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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Skyrim Dawnguard PS3: Punished for choosing wrong console

Adinnieken on 22 October 2012
J_Allard said:
I platinum'd the game on PS3 and got over 200 hours out of it so DLC or no DLC, Bethesda and Bethesda Game Studios are ok in my book.


And here I thought J_Allard would be an Xbox 360 loyalist.



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Slimebeast on 24 October 2012

Lots of sour grapes reactions here as expected.

"Skyrim is boring anyway". How childish.

For me personally it's sad that the DLC is not available on the PS3 yet but I have faith in the gaming gods of Bethesda and I feel very confident that the DLC will come out on PS3 one day.



zarx on 25 October 2012
binary solo said:
fillet said:
binary solo said:
PS3 just required a different technical solution, which is to only render items in the immediate environment of the player. That way there's a lot less demand on the RAM, despite there being hundreds or even thousands of item movements and placements across the entire game world. The only thing is that would require Bethesda to make major changes to the game engine, which would increase the cost of making the PS3 version immensely, and thereby make the game much less profitable.

Of course they could have started out by looking at the architecture of all the machines they'd be putting the game onto and design the software accordingly, rather than design the software to work well on 2 out of 3 of rhe machines and be sub-standard on the 3rd.

That is exactly what Bethesday - and ALL other developers do and have done since 3D gaming first came about on the PC in 1995.

All 3D graphics cards only render the image that is actually visible using memory on the graphics card. Other assets that could be needed before a load point are stored in RAM.

There is no solution.

Right, so it's 1995 thinking being used in 2012. No one's come up with a smarter way of doing it than loading it all on RAM. Why is that? Because more RAM has always been the answer rather than using existing resources in a different way. As pointed out above, you can stream stuff of the HDD but it takes longer to do so. If you have some of the data on RAM and there is a dynamic interchange between RAM and HDD then that's a hardware solutionm that merely needs the software to operate it. It can be done for Skyrim or Dawnguard because they software is already written.

PS3 presented a problem for Bethesda's ambition. Bethesda chose not to address the problem at the design phase, or more likely they had no idea it would be a problem so they didn't even realise they might need to find a solution.


Very few games just load all data into RAM anymore, and Skyrim uses one of the most advanced asset streaming systems devised... If Skyrim didn't use asset streaming then you would literally have to sit in a loading screen every 10 minutes when walking in the world. 

The problem is that the way the engine was designed (for morrowind) the save file is one big offset file that is loaded into memory which is the used to keep track of the current state of the world. Then as chunks of the world are loaded in the engine uses the save file to check what state that chunk is in (where items are, monsters killed, quests finished, plantss harvested etc) and then that is what you get to explore. In Skyrim chunks of the world can be in 3 states, 1 is always in memory (at least on the overworld) which is used so things like mountains are always visable, distant cunks which is land you can see but have no details items NPCs etc loaded, and close chunks which are the ones you can interact with and the ones imediately around you. There are also other things that are dynamicly loaded such as the spells you have, equipment you have, enemies around you, shouts, active quests, items on the ground etc.

This has always been a problem for the games on consoles especialy the PS3 as it only has 256MB of system RAM, Skyrim just made it a lot worse due to 3 main reasons, 1 the world just has far more stuff in it that needs to be kept track of from NPCs and quests too items and dungeons, 2 the new system that procedurally generates quests, and 3rd assets are higher quality and they now keep more stuff always in memory such as mountains in the distance. This means that Skyrim saves grow bigger faster than past games and on the PS3 with only 256MB of system RAM (- around 30MB for the OS) once the save file gets to big forcing to load chunks of the world in and out of memory much more often which causes slowdown. Now the problems were made much worse at launch due to memory leaks, and glitches like stacking ninroot glows etc, over time patches have mitigated the problems by fixing bugs, and also reducing the number of high quality assets that the PS version loads, reducing the time it takes for things in the world to reset etc. The trouble now is adding DLC means that you increase the max size of the world and the size of the save file, as well as adding more different items, spells, and global scripts for quests which could possibly be loaded at any time, that will just make the game perform worse.

The only way to "fix" the problem would be a major change to how the game functions at both an engine and gameplay level. Something that would basically mean remaking a large chunk of the game. That or removing much of what makes the game unique. Nether option is really realistic. I mean would PS3 owners really be happy with a Skyrim which resets everything as soon as you walk out of site of it and has a morrowind style fog where you can't see more than 20m ahead, but with all the DLC?



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