

Gstaff is the lag going to be gone. i have alot of lag.

As far as I can tell, he IS an employee. The rather large Bethesda logo under his nickname is sort of a dead giveaway.

I asked my specific questions because I want them answered (because, really I think I'm entitled to such answers), not because I expect them to be answered. The questions you never ask are the questions you can be 100% certain will never be answered.

You won't get answers till they release patch notes end of...

So still no release date for 1.4?
Because if its not fixing, or at least improving gameplay on the PS3, I know 4 people (including me) who will be returning their copies.

It's a great game, when its not lagging. Once your save file gets higher, its unplayable.

Ah yes, as I begin my now daily ritual of perusing the Bethesda forums, I see everything is the same. A broken game remains broken almost two months after release.

Why doesn't Todd Howard or another person of interest from the development team show their faces? That's what usually happens when a game has controversy surrounding it. We haven't seen or heard a peep from them since release date. Except on award shows anyway. Where's that Nord-looking dude who play-tested the game in two hours? He even posted in a Kotaku talkback about that story, very proud of his performance.

In short, how about a real update guys. None of that generic (yet painfully ironic) 'we've got lots of things coming up, and thank you so much for your support' nonsense you fill the main page with. I mean an actual dialogue between developers and users. It's bizarre that there is none of that for a game like this.

Bethesda is a strange company. The strangest game company I've ever witnessed anyway. It's as if it's pretending to be one. Very weird.