Over the last couple months, the PS3 version of The Elder Scrolls Skyrim has been pounded with negative publicity.
There was a lot of criticism about the fact that players were experiencing game-crippling lag once they got far into the adventure, and nothing they did was able to eliminate the problem.
It seemed to be that the way the save file was created and modified was the problem. Users noticed that the further they delved into the game, the bigger the save file size became, until it was too big for its own good and caused the entire PS3 system to be overloaded and making it impossible to play normally.
Neither the Xbox 360 version nor the PC version suffered the same kind of issue. Bethesda worked on a patch, but due to various issues including the fact that console games have a whole bunch of red tape before they can be patched, it took several weeks. Even after the company found a way to fix the problem, users still had to wait until it was released to the PS3.
Then, after the fact, Bethesda admitted that it knew there could be issues on the PS3 when the game launched but it decided to launch it anyway, knowing it could be patched at a later date.
This has all led to a lot of media backlash about the game, but in an interview with Industrygamers.com, Bethesda director Todd Howard said it isn’t as bad as it’s been made out to be.
“For the vast, vast majority of people who play the game for 100 hours, it’s fine. But there are certain things we found out that make it not fine… The PS3, in general, it handles memory much differently than a PC with lots of memory or a 360. So we did a lot of systems to have it kind of recover when it gets in a bad memory situation, but it turned out there were still circumstances where it would say, ‘I can’t,'” Howard said.
