Skyrim Patch Swoops in to Playstation 3, Players Report
By Yannick LeJacq | November 28, 2011 | News | No comments | Share
Despite some nagging performance issues across all platforms, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim received overwhelming praise and correspondingly high sales figures. And while there were some hints that the first official patch would be released some time after Thanksgiving, the PC players were angered last week at an unexpected early patch that didn’t seem to fix anything, but rather enforced a stricter DRM policy. It turns out that Bethesda is making good on its earlier guarantees, at least as far as Playstation 3 players are concerned. Skyrim players on the console reported on a Bethesda forum that the promised patch is officially active, bringing their game up to version 2.01.
Pete Hines of Bethesda said that the patch will improve performance for “long-term play on PS3.” This refers to a bug on the PS3 version of the game that gradually makes the game unplayable for some users. The bug begins to affect performance when save files exceed a certain size. After that point, users have noted, the game begins to lag, and eventually becomes unplayable.
The Xbox 360 version of the game, meanwhile, suffers from a texture pop-in problem that only appears when the game is installed on the console’s hard drive. When players do choose to install the game this way, the highest resolution versions of the textures suffer from some Rage-like lag issues. Strangely enough, these issues seem to disappear when the game is played without a hard drive installation.
So far, user comments have been positive as to the patch’s improved performance for the game. Posts specify that the patch is 92MB and is live in some parts of Europe, including the UK. An update is still due out for the XBox 360 and PC versions of the game, though their release date is still unknown. Last week Bethesda commented that patches for both consoles were in the certification process from Sony and Microsoft, respectively.
