Bethesda Game Studios releases are certainly prone to weird issues, but the PlayStation 3 versions especially so. Users have reported serious performance issues with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim when playing for many hours at a time, prompting a response from the company.
Bethesda has started to acknowledge these PS3-specific reports are a problem, promising specific fixes in a patch coming after version 1.3, which is expected later this week.
“We’ve been reaching out to a number of those users to collect save games, so we can take a look at their specific issues,” said the company on its blog. “Right now we know it’s not one thing, but a combination of smaller ones that some folks are seeing, but others are not.”
Version 1.3 comes after version 1.2, which fixed some things and broke others, ala backwards dragons. It's up for PC now.
Knowing things will change eventually doesn’t really help PS3 owners right now, but the company did offer some temporary solutions that could alleviate the pain on its message boards, which I’ll quote in full below:
- "Turn off auto saves. This can cause temporary stuttering since the PS3 saves these files in the background. This is most noticeable with large saves when fast traveling to a new area or entering a new area that auto saves.
- Clear space on your hard drive. Skyrim makes heavy use of the hard drive, and freeing up space on here seems to help many people. Hard drive speeds also differ in PS3 models. Some users have reported increase performance by upgrading their drives.
- Waiting for time to pass. Many things are running in the world depending on what quests you've done or places you have visited. Using Wait or Rest options, passing time will clear up some of these. It depends how long you wait, it may take up to 30 days for some items. Saving, resetting, and loading after this will have the largest effect."
The nature of the problems facing Skyrim on PS3 are understandably upsetting to users. Please report anything you’re running into within the comments, as I’ll be playing close attention.