Bethesda admits they can't get Skyrim Dawnguard running on PS3

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/bethesda-admits-skyrim-players-may-never-get-dawnguard-on-ps3-20120831/

by ukdm • 14 years ago

22 20 14 years ago

dazzawazza• 14 years ago

This sounds more like political manoeuvring to me. If they've got the game running on the PS3 then there is no reason that the DLC wouldn't 'work' it's just a patch.

rrreese• 14 years ago

The PS3 version of Skyrim struggled to run when it was released. After 10 hours of game play the game would suffer crashes, slowdown and frame rate drops.

While these issues where patched later, its not surprising that the Dawnguard DLC which includes new animations that stress the XBox and low end PCs, when combined with existing PS3 issues would mean they can't get tit to work.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I know someone who has a PS3, got Skyrim just before me and gave up after it turned into a bug filled nightmare and corrupted his save 40 hours in. Don't think he's gone back to it since.

Argorak• 14 years ago

(this is mostly speculation and advanced hearsay) Skyrim already has weird problems on the PS3 like severe slowdowns that affect the late-game because the world state and the save file grows too much.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/06/fixing-skyrim-would-take-a...

Still, this is not a new problem - Las Vegas had it, Skyrim has it again. Its not like it hit them suddenly. I imagine that Dawnguard basically goes over the top in that regard. Still, it seems like they chose an implementation of a specific problem that does not address the specifics of a major target platform, which sucks.

engtech• 14 years ago

the save file thing is a huge issues for their platform

One of the best mods I have installed for New Vegas is CASM, which saves the game every 10 minutes with a rotating number of autosaves. Very helpful if the save file jumps from 500k to 10mb.

http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/36730

jameskilton• 14 years ago

No, this sounds like typical Bethesda. Their games have been the epitome of everything that's wrong in software development. I've yet to play a Bethesda game that wasn't a technical and bug-ridden nightmare, so much so that I've stopped supporting them entirely.

Their dev teams can't code themselves out of a paper bag. I'm not at all surprised that the PS3 is giving them serious troubles, given how it requires concurrent software to use all of the hardware (8 smaller cores over the Xbox's 3 larger ones, iirc).

programminggeek• 14 years ago

Their dev teams can't code themselves out of a paper bag? Really?!

Given the complexity of the world simulations they are building and that they basically are successful at creating, I don't think I'd use such strong language. It takes a lot of talent and hard work to ship something like Skyrim.

Bug ridden technical nightmare? I don't think I'd go that far either. Skyrim was very playable on the Xbox 360. Not too many bugs that I noticed, but I'm sure they are there if you look for them.

zeru• 14 years ago

There may be some bugs, but the way you are putting is extremely untrue. Given their complexity of the type of games, they are quite great.

On top of that Bethesda is one of the few companies that still create games with very high replay value, there are not many (i currently cant come up with even one) who still create games "with endings" (i.e. not MMO/RTS type games) where you can put in that many hours and still be entertained.

If you actually hate bethesdas creations, I simply think you hate the type of games, not the product itself.

Goronmon• 14 years ago

Their games have been the epitome of everything that's wrong in software development.

They are one of the few development studios capable of making large open-world games that are fun to play, and they make it fairly easy for PC gamers to mod the game as well.

I'll take buggy Skyrim over no Skyrim. Same goes for a game like Dark Souls. Not the most stable game ever made, but probably the best action RPG ever made and one of the best overall games.

If they are so bad at game development, surely it should be easier for another group of developers to beat them at their own game?

lloeki• 14 years ago

Some data points:

Dawnguard on the Xbox is ~600MB, while Skyrim itself is ~4GB.

> releasing sizeable DLC is a complex issue

By comparison, Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut DLC is ~2GB.

There may be some weird technical limitation, but it's not just size.

dagw• 14 years ago

By the sound of it the problem isn't the size of the DLC download, but the size of the game state they're trying to keep in memory. The Xbox and PC architecture makes it easier to large game states in memory.

ukdm• 14 years ago

If I remember correctly, doesn't the PS3 split the available memory in half? Therefore limiting the options you have. Where as on Xbox it's up to the developer how they use all of the available memory.

EDIT: See w0utert's comment in this thread for more info: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4459260

cube13• 14 years ago

Mass Effect's Extended Cut is basically 100% video and sound content, though, which is why it's so big.

It's certainly less complex than any of the expansions to The Elder Scrolls series.

Eclyps• 14 years ago

It sounds like the article is implying that the PS3 itself is too difficult to release DLC on... which I find to be a load of crap. There's plenty of good DLC coming out for other games. It just sounds like Bethesda developed the PS3 version as an afterthought and now can't manage the crappy code they wrote.

Paul_S• 14 years ago

Seems they lead on XBox, loaded it with extra features and now find it difficult to squeeze it all in for the PS3 version. I'm sure it's doable but it'll probably come down to whether it's cost effective. It's not about size or delivery, it's about getting it running. I'm sure they've got people to run the numbers and see if it's worth the risk.

w0utert• 14 years ago

While I don't rule out that the PS3 port of Skyrim is a crap translation done as an afterthought, there are some technical constraints to the PS3 hardware that would make it very difficult to get a large open-world game such as Skyrim to work, and be able to extend it with DLC. The most important one being the memory model, where you can only access 256 of the 512 MB RAM directly from the CPU.

Most other games 'solve' the memory limitations of the PS3 by chopping up the game world and introducing lots of load screens, or by streaming as much of the content as possible. My guess would be that the Skyrim engine does the latter, which doesn't fit the PS3 memory model very well. The Blu-Ray drive is very slow for random-access, and I don't think you can stream textures and geometry directly to the 256 MB RAM segment accessible to the GPU, which means you would have to allocate part of the already-scarce 256 MB RAM in the other segment, and DMA it to the GPU-segment.

I'm not a PS3 developer and I don't know anything about the Skyrim engine, but it's well-known that the PS3 memory model can be a real PITA, and I can imagine this makes it very hard to get certain optimizations that work well on other systems to work on the PS3.

CrazedGeek• 14 years ago

I don't think it's a Blu-Ray issue: Skyrim on the PS3 has a mandatory 5GB HDD install (roughly the size of the whole game), and the DLC would be on the HDD anyway.

TillE• 14 years ago

The RAM constraints are the reason I'm eagerly looking forward to the next generation of consoles. When you're trying to cram fancier and flashier graphics into the same hardware every year, there are severe limitations in what else is possible in the game.

Give developers 4GB of RAM and better CPUs to play with, and we're going to see some more interesting cross-platform games.

Bethesda admits they can't get Skyrim Dawnguard running on PS3

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