Tech Focus: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

We were unable to replicate the save game issue thus far in our Digital Foundry analysis, but GI.biz's Dan Pearson - 18 hours into the PS3 version - seems to have experienced the problem and describes the increased performance after moving across to the 360 game as "revelatory".

Tracking a bug like this sounds like a nightmare, but according to Bethesda fans, the exact same issue exists in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas (some even saying that Morrowind on the original Xbox did the same thing) and questions are being asked on why the new game with its enhanced engine is exhibiting a similar issue.

So is Skyrim a victim of simply being too rich and too complex for its own good, was QA simply a little lacklustre, or was the game simply rushed to market?

Perhaps befitting the SKU that Bethesda has designed as lead platform, the Xbox 360 game doesn't seem to have quite as many problems as its PC and PS3 siblings, but the issue it has manifested is a bit of a doozy, with the preferred HDD install actually robbing the game of its ability to render the highest resolution textures. Bethesda initially denied there was a problem - perhaps understandable bearing in mind that HDD installation is an OS-level function that game developers have very little control over. Regardless, a later post on its official forum suggests that Bethesda are at least aware of this issue and plan to resolve it in a future patch.

Other bugs are manifesting in interesting and unexpected ways, and don't sound so much like QA oversights - more like unintended consequences of the open nature of the immense world the developers have created. Bethesda is making some bold claims for the intelligence of the NPCs in Skyrim, and the way that they interface with the game world. The "How to Steal in Skyrim" video soon went viral, currently weighing in at 1.5m views, demonstrating how you can thieve any object you want from anywhere by placing a pot over the heads of characters in the room.

It looks ridiculous, but it demonstrates that the NPCs are "seeing" the world and reacting to visual input - it's just that they're not smart enough to cope with out-of-the-box thinking from the player, and it would require some remarkably bright QA personnel to anticipate this problem. On top of that, while the AI may well be better than the average NPC's in many respects, it's clear they have trouble adapting to changing situations, resulting in abrupt changes of mind that don't make a lot of sense to the player.

Other issues seem to relate to the physics code being unable to cope with certain mixtures of objects, terrains and magical effects, resulting in some unintentionally hilarious consequences. Again, it's really difficult to imagine how even the best QA could anticipate some of the challenges conjured up by inventive players. Some might say that it's all part of the charm of a game that is so flexible and wide-open for experimentation.

So is Skyrim a victim of simply being too rich and too complex for its own good, was QA simply a little lacklustre, or was the game simply rushed to market? It's hard to think that it's not a combination of all three. For all the issues that are directly related to the game's cutting edge technology, there exists many more, particularly on the PC version where - depending on who you talk to - quests don't activate, mountains flicker in and out of existence, NPCs talk to you through walls, AI pathfinding can go completely bananas and horses can ride dragons. And that's all after a day one patch released for all three platforms that would have presumably quashed issues discovered after the game went gold.

Where does Bethesda go from here? Another patch is incoming, which the firm promises will fix as many bugs and performance issues as they can find. Will it stop the tide of unintentionally hilarious YouTube videos? Probably not. I certainly hope not. One of Skyrim's key strengths is that almost anything can happen and so long as nothing game-breaking happens as a consequence, we wouldn't want that to change...