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Posted February 17th, 2012 by James Brightman
Skyrim, the fifth entry in The Elder Scrolls franchise, has hit it out of the ballpark. The game's seen numerous accolades, including Game of the Year at DICE, and it's racked up the sales to match. For some PS3 gamers, however, it's been more about frustration than slaying dragons. Bethesda Softworks Game Director Todd Howard and his team have been furiously working on squashing the bugs, but Howard tells IndustryGamers that it's not a problem for as many people as it seems.
"Statistically, it is not nearly as bad as it seems. Meaning, by all the internal and external data, this is our most solid release," he began. "It's also our most popular by a large factor, so we do have a lot of people on the PS3 who play the games a lot and their games are at a state that the game is just taxing the PS3 enough. That's a fact; so, it really wasn't until we were able to get save games from the users – because, literally, how they play the game over 100 hours – some of it, very little of it, we were able to reproduce and take care of on our own and a lot of it that you're seeing now, we weren't. So over the course of, like, December, the community helped us. We got their save games. We'd literally have to look in and say, 'What quests do they have running, what order? Oh, he's doing this. He's got these dragons here. This script is running. Why is it kicking out this many things?' And the 1.4 update is coming out today on the PS3 and it should – in our internal tests on those games - it fixes it, it takes care of it. But, going through this, we now know, there will still be – a smaller set, but there are probably still people we don't have their saved games and they have [other problems]."
With a game as vast and complex as Skyrim, it's difficult to point to any one specific thing in the code that's producing the problems for players - in the end, it becomes a whole combination of circumstances that have to be examined.
"So this is not one thing, this is this whole set of unique circumstances, and the point is, we're going to get a hold of those people then and say, 'Well, let us look at it.' Because, look, when you spend this much time on a game, you want it to perform for everybody. So when someone says it doesnt, they have every right to be upset with us, and we want to attack that and, 'ok, you tell us what's going on. We're going to fix this'," Howard continued.
"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.' So it's literally having to delve into things like 'what spells did you have hotkeyed? How often do you use them?' It's very, very specific things. People will say, 'When your save game hits this size [you're affected]' but that's totally not true, because you have a much larger set of people who are fine. So it's not that. It has to do with how many things have you done in the game in what order. What's running right now? And because the game is so dynamic, it does tax the PS3 in a different way. Obviously, we wish we had all that information beforehand. Some of that is just very difficult to get."
It's common knowledge that the PS3 architecture is wildly different than the Xbox 360's and for some developers this can make things more difficult to adjust to. Howard wasn't willing to use the PS3's architecture as an excuse whatsoever, though.
"I wouldn't even use that as an excuse. The game, 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," he said.
James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.
Skyrim, the fifth entry in The Elder Scrolls franchise, has hit it out of the ballpark. The game's seen numerous accolades, including Game of the Year at DICE, and it's racked up the sales to match. For some PS3 gamers, however, it's been more about frustration than slaying dragons. Bethesda Softworks Game Director Todd Howard and his team have been furiously working on squashing the bugs, but Howard tells IndustryGamers that it's not a problem for as many people as it seems.
"Statistically, it is not nearly as bad as it seems. Meaning, by all the internal and external data, this is our most solid release," he began. "It's also our most popular by a large factor, so we do have a lot of people on the PS3 who play the games a lot and their games are at a state that the game is just taxing the PS3 enough. That's a fact; so, it really wasn't until we were able to get save games from the users – because, literally, how they play the game over 100 hours – some of it, very little of it, we were able to reproduce and take care of on our own and a lot of it that you're seeing now, we weren't. So over the course of, like, December, the community helped us. We got their save games. We'd literally have to look in and say, 'What quests do they have running, what order? Oh, he's doing this. He's got these dragons here. This script is running. Why is it kicking out this many things?' And the 1.4 update is coming out today on the PS3 and it should – in our internal tests on those games - it fixes it, it takes care of it. But, going through this, we now know, there will still be – a smaller set, but there are probably still people we don't have their saved games and they have [other problems]."
With a game as vast and complex as Skyrim, it's difficult to point to any one specific thing in the code that's producing the problems for players - in the end, it becomes a whole combination of circumstances that have to be examined.
"So this is not one thing, this is this whole set of unique circumstances, and the point is, we're going to get a hold of those people then and say, 'Well, let us look at it.' Because, look, when you spend this much time on a game, you want it to perform for everybody. So when someone says it doesnt, they have every right to be upset with us, and we want to attack that and, 'ok, you tell us what's going on. We're going to fix this'," Howard continued.
"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.' So it's literally having to delve into things like 'what spells did you have hotkeyed? How often do you use them?' It's very, very specific things. People will say, 'When your save game hits this size [you're affected]' but that's totally not true, because you have a much larger set of people who are fine. So it's not that. It has to do with how many things have you done in the game in what order. What's running right now? And because the game is so dynamic, it does tax the PS3 in a different way. Obviously, we wish we had all that information beforehand. Some of that is just very difficult to get."
It's common knowledge that the PS3 architecture is wildly different than the Xbox 360's and for some developers this can make things more difficult to adjust to. Howard wasn't willing to use the PS3's architecture as an excuse whatsoever, though.
"I wouldn't even use that as an excuse. The game, 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," he said.
James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.