A New Vegas Dev's 2 Cents on Skyrim's PS3 Probs

By now, everyone's heard about Skyrim's problems, particularly on the PS3. Even if you haven't played it yet you've heard about the framerate issues and patches that have caused even more problems. Everybody has chimed in with the issues they've run into, but now we're getting a developers look into the issues Skyrim has had since it's release a few weeks ago.

Joshua E. Sawyer is not a developer for Bethesda (the team behind Skyrim), but he was the Project Director and Lead Designer for Fallout: New Vegas, which used the same architecture as another RPG designed by Bethesda, Fallout 3. So he has some idea about how these things work. Mr. Sawyer sounded off on Skyrim on his Formspring account, but a user on Bethesda's forums posted the crucial details about what he said regarding Skyrim. 

First, Sawyer says the size of save files "could be a big problem, especially if you're on the PS3. The longer you play a character, the more bit differences on objects (characters, pencils on tables, containers, etc.) get saved off and carried around in memory."

When asked about why so many games are released in such bad conditioned or seemingly unfinished, Sawyer said that Skyrim's issues are "an engine-level issue with how the save game data is stored." 

When confronted with angry PS3 users, he defended Bethesda. "It's not like someone wrote a function and put a decimal point in the wrong place," he said. "We're talking about how the engine fundamentally saves off and references data at run time. Restructuring how that works would require a large time commitment." 

When pressed about why many of these issues seem to be PS3-specific, Sawyer answered, "As with Fallout 3 and Skyrim, the problems are most pronounced on the PS3 because the PS3 has a divided memory pool." 

What's that you may ask? 

Sawyer elaborated, saying, "The Xbox 360 has a unified memory pool: 512 megs of RAM usable as system memory or graphics memory. The PS3 has a divided memory pool: 256 megs for system, 256 for graphics. It's the same amount of memory, but not as flexible for a developer to make use of."