Shoving Skyrim on PS3 was a “Herculean Effort” for Bethesda as devs worked tirelessly

FO3 an my Phat and slim, 2009, worked well compared to what I read about that game on other platforms. The crashing was random, some times happening twice in the first hour of play, while other times I could play for 8-10 hours without crashing, The frame rates were OK and only nosedived drastically at the Wheaton Armory.

FO3 Goty: purchased week of release and it flat out was broken. It crashed often and tanked the frame rates. Dlc’s were unplayable. I returned that game for full credit towards Borderlands. Later in 2011 I downloaded the dlc and all were playable except Broken Steel. The problem was more than the frame rates and crashing at the airbase, the problem was how adding that dlc affected the game and other dlc with erratic frames, longer loading times, and crashes. So my future replays were without Broken Steel downloaded. Broken Steel first came to the 360 and had to be recalled and replaced Like the FO4 Far Harbor dlc on PS4. However Broken Steel never was fixed, at least on my PS3.

New Vegas and dlc worked less well than FO3. A big culprit was memory management and save file size. The more played the larger the files became and then frame rates tanked, frame hitching and stuttering, and crashes increased. Then too to avoid crashing when loading into the airbase or outer Vegas I would save quit and restart and reload the save which would refresh the memory pool. Patches somewhat fixed that issue but not the save file size issue.

There was a strange early bug at least on PS3 where when loading into the strip from outer Vegas the player would enter an infinite loading cycle and have to reload the last save. That was patched quickly, but until patched the work around was to wear the item ‘Old Cowboy Hat’ that was sold at the vender in outer Vegas.

Skyrim; I image only those few with a magic PS3 enjoyed that mess on a PS3. After playing FO3, and New Vegas on a PS3 and then reading the reports of Skyrim I decided to pass on playing it on a PS3. Now on my PS4 Pro with some basic make the game look better mods it plays and looks great. I wish FO3 and New Vegas had received updates for PS4 like the excellent update Skyrim received.