Bethesda Admit Knowing Skyrim PS3 Problems Before Release

By Matt Holmes / February 16, 2012

Kotaku at the DICE summit in Los Angeles this past week, Bethesda's Todd Howard said the following;

"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,"

He blames the problems on the 'bad memory situation' on the PS3. Unfortunately the developers were unable to fix all these problems they noticed in time before the game hit shelves on November 11th last year and claimed that the intention was to fix the code post-release. They weren't overly concerned about the problem as it only affected some users...

"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?" explains Howard. "It's literally the things you've done in what order and what's running. Some of the things are literally what spells do you have hot-keyed? Because, as you switch to them, they handle memory differently."

Bethesda releasing a console game that wasn't tested fully and later was found out to have problems is bad enough but to release the game when the developer knew full well there were errors, that's an unprecedented and scary indicator of where the gaming industry is right now. This is a controversy, no question, and one that should be investigated and frowned upon fully as no game should ever hit the shelves if a developer knows there are major problems associated with it. As we all know Bethesda released patch 1.2 in November to fix the game for PS3 users and they bent over backwards to try and fix the problem, even asking users to submit individual files to try and solve the errors before the release of patch 1.4. But still, they do all this after they had secured your money from the original sale. Howard says that the PS3 issues should now have been resolved; "Now that we've been through this, we're not naive 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.' 'OK, send us your saved game.' We literally need to look at what you have running€ We need to open the saved game comes up and look at it." Should Bethesda have delayed the release of Skyrim on the PlayStation 3 until they were confident these errors were fixed or were they right to supply the game on that console to users who wanted it even though they knew it wasn't fixed? Tell us what you think below...