Todd Howard reveals that the lag problems in the PS3 version of Skyrim isn’t caused by a large save file

Skyrim’s famed game director Todd Howard has spoken out to Kotaku about the lag issues that have faced some PS3 users. Up until now it was widely believed that once you have played the game long enough and your save file exceed a certain size, it was then possible to experience a large framerate drop in some areas of the game. Todd has stated that the issue isn’t dependant on the size of the save file.

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So if it isn’t the size of the save file, when what causes the crippling lag problem? Todd Howard explains as "It's literally the things you've done in what order and what's running," It turns out that it is due to "The way our dynamic stuff and our scripting works, it's obvious it gets in situations where it taxes the PS3. And we felt we had a lot of it under control.” And states that the issue is caused by the save file as a "common misconception".

"But for certain users it literally depends on how they play the game, varied over a hundred hours and literally what spells they use. Did they go in this building? It's literally the things you've done in what order and what's running," he added. "Some of the things are literally what spells do you have hot-keyed? Because, as you switch to them, they handle memory differently."

Todd Howard confessed that his PS3 team knew ahead of release that there were going to be some "bad memory situation", but hoped that only "a small percentage" of users will be affected. Before those of you who’ve experienced these problems go ballistic, Bethesda did try as much as possible to prevent these issues from happening. They have acknowledged the problem and are continuing to work on patches for all platforms, and in comparison to previous Bethesda games like Fallout and its DLC, it was allot more stable for the majority of people.

The 1.4 patch for Skyrim that was recently released on consoles was intended to fix the lag issues, which for some, didn’t happen. Todd Howard said the way that they attempted to fix the problem was difficult, every had the same problem caused by many different factors and the only way that Bethesda could tackle the problem was through user submitted save files.

Todd addressed those who are still having issues by saying "Now that we've been through this, we're not naïve enough to say, 'We have seen everything,' because we have to assume we haven't. There are still going to be some people who have to come back to us and say, 'Ok, my situation is this.” All that they are able to say is “OK, send us your saved game.”

"We literally need to look at what you have running. We tried doing it through e-mail. We need to open the saved game comes up and look at it."

Nintendo had a similar issue facing their 2011 game Zelda: Skyward Sword, where finishing mission is a certain order would outright prevent story progression. This issue was quickly spread across the internet and could easily be avoided with the knowledge ahead of time. The game has since been patched, but the problem facing Bethesda is that the issue isn’t singular; it can be caused by a combination of a million different processes. So for now at least, it seems that you either have to hope not to be one of the unlucky minorities, or just wait out the issues. As for Bethesda, the Playstation problem has to be addressed in the future, their ports to Sony’s console are always the least stable version and maybe the solution would be either not developing for PS3, or allowing another company handle the port.

Source: Kotaku

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