Speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda Studios head Todd Howard said that the PS3 lag problems stemming from large save files is a “common misconception”.

“The way our dynamic stuff and our scripting works, it’s obvious it gets in situations where it taxes the PS3. And we felt we had a lot of it under control.

But for certain users it literally depends on how they play the game, varied over a hundred hours and literally what spells they use. Did they go in this building? [And so on.]

It’s literally the things you’ve done in what order and what’s running,”

“Some of the things are literally what spells do you have hot-keyed? Because, as you switch to them, they handle memory differently.”

He also admitted that the development team were aware the PS3 version of the game was going to run into a “bad memory situation” that could affect “a small percentage” of users, but he says Bethesda did all they could to prevent it from happening. “We did a ton more testing this time around, so the game is definitely our most solid release regardless of platform.” It still begs the question as to why did they still release with such issues?

Howard also spoke on how they managed to sort out the issues in Skyrim‘s 1.4 patch, and how he knows it wont have sorted the problems for everybody yet.

“Now that we’ve been through this, we’re not naïve enough to say, ‘We have seen everything,’ because we have to assume we haven’t. There are still going to be some people who have to come back to us and say, ‘Ok, my situation is this.’ [Our response is:] ‘OK, send us your saved game.’

“We literally need to look at what you have running. We tried doing it through e-mail. We need to open the saved game comes up and look at it. We’ve got one guy who has seven dragons on the other side of the world, and a siege about to happen in this city and another 20 quests running. And, ok, this is what the game is trying to do and it’s having a hard time running that.”

Source: CVG