The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

THE BUZZ: By now many gamers know that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has had serious gameplay issues on the PlayStation 3. But why did it have those issues?

EGM’s TAKE: At last week’s DICE Summit, Bethesda chief game designer Todd Howard spoke a bit about that very topic to Kotaku.

“We did a ton more testing this time around, so the game is definitely our most solid release regardless of platform,” Howard said to Kotaku. “The way our dynamic stuff and our scripting works, it’s obvious it gets in situations where it taxes the PS3. And we felt we had a lot of it under control. But for certain users it literally depends on how they play the game, varied over a hundred hours and literally what spells they use. Did they go in this building? [And so on.]”

Many had speculated that it was the size of save files that was the problem, but instead, it was what exactly players had done in the course of their adventures. Howard told Kotaku that the team knew the PS3 was going to run into memory issues, but that the code tweaking they had done didn’t end up being enough.

After patch 1.2 came out and still didn’t fix all of the issues people were having, Bethesda started asking players who were having ongoing problems to send in their save files. By studying those files, they were better able to understand some of the other memory issues that were affecting gameplay, and that information was used for the new 1.4 patch.

For the full story over on Kotaku, hit the link below.

Source: Kotaku