Bethesda gets Burned, IGN has called them out over PS3 performance problems Options

[Thomas Kaira]

Link to Article

From a site as big as IGN, that is a truly scathing article they put out there. Time for Bethesda to start kissing up and giving some details, the world is losing patience with them fast about the PS3 issues here.

[SubRosa]

Good. It is about time someone put them on the carpet for the crap they are shoveling at people. Especially after the latest patch which screwed up everyone's games, let alone the PS3 issues. When I read the part in the article wondering why Bethesda's quality control department did not catch this issue, I just had to laugh out loud. They have no quality control. No one ever playtests their games. That was plain back in the days of Oblivion. The 1.2 patch is proof that has not changed with Skyrim.

On the bright side, at least it is nice to know that it is not only PC players that Bethesda hates, but PS3 players too.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Dec 6 2011, 02:44 AM

[McBadgere]

I'm PS3...I think I said before...Aaamywho...I said somewhere else that I met the backwards dragon north of Riften and I had mega-lag for about a minute...But after I got out of range it was fine...

Thing is, I'm not sure what everyone's expecting?...Surely it's impossible to cover every eventuality...

But I did notice a significant absence of anything on the PSN leading up to it's release...Even my brother on X-Box got the 10 min video things...Swine!... ...

Mine's still running fine on Level 41 and many many hours...I think I saw 11MB on the save this morning...Still, I'm only finishing the MQ and doing some of the radiant Companion quests then I'm abandoning it for a bit to get back to m'story...You lucky people you... ...So maybe I won't get as many problems anyway...

[Jacki Dice]

I don't think the major lag was just PS3. Wrothken was getting extremely irritated by a bout of lagging and freezing today

[Fuzzy Knight]

Hmm, might be worth deleting your quick save. I've heard some people having problems with lag and such if their quick save gets too big and corrupt (or something) on PC and maybe Xbox as well. I probably had several hundreds of saves in my quick save but never any lag or freeze on PC but now I usually delete it at the end of a session.

[mALX]

The 360 users should be able to disable autosave, keep their cache cleaned, and do a hard drive maintenance to remove the patches till a good one comes out (but they'll have to stay off Live till then or the patch will just be DL'd again).

I have heard that large save files are an issue connected to those lagging frame-rates. Try deleting extraneous saves if possible.

[Thomas Kaira]

Yes, the 360 users are beginning to get hit by this lag problem, too.

The issue is with how Skyrim is caching memory. Simply put, as it is now the consoles do not have enough of it for extended play sessions. PS3 can't go beyond 30, and the Xbox 360 seems to crop up at 120. Then the game starts lagging because it's having trouble keeping everything loaded. Every time you save a game, Skyrim takes a snapshot of the entire world, figures out what is different from Skyrim.ESM at the time, and records the differences in an ESS save file (NPCs changed positions, chests looted, apples moved, etc.). That's how Bethesda's games have always done their saving.

Unfortunately, for the memory-strapped consoles (with memory going up into the GigaByte range, PC is effectively immune to this problem, that's why no one on PC is reporting memory-based lag), this approach is extremely inefficient. Every time you load a new save, the game is loading up the original ESM and then loading in all the changes based on the ESS. When the ESS gets bloated, more stuff gets loaded initially and the game starts running out of room to stream things as you play on. That's when the lag starts.

That is an ultra-basic explanation of the problem. Fixing it will likely mean overhauling how the game handles saves, so it will not be easy.

This post has been edited by Thomas Kaira: Dec 8 2011, 08:20 PM

[SubRosa]

That is an ultra-basic explanation of the problem. Fixing it will likely mean overhauling how the game handles saves, so it will not be easy.

Not to mention it would also doubtlessly break all the old saves.

It is funny, I was looking at the specs on the consoles compared to my computer. My video card has 3 times the memory its does, and the ram is two generations ahead. 8 times the drive space of the big X-Boxes with 320 gig drives, and I do not even know how to compare my i7 with those power pc processors they have. I guess there is no point in coming out with a new generation of consoles however...

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Dec 9 2011, 12:39 AM

[King Coin]

I was shocked at how weak the console hardware was when I first looked them up.

[liliandra nadiar]

I suppose their advantage is having absolutly no need for anything but the OS loaded. At least at first, X-box seems to be trying to become a laptop without a keyboard/monitor... And 4x the space requirments and none of the portability... *shakes head*

[mALX]

I suppose their advantage is having absolutly no need for anything but the OS loaded. At least at first, X-box seems to be trying to become a laptop without a keyboard/monitor... And 4x the space requirments and none of the portability... *shakes head*

My XBox 360 was very portable - I took it everywhere with me in a "wheeled laptop bag" with a 15" flatscreen monitor/TV before I finally was able to get a PC that would play Oblivion, lol.

[Bolzmania]

The lag problem is starting to show on the 360 as well? I haven't seen any of that.

[mALX]

The lag problem is starting to show on the 360 as well? I haven't seen any of that.

My son hasn't reported a single issue yet, he is playing on the 360. Not sure if he is hooked up to "Live" or not though, I think he has run that line straight to his PC instead of his Xbox. (so he may not have a patched game yet).

[Feralikazam]

I've totally stopped playing the game until they fix this. I didn't wait in like for 2 hours pre-midnight for this big of a problem. It's a great game the lag just ruins it.