Editor’s Note On Our Skyrim Review for PS3, Lag, Bugs, Etc. [Update]
We are well aware of the widespread issues that many PlayStation 3 owners of Skyrim are suffering from, and we have deep empathy for those who are. That said, our review score stands. The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim is a deep immersive world, well-deserving of the recognition it is receiving, even despite reports of lag, glitches and bugs.
We’ve received emails from a number of unhappy Skyrim players asking us to alter our score or to play more than 60+ hours of the game. I personally have logged over 100+ hours (Level 54, Master of Sneak) into the PlayStation 3 version of the game, and have only experienced some minor lag and a handful of game crashes that required a hard reset of my PlayStation 3.
While I don’t dare deny that there are many users are enduring through much worse issues (we read the forums and comments, too), there are some users that are not (although cases like my own are more rare than users with issues). We publicly implore Bethesda to address the issues and the community at large, and have reached out to them for their thoughts on the matter.
[Update] Bethesda’s Pete Hines has issued the following comment, as well as directing us to the following links:
Skyrim: What We’re Working On: http://www.bethblog.com/2011/12/01/skyrim-what-were-working-on/
“We’re seeing folks reporting success with these and playing lag free (including games over 100 hours).”
PS3 Tips to Try: http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1308326-ps3-tips-to-try/
“We’ll continue to provide info and updates as they become available to those users who are still having issues.”
We highly recommend that anyone experiencing any problems to give these “tips” a try. If you do, please report back here to inform us if you’ve had any success in remedying the issues you have been facing.
-Anthony Severino, Editor-In-Chief
19 Responses to “Editor’s Note On Our Skyrim Review for PS3, Lag, Bugs, Etc. [Update]”
People are emailing asking you to alter your score? Really? 60+ hours? Seriously? I’m lucky if I get to game that much in a week. I only wish I had the time to email PSLS after 60+ hours of play to complain about the scoring.
Stand by your scoring – Good for you for Sev! I applaud you.
The rest of you whining, go the hell outside.
“A handful of crashes that required a hard reset.” Now tell me honestly, if this weren’t such a highly anticipated games and you had experienced a “handful of crashes that required a hard reset” would it have been given a perfect score? We’re not talking about a game that got a 7 or 8 here. We’re talking about a PERFECT score. How is that perfect? Give me a break. Don’t do reviews if you’re only going to do them based on hype. Be subjective or don’t do reviews at all.
We don’t give PERFECT scores. And we certainly don’t review games based on hype. Read the text, not the scores.
Also, please refer here: http://playstationlifestyle.net/review-policy/
There is no such thing as a perfect game.
Oh and to address your question, yes it’s acceptable to me. I’ve played 8-hour long games that crashed once during that time. I’ve been playing Skyrim for 100+ and have seen 4 or 5 crashes. The hours logged/crash ratio is in Skyrim’s favor. Things happen, games crash. This has been happening since the Atari and the NES.
Windows crashes. Firefox crashes. Chrome crashes. My Android phone crashes. Skyrim is an enormous game both in scope and in interest. Maybe the problem seems more pronounced due to the large amount of people actually playing it.
Your scale is from 1 to 10. You gave a broken game the highest score possible. Okay sure, maybe a 10 doesn’t necessarily mean that its “perfect.” But it’s still a much higher score than a broken game should have gotten. And stop using the size of the game as an excuse. It’s broken. If they can’t make a big game without it being plagued with bugs, then maybe they should have scaled it back. Obviously it was overly ambitious if the sheer size and scope of the game causes so many problems. I would rather have a comparatively small game (like Assassin’s Creed) that is fun and playable, even though it’s not without its flaws, than a massive game that is unplayable. What good does the size of the game do if you can’t play it more than a few minutes without a crash? And would it have killed them to hold off on releasing it and do some beta testing? It was obviously rushed out to make the holiday season and consequently it was broken. It doesn’t take a genius to see that.
Are you speaking from experience? Have you played Skyrim on the PS3 for 100 hours or more?
Don’t like our review scores? Then go somewhere else. Don’t like Skyrim? Don’t play it. It’s very simple.
Wan’t to make a difference? Become an accredited games journalist and write your own review.
Not everyone wants a smaller game. That’s the appeal Skyrim offers. Everyone has opinions – yours is your own, and ours is our own. End of story. We’re not telling you how to think or what to enjoy, we’d appreciate if you had the same respect for us.
@Severino
Then your review policy sucks.
Then again, nothing to worry about though — you’re not the only site in the business to tolerate unacceptable game-breaking bugs when the incriminated titles are GOTY contenders. I don’t see why you’d personally feel the need to reconsider your journalistic ethics when every other journalist has no second thought about it.
Severino didn’t review the game, Daniel Bischoff did. Come at him, bro.
The story and quests are what make an RPG, base it on that.
In closing:
Skyrim was gonna live up to the hype, but then it took an arrow to the knee.
anthony dont listen to andrew because of this he does not know what he is talking about he tryed to get into the same arguement with me and i blew him out of the water here read for your self ( read the hawkeye and andrew posts) “” http://playstationlifestyle.net/2011/12/01/more-skyrim-patches-coming-soon/comment-page-1/?replytocom=172060#respond “” he is bacicly saying the same thing he said to me and it is making him LOOK STUPiD. ( you will get that if you read the posts.) p.s andrew its kinda funny you are saying what i said and when you were talking to me you were saying the opposite of what you are saying now here is a quote from your own post ” It was obviously rushed out to make the holiday season and consequently it was broken. It doesn’t take a genius to see that. ” thats funney i said the same thing to you a week ago here is my post and i quote ” so yes skyrim is a very large game and there are going to be a lot of problems with a game that large now dont get me wrong there is no real excuse that there are so many glitches in skyrim because of this, they should have spent more time fixing all the issues instead of pushing for that 11/11/11 relece date” and YOUR reply to that is and i quote “This game was way overhyped and whoever reviewed it on PSLS totally bought into the hype and his review showed it. If the game was rushed out so they could make 11/11/11, then an unbiased review should have reflected that. It would have in any other game.” you see i guess you are NOT that typ of person that relly knows what you are talking about. so yes everybody ignore the troll. and just so you know when i look at the fourms i would like to NOT see your ridiculous posts. nuff said
What do you expect? It’s from Bethesda, same makers as New Vegas. Need I say more? People knew what they were getting into when they popped in the game.
bethesda did not make new vegas obsidian did using bethesdas engin. p.s yes im trolling andrew at the request of 22 diff emails im getting because of what bull is comming out of his/her mouth and to everybody i apologise for that but someone has to put him in his place.
no need to appologize and i dont think you are a troll because of what he is saying is utterly ridiculous. he is a narrow minded person that only agrees with what his opinion is and doesnt think at a different point of view.
“We’ve received emails from a number of unhappy Skyrim players asking us to alter our score” LoL
Hmm i bet most of them don’t even own a PS3.
“I personally have logged over 100+ hours (Level 54, Master of Sneak) into the PlayStation 3 version of the game”
Yeah I’m sure Anthony just found a way to play a PS3 version of a game without owning a PS3. Surely there must be a rule somewhere on PSLS about this? You know people questioning the ethics of Anthony and the writers of the site, a lot of people felt it was a 10/10 not just Anthony and yes there’s a lot of crap going around about people giving the big popular games 10/10 scores just to not go against the status quo for the game but I don’t think this is an example of that.
Clearly the reviewer didn’t experiance any of the glitches or lag people are reporting so made he’s own decision on how good the game is. That’s kinda he’s job in case you forgot. To tell us how good he thought the game was.
Seriously people, IT’S A REVIEW. A review is an opinion. There have been plenty of highly reviewed games that I didn’t like (this one being one of them) and many panned games that I liked (Duke Nukem Forever)
Get off your high horses and let the people give their opinions. If the bugs aren’t game breaking to them, then they aren’t game breaking. He mentioned the bugs, that’s what’s important. People amaze me sometimes.
As anthony said, if you don’t like it then go somewhere else. As far as I’m concerned, unless they were paid to give a good review when the game sucked, then it’s all fair. It’s still just an unbiased opinion if they weren’t paid or received any benefits from a good score.
I have also personally logged in over 100 hours as mainly A Mage (bit of a glass cannon) and have had to do a hard reset only twice. Both times loading in a town that never loaded. I also noticed some heavy lag after playing for 5 hours straight and going into a new area. That was quickly fixed by saving and resetting. That’s it. Not bad for over 100 hours of gameplay.
IMHO, The review score and assessment was spot on.
@andrew. To say the game is broken is hardly true. There are a few fixes for the people who can’t play it and it all has to do with hard drive space and speed. If you are one of these people I highly suggest you check out the games forum.
I’ve crashed 2 times in 65 hours. Lag set in 5 times, but was easily fixed by rebooting the ps3. The game is massive. I would easily review it a 9.9 or 10 myself. My only real complaint is that the patch removed the treasure map chests.
I don’t think Skyrim should be GOTY overall, because Batman AC should be, but it’s by far one of the best games out this year.
I’m delighted to see the public becoming more and more involved in things. Giving their opinions and demanding accountability. But the target of their attentions disappoints me to the point of retaining no respect for such vocal communities.
Much like protesting hackers, the targets of such behavior rarely are the ones that are accused of being the problem. Hacking a user database and releasing the contained information fails to hurt the company it’s taken from but severely hurts the users whose information is within the database. Occupying a park fails to hurt Wall Street but does hurt the local economy around said park because people stop coming to it as a result of the occupation. Writing to a media outlet and telling them their opinion is wrong doesn’t help a company improve their product. It simply serves to prove that the complainer doesn’t understand what a review or opinion piece is or how they are properly written.
Demanding improved quality or accountability in an amazingly complex game is worth-while but that energy could be better spent asking for the same things from our governments and businesses that offer essential services. The energies spent trolling a magazine and an industry that has always tried to push it’s own boundaries could be better spent either learning what those boundaries are and how to ensure that they can be successfully broken or even better spent improving the actual world around said troll.
Skyrim isn’t perfect, but it also doesn’t sit back and allow someone else to push boundaries of what gaming can entail either. It doesn’t exist by using pre-established, and “perfected”, methodologies and systems. No game that pushes boundaries will ever be perfect because nothing anywhere that ever pushes boundaries is capable of being perfect. Especially something that is essentially art and not scientific engineering.
Ultimately, Anthony said it best. You have a problem with the game? Don’t play it. You have a problem with our review? Don’t read us.
A tad off topic and will be ranty but just wanted to throw my two cents in about Bethesda RPGs like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. To take New Vegas as an example, I’ve put as a bare minimum have put in 275 hours into NV, minimum as I’ve deleted a few characters and no longer have the playtimes, and over 400 hours into Fallout 3, and not saying I haven’t seen my fair share of lag and freezes with both, but at no point did the words ‘broken’ or ‘game-breaking’ enter my mind. It’s not that I didn’t notice them, I was simply having way too much fun playing the games that when something went wrong,it was never enough to make me stop playing and I simply reset the system and kept going like it never happened. And one last thing, a vast percentage of my NV time was before the massive patch was released.Two cents in, shutting up.
This game is no longer playable. I’ve formatted the PS3, I’ve dumped all my books, I’ve turned off the auto-saves, I’ve done everything that anyone has posted as a suggested fix and I’m done. I have over 120 hours game play, level 46, 100 on a few of the skills, and my game save is only about 8MB. I can’t play this anymore. It freezes now when trying to save, or when trying to open a door, or when loading a bookcase. I’m trading this in and I’m done with Bethesda. It’s unfathomable that they could just ignore the issues that users are obviously having. I have an older console but that’s really not an excuse. It shouldn’t behave like this. At first it was every once in a while. Then it was every few days. Then every day. And now it’s so frequent that I can’t even finish a quest without the console locking up. I spend $60 on this thing and haven’t been able to complete the main quest. All I have done is the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brother hood. Did I get my $60 worth, sure. But I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of this game. In Oblivion I had well over 300 hours. I could easily have seen Skyrim reaching and even surpassing that threshold. It’s really unfortunate. This was a really enjoyable game. I’ll be avoiding Bethesda products from now on.