Despite the 1.2 patch for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim being released it appears that not everything that was supposedly fixed in the patch actually was. The biggest detrimental part of this, is that the PlayStation 3 version of the title still suffers from nearly frozen gameplay as the player gets further in the game and their save file grows larger and larger.
To be more specific, the Digital Foundry has explored the detail further and it appears that the issue is memory management. “The bottom line is that Skyrim is an unbounded game world running on a space-constricted system – and this applies regardless of the platform you play it on, hence reports of the PC version running out of address space and displaying solid colours instead of textures,” says Digital Foundry’s Tom Morgan. “The PlayStation 3 is unfortunate in that it’s the platform with the most oppressive RAM issues (in addition to the split-pool set-up of the memory, the OS has a larger footprint than its 360 equivalent) so it makes sense that it has the most noticeable issues.”
This has caused the company to see unprecedented levels of lag, being that this is “the first time our performance analysis tools have ever recorded a 0FPS reading.” The only way to regulate this is to save and restart the title every half hour to try and continue further in the game.
Anonymous
I’ve noticed some of the texture issues when playing on my 360. I was walking around and thought the ground looked really smooth and strange. Then I realized the texture wasn’t loading. It eventually loaded, and it was only in spots.
Still for all it’s glitches, I still love it. Though I haven’t experienced any game breaking issues thus far (and I really hope I don’t ever).
I can understand why it’s got so many problems though. Being such an expansive world, and the fact that you can go anywhere and do anything, makes it really hard to test and debug the game. It’ll get better over time. Thank goodness for patches.