Obsidians Josh Sawyer, project director on Fallout: New Vegas, thinks the lag that especially the PS3 version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are experiencing, is caused by the way the video game savegames save.
Josh Sawyer worked at developer Obsidian as a lead designer and project director on Fallout: New Vegas. He sees striking similarities between the issues that the players of his game experience and the issues that players of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim experience, especially in the version for the PlayStation 3. That he reports in an interview on Formspring. Especially on the PS3, both games suffer from lag. In Fallout: New Vegas is due to the way savegames in the memory of the console will be loaded. Bethesda Game Studios, the creators of Skyrim use the same engine as Obsidian did for Fallout: New Vegas, and according to Sawyer beat both games in the same way savegames, so in Skyrim the same problems occur.
The engine saves the actions of the player in a database, not only which characters the player meets, but also what items he picks up, let it fall or shifts. The size of the game world makes that the savegames of Skyrim huge amounts of data. Or, as Sawyer describes it: “It is a problem on engineniveau, around the way savegame data is stored and how differences identified in relation to main .esm+DLC .esm’s. If the game is a well-known instance of a object changes, then the changes are saved in what is essentially a new .esm is. If you have a savegame to load, then load all changes in the resident memory of the console.” That means that the problem is not so easy to remedy. “It’s not like someone has a function in which a point in the wrong place has moved or something as a float declared as the int had to be.”
The Xbox 360 and especially the pc can that huge amount of data is more manageable than the PlayStation 3, according to Sawyer. “The Xbox 360 has 512MB memory on board, which can be used by the cpu or the gpu. The PS3 has a split memory: 256MB for cpu and 256MB for the gpu. The total is the same, but not as flexible to use by developers.”
The statement of Sawyer, is a response to the problems that some gamers have reported that after installing the patch that Bethesda at the end of november neighbour. Thus tried to the creators of the lag that players reported to remedy. After the patch reported some players, however, that the problems had worsened than improved. Sawyer thinks that the problems with the PS3 version is not easy to resolve. “We’re talking about how the engine in a fundamental way data save and recall at runtime. To change this requires a huge investment of time.”
Trailer in which the game world of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is being displayed