so i put in skyrim today, loaded a save, i was in the Ragged Flagon - cistern. need to go up top for a quest...i took the ladder up...it got done loading.. BAM instant death....it reloaded. skyrim was litterally above me, i was underneath the whole of skyrim. i was on nothing but flat land, no health, screen flashing red. there were a few dead people, but i could not do anything, 102 hours worth of playing and NEVER had one glitch, until now. i deleted the 1.03 update and reinstalled, that didnt work. i did, however, format my ps3 last week, and saved all my games online thru the PSN plus. i have no idea what to do, i never even heard of this

nevermind, i had to reinstall the game data and it works now

All you did was fall through the floor. It happens sometimes. Loading a prior save would have resolved this.

It happened to me once outside Windhelm. The graphics didn't update with proper lods and I walked across the bridge half covered in "snow". When I got to the heavily blurred "gate" I simply fell through, as apparently the visible lod didn't have any collision geometry with it. I've only had that lod updating once though, and a long time ago, and I'm not sure what caused it.

If you have ever built something in the editor, you take two meshes and "smush" them together to make land or a bridge or whatever. If the join is not perfect, it is possible to fall through the texture. It is rare as you have to basically put the correct pixel of your foot on the exact spot where there is a gap and it might happen. In the past games, there always seemed to be a place in the game where two meshes were far enough apart that it was common for folks to fall through. Usually it was in an obscure area, but we would see posts about it.

In your case, the mesh may not have rendered correctly, which can happen (it has happened since Morrowind and reloading the cell always fixes it) and results in you falling down to the void.

i havent modded anything. im on the ps3, and it was more than falling through the floor. ive seen videos of that. skyrim seemed like a mile in the sky,not just above my head. i have a pic but dont know how to get it on here. i did try loading a different save, same thing happened.

just use tcl and fix your position

(me know you won't get achievments, but who cares about that?)

I once loaded the ragged flaggon ad was swimming about under the map .-. thought i was gonna drown but luckily was that ladder ramp thing going into the pool and i managed to get on that and de glitch my self (and make sme wonder if bethesda put that ladder there ebcause they knew about the glitch but was unsure on how to fix it)

sounds like your game failed to render

he is on PS3 so TCL is not an option

TES has come a long way since daggerfall. In that game it was so common people used it as an exploit.

Master Vampires exploited their awesomeness against the player. They deserved to all die.

I haven't had this in Skyrim or Oblivion, but it was fairly common for me in Morrowind, mainly in Vivec where I regularly fell through the canton meshes into the water beneath.

Thats nothing, I once had the whole of Solstheim appear as a gigantic yellow exclamation mark.