Hello Bethesda and Fans,

I just wanted to throw in my observation on DLC issues that appear to occur with Bethesda games. I have not played any DLC for Skyrim on the PS3 obviously, but I have purchased and played all of the DLC released for Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout NV.

A general observation on Bethesda games is that they all seem to get slower with extended play. Patches would help this but only for newly created games. DLC added to the base would pretty much always break the game and make it unplayable, especially in the new area, where framerates would grind to a halt. Again, creating a new game would completely fix the problem and I could visit the new areas with smooth framerates. This wasn't just limited to the first few hours of play. I could level a character to max and only experience minor slowdown.

When I hear that Skyrim is having problems with DLC, this isn't a surprise to me. I was expecting it. I know Skyrim is a completely new graphics engine, but I suspect that Bethesda programmers use the same file architecture they have always used for sorting data, objects, textures, etc. What does surprise me is that they have not gotten a handle on the problem yet.

The guys at Obsidian seemed to finally find a good workaround. Their final DLC seemed to make the game very stable. Has anyone talked to them yet?

BTW, I am fine with starting a new game if that will work for Skyrim too. Just release it with a disclaimer and take my money!

Discussing the future of Skyrim on PS3, as in DLC or patches isn't allowed. Not here at least.


But to answer your point, releasing the DLC, even with a disclaimer won't happen. If this was a workable option Bethesda would have done it already and we'd be having a very different discussion here. Bethesda is being overly secretive so we don't know for sure but as far as we can glean from what has been said officially the problem isn't that Dawguard doesn't meet some standard that Bethesda mysteriously gained during the summer, but that Sony won't give a free pass to a belated DLC for certification. Well, that and the DLC breaks the main game to the point it becomes genuinely unplayable and would cause more trouble for Bethesda than simply ceasing support on the platform altogether...

What you're encountering is called "Save Game Bloat." This is an imborn issue with gamesas's save system; it is required to keep track of scripts, cells (for a few in-game days) items, NPCs, quests, etc. that the player interacts with. Without keeping track of these, the saves would revert to how the world was when you first started the game, every time you tried to play it.

As for DLC instability, consider this.

For Fallout 3, I download a companion mod. I decide that I don't like where the companion is placed, and decide to set her up in Springvale School, with home marker, quest point, dialogue, etc. to reflect this change. When I do this, and I reach the Purifier, the game breaks. The Airlock door refuses to cycle and I can't enter the code. If I do not move the companion, the airlock door works fine.

I can't tell you why this happens; the mod (and my modification to it) doesn't touch anything remotely related to the Main Quest, yet it somehow breaks it. This is why every DLC gamesas releases is buggy at first and requires a patch or two to fix it. Whatever coding they use to run their games is very sensitive to changes, and any change made runs the risk of breaking the game, no matter how illogical or minor it seems.