Players report Skyrim PlayStation 3 patch out now

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 28 November, 2011

92MB.

Skyrim players have reported that the promised patch for the PlayStation 3 version of the epic fantasy game is out now, bringing the game up to version 2.01.

Users on the Bethesda forum say the patch is 92MB and is live in some parts of Europe, including the UK.

An update is due for all three versions of the game. Last week Bethesda said the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 updates were in certification with Sony and Microsoft.

Bethesda PR boss Pete Hines said the patch will improve performance for "long-term play on PS3". This relates to a bug currently making the PS3 version unplayable for some. The bug occurs when save files exceed a certain size. After that point, the PS3 version suffers from lag and, according to some players, eventually becomes unplayable.

Impressions of the new patch are rolling in. "yeah it fixed it!!!" said user "kenTucky". "but they seem to have minimized the texture details..anyway it's not that bad though...I hope this runs this smooth after hours of gameplay.."

Skyrim on Xbox 360 suffers from a curious texture problem that sees performance drop when the game is installed to the hard drive.

The issue only seems to occur if you have the Xbox 360 version of Skyrim installed to the hard drive - a process that is entirely optional. In this case, the highest resolution versions of the textures appear to stall and not load, meaning you're not seeing the game at its best. If you remove the install, and run the game directly from the DVD, the best quality artwork returns to the game.

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About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (50) Latest comment 6 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Lexx87 #1 6 months ago

    It was actually user KenTucky that has "yeah it fixed it!!" the other guy was just quoting ;)

  • uknortherner2000 #2 6 months ago

    I wonder if the PC patch will fix the bloated save issue as well? My saves are now around 13.5MB and I'm starting to experience frequent crashes on a game that was before, rock solid.

  • brommers #3 6 months ago

    Glad to hear it. Such a game breaking bug in this day and age just seems weird, although, not unique.
    I play on PC and would just like to ask, is this a new patch as opposed to that little drm thing? I seem to have a lot of problems with mods causing crashes to desktop a lot. So have to play vanilla which is a shame as i got the pc version for the mods.

  • wyp100 #4 6 months ago

    @Lexx87 You're absolutely right. Fixed.

  • Lexx87 #5 6 months ago

    Is it wrong I've only just figured out wyp100 is Wesley yin Poole.

  • fongy #6 6 months ago

    So am I right in thinking that they've fixed the slow performance by reducing graphical quality?
    REALLY?
    This is 'fixing' it?
    And people think this could even compete for GOTY...
    :(
    I'm currently level 38 on it on PS3 and I swear, you go into some of the towns and it's unplayable... that and my head has still disappeared...
    So now it'll be smooth again but at the cost of rubbish textures?
    I think this is the last Bethesda game I'm purchasing...
    :(

    A disgrace.
    Edited by fongy at 28/11/11 @ 10:20

  • Lexx87 #7 6 months ago

    @fongy

    Get a 360.

    /runs back 3 years ago when this was still funny

  • hiscore #8 6 months ago

    I'll have to wait and see, but already a few people on the official Bethesda PS3 forum are reporting it was 'fixed' but with lower texture resolution as a result.

    Why on earth should Bethesda release a 92MB patch when this can be solved with just a few option sliders in a graphics menu (viewing distance, texure detail etc.)?... oh wait, that's a pc thing. But seriously, if they actually DID lower the resolution of Skyrim on PS3 than their advertised product (with higher texture resolution) was a LIE and people are going to want to trade in their copies.

    You CANNOT just lower the quality of your textures in a patch... that's unfair because on console users have no option sliders.

  • kirankara #9 6 months ago

    @Lexx87

    sadly its kinda true still, and I.did just that, so that i dont have to choose between missing a game or crap port. dont expect much else than broken mess from bethseda anymore though

  • Acquiescence #10 6 months ago

    About bloody time, I was starting to get weary of playing Skyrim: The Slideshow Edition. Seriously though, this is the last time I ever buy a Bethesda game on release day. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with this shit.

  • fongy #11 6 months ago

    @Lexx87 I have one! I genuinely thought it would be better on PS3 (blu-ray, etc.) but to be fair, XB has had its own problems with textures, and similar issues - I think this one is across the board...

  • Dizzy #12 6 months ago

    @fongy The problem is that they are running out of memory on the PS3 so yeah, they solved it by reducing the memory of the game so they can fit in the save game. The "problem" is that Skyrim (and Oblivion) need quite a lot of memory since they remember all the objects and bodies that the player moved/dropped etc... This is part of the charm but a memory hog.

  • PYF #13 6 months ago

    Just a note to say that playing from the disc does not always solve the problem on 360.

    First time I played Skyrim, I cleared my cache before launching the game (from the disc, as I'd already read about the texture problems if installed to hard drive) and the game was perfect, and looked brilliant.

    Then I played some BF3, which obviously did something to the cache, as when I played Skyrim after that some textures (especially rocks, trees and stone walls) were obviously now low-res.

    Ever since then, I can't seem to get the high-res textures back in the game. Which is a real shame, as I know how awesome it looked with it all running full-res.

    I've been waiting for this patch to sort it out. Hopefully it will...

  • roquey Verified Lead Quality Assurance Tester and Compliance Specialist, Universally Speaking #14 6 months ago

    Ive had no problems playing from my xbox, i have the disc on my HD, so what if i lose a lil bit of GFX, the game is still stunning and hell id rathe rlose a bit of gfx than suffer even longer loading times.

  • DozyKipper #15 6 months ago

    Guys before you start moaning, just take a moment to think about this game. Think of everything there is to see and do. Think of the hundreds of quests, people and items that all feature during your gameplay. There must be millions of lines of code to get all this working and every possible quest combination simply cannot be tested. Cut the devs some slack here. After looking at the Doom 3 source code, I have a new found appreciation for the hard work the coders do.

  • RelaxedMikki #16 6 months ago

    So, we think it's getting choppy in Whiterun because the game is remembering exactly where you left those 3 helmets, and the position of bowls you accidentally knocked over and are still lying around 3 weeks later, etc etc. This is hogging memory.

    Could those npcs with brooms not go round and tidy these things up? It's kind of odd how dead bodies lie around for days, and no one picks up the fruit you knocked off the stall, as well as it being a memory hog remembering all the positions of the objects. Just have the place be tidied up a bit when you leave town and objects set to default positions where appropriate?

    Maybe?

  • Duallusion #17 6 months ago

    I'm level 42 on Xbox 360 and all my save files are still(?) 9MB. Why are they bloating on other platforms?

  • fongy #18 6 months ago

    @DozyKipper - You are right, there is no doubt years' worth of work goes into these kinds of games... but when the basics fail on a massive scale (i.e. framerate / save game issues / textures) then unfortunately all that work is for nothing... if the fundamental design is flawed (i.e. the reason for the slow down is remembering where everything is) - then they need to seriously re-think their strategy.... as this kind of thing happens time and time again on every Bethesda title...
    :(

  • Totza #19 6 months ago

    @fongy Get a 360, problem solved :)

  • Cjail #20 6 months ago

    "but they seem to have minimized the texture details"

    Can anyone please confirm this?

  • Cappy #21 6 months ago

    I guess this means that Digital Foundry get to do a new Skyrim Face Off which should generate even more page hits with a PS3 version that's even further downgraded if the reports are correct.

  • Darren #22 6 months ago

    @uknortherner2000 - I'm not sure that it's the savegame size that is causing your instability as I've been experiencing a lot of unexpected exits to the desktops too since Steam updated the v1.1.121 file last week and disabled the Large Address Aware tweak.

    I played the game for the first time since that update yesterday for over ten hours and in that time had the game quit on me EIGHT times! To start with it was doing it intermittently while fast travelling across the map then I had two during a boss fight in the Forelhost Stronghold, which was really annoying as it did it just as I was about to finish the bastard off! Now I quicksave/Wait/manually save regularly so I have over 600 saves now for my level 35 character from 78 hours of play. My saves are only a little under 12 MB in size though.

    When I checked my Steam's Skyrim folder though, I noticed a file called TESIV.exe.Backup, which is not something I placed there as I use the .bak extension to backup files. This file is 18.2 MB not the current 18.6 MB but has the same version number, v1.1.121. It appears to be the previous executable which I found with the LAA tweak to be very, very stable as I never had a single exit in almost 40 hours of using it until Steam overwrote it last week and disabled LAA.

    So you might want to use that file instead as I'm doing now with the LAA tweak until the v1.2 patch arrives and hopefully fixes this annoying issue for good. The game is absolutely incredible and by far the best game I've played this year but these 'crashes' were really starting to spoil it for me as they're just so random.
    Edited by Darren at 28/11/11 @ 12:03

  • BritishBlue1 #23 6 months ago

    Just downloaded the patch and loaded up my current 53hr campaign. Initial impression is that the frame-rate and load times have been significantly improved, however my nice new shiny Dwarven Armour now seems to be composed of these strange little squares, hard to explain but it looks pixelated like a really bad youtube video.
    Other than that not really noticing any changes in the world environment. I'm just glad the erratic frame-rate and freezing has now stopped.

  • SheffAl #24 6 months ago

    @BritishBlue1
    They most likely swapped the 360s bug for the lag one!

    Good to see Eurogamer still peddling the myth that the 360 texture bug is cured by playing it from the disk. To the bitter end hey guys?

  • BritishBlue1 #25 6 months ago

    @SheffAl
    No the textures aren't anywhere as bad as the installed 360 texture bug. It only seems to be my character that is affected (and perhaps my follower), no more 3rd person view for me I suppose.
    Everything else seems to be fine, if there has been reduced draw distance or reduced special effects my eye isn't discerning enough to spot it. Perhaps this is a job for Digital Foundry.
    As I said before the frame-rate and loading are now very much improved so I should now be able to happily continue my travels without any hiccups.

  • camo_kill #26 6 months ago

    So the already terrible looking (in comparison) PS3 version (which I have) will now look worst?
    I hate the horrible post processed blur they've added to the game - it really muddies up the textures enough in the first place and looks nowhere near as sharp as the other versions. The trees on the xbox look pretty great, whereas the ps3 trees look 'fluffy' and have terrible shadows.

    In comic book guys voice; Worst.Patch.Ever

  • guernican #27 6 months ago

    Hmmm.

    On the bright side, when the game actually works it's really good.

  • Bigglesworth #28 6 months ago

    What on earth are they saving to get savedata up in the multi-megabyte range? That's incredible!

  • theirongiant #29 6 months ago

    Will the patch address quest glitches, i can't get any further in the thieves guild line cos i can't talk to enthir. I've abandoned it now but got too many hours racked up to go back to an earlier save.

  • Zerobob #30 6 months ago

    I unistalled the game from my Xbox HDD and gained high resolution textures in places running it from the disc, most notably road sign, wood and water textures. The game runs like a dream.

    Am I the only one who hasn't really noticed a difference in load times running from the disc? Even loading the "Skyrim" game area first time at the start of a gaming session barely takes more than 30 sec, then load times are between 10 - 20 sec.

  • uknortherner2000 #31 6 months ago

    @Darren I might give that a shot. I haven't used the LAA tweak yet because I haven't bothered with any texture packs apart from one that gets rid of the dirt covering my female Breton's face, although I have changed a couple of parameters in both .ini files for things like shadows and particles.

    One thing I've noticed over Oblivion is that dead creatures/bandits/assorted mobs remain long after they've been killed. Oblivion would purge these three days after they had been killed, but Skyrim doesn't appear to remove them at all, adding to the save bloat.

    In one scenario, I returned to a cave a good couple of in-game weeks later after I had slaughtered the bandit population there, only to find that more bandits had moved in (as expected), but the corpses of the original inhabitants remained.
    Edited by uknortherner2000 at 28/11/11 @ 13:59

  • psychobudgie #32 6 months ago

    It doesn't fix it, it merely prolongs the playability by around an hour before the problem comes back. Loads of people on the official forums reporting the same thing. My Save file reduced however from 17mb to 14mb though after around 3 hours of play it once again turned into a flick book.

  • Beano #33 6 months ago

    Any news on the 360 update?

    I'm experiencing a lot of glitches on 360 (playing from DVD). Game has crashed for me 4-5 times. Luckily never lost progress since that was after a load-screen.

  • hiscore #34 6 months ago

    @RelaxedMikki Indeed, my first kill in Skyrim -a wolf- is still lying on that bridge near White Run reserving his piece of PS3 memory nirvana which I could use for more horsepower (pun intended). Even the stable owners -struck down by a dragon- show persistance in their rigor mortis. This all takes away valuable memory, plus.. it's against nature's law that corpses stick around that long. So yes, unpatch them and also include an option so that players can DESTROY anything but the most important (quest) items. This should help memory management imho.
    Edited by hiscore at 28/11/11 @ 15:29

  • Bigglesworth #35 6 months ago

    One thing I've noticed over Oblivion is that dead creatures/bandits/assorted mobs remain long after they've been killed.

    I've worked on a number of savedata systems over the years, ans I still find it mind-boggling how large the save data apparently is for this game.

    Using the above example, lets allocate a generous 10 bytes per killed item, and naively assume linear growth over an increasing collection. We could store 1000 killed items in less than 10 kilobytes! What is consuming so much data?

  • ubergine #36 6 months ago

    I'm on 360 at maybe 60 hours and have not had any problems of note. I didn't have any with Oblivion, Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas either. I must be the luckiest guy ever.

  • uknortherner2000 #37 6 months ago

    @Bigglesworth You might need to factor in duplicate weapons, armour and other crap these mobs carry in that figure.

  • Lucodeath #38 6 months ago

    My pc version was fine until the first patch made it reset to windows every 25 mins. Only takes 30 seconds to reload though but still a pain in the arse.

  • Darren #39 6 months ago

    I like that bodies don't disappear as it gives you a chance to return back to, say, a dungeon and pick off the remaining goodies as I'm doing now at Forelhost Stronghold with a new Follower (since my last one was killed in the very same place while carrying a lot of my loot!). I actually missed the crypt as well on my first run through so I've found even more loot and money! :)

    The corpses do add to the sense of immersion even if does seem strange that no-one ever thinks to clear them up. As people have suggested, it would probably be better if the bodies disappeared after a set length of time depending on the circumstances. For example, a murdered person in their home would be moved shortly after being discovered, say, a day but a cave full of bandits might not be cleared out for a week until someone (or something) moves in.

  • skuzzbag #40 6 months ago

    Pity we can't remove bodies like you could with Morrowind. At least then we could tidy up as we go along!

  • jack24 #41 6 months ago

    @Ubergine

    I'm at about 60 hours and had my first major quest
    breaking glitch, and it has gotten less stable as I've gone on aswell.

    Don't think it can't happen to you!!!

  • Limp_interesting #42 6 months ago

    Played the game with no issues, installed the patch (20 minutes ago) and the game freezed two times!

    1.) As i wanted to save my game manually
    2.) After i killed a dragon and was about to absorb its soul

    It is getting more and more absurd!

    Deleting the patch is no use, because it overwrites previous patches.
    Since i am only able to download the latest patch i am screwed!

    I do hope that, if I am not experiencing a single issue, Bethesda cant get away with a broken game like this!

  • guernican #43 6 months ago

    @ubergine

    60 hours in two weeks? If you still have a girlfriend, that definitely makes you the luckiest guy ever.

    I'm far from joking. Mine is packing as we speak.

  • AenimaPT #44 6 months ago

    Bad journalism will remain bad, like broken game will remain broken.

    Making news from a user quote? seriously?

    The patch does improve the frame rate issues, some ppl that was at a slide show state can now play the game, but still not completely fixed as the frame drops still appear, just not as bad as before.

    There are absolutely no texture differences then before. Same textures as before.

    Bugged quests, remain bugged.

    Want to play this game is full splendour? Get it for PC as the players can fix themselves the bugged quests.

  • Antaios #45 6 months ago

    Bethesda should just give people the option to dispose of bodies (which, having just replayed Morrowind, I was missing the moment I killed my first rabbit in Skyrim) and save memory that way.

    Still, you'd think Bethesda would learn from the mistakes they made in the past. I'm happy with Skyrim and having a lot of fun with it, but game ruining bugs like this are inexcusable in this day and age, big and open as the world may be.

  • coomber #46 6 months ago

    The Bethesda forums are filling up with PS3 players complaining about the quality of this patch. Plenty of people reporting lower textures. Others saying the game is worse than before.

    I'll hold off playing Skyrim for a while, in the hope that Bethesda do a half-decent job fixing this!

  • Simmo3D #47 6 months ago

    Just updated.. lag definately fixed for me and graphics are exactly the same as before... running the same game on my friends PS3 that has not been updated yet and graphics are identical... NO DIFFERENCE IN GRAPHICS so relax people! Also, Bad journalism on Eurogamer's part.

  • SheffAl #48 6 months ago

    @Beano

    Wednesday is the latest eta for 360 patch 1.2 (from the Bethesda PR big gob himself)

  • Beano #49 6 months ago

    @SheffAl Thank you - I just read the news :)

  • riseer #50 6 months ago

    @Simmo3D We all know eurogamer is pro Ms just like ign and other sites.Going to wait till goty hits then i will buy skyrim then.