Shoving Skyrim on PS3 was a “Herculean Effort” for Bethesda as devs worked tirelessly to force the game on PlayStation

When The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim landed on November 11, 2011, Bethesda was skyrocketed into stardom. Over a decade after, the brilliant open-world RPG is one of the best-selling games ever, Bethesda’s pinnacle and available on nearly every system under the sun, but on release the game was criticised for its horrendous PS3 port.

After discussing the reasons why Bethesda likely won’t move away from Creation Engine and looking back on the Horse Armour debacle, Skyrim Lead Designer Bruce Nesmith spoke to VideoGamer about the game’s troublesome PlayStation release. After leaving Bethesda in 2021 to write books such as Mischief Maker and move to a smaller studio, Nesmith looked back on the studio’s attempt to get the game running on Sony’s console.

Skyrim on PS3 was extremely difficult

Announced at the Spike Video Game Awards in 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was revealed to release across Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC simultaneously. While Bethesda’s PS3 port of Skyrim’s predecessor, Oblivion, wasn’t an issue for the studio, bringing Skyrim to the PlayStation console was a much harder task.

Nesmith explains that Skyrim was already pushing the Xbox 360 hard, using as much of the console’s shared memory system as possible to deliver its massive world. However, the PlayStation 3’s split memory pool created a far more difficult challenge.

“My hat’s off to everybody on that team who did that work, because that was thankless, hard, long hours to make that happen at all.”

SKYRIM LEAD DESIGNER BRUCE NESMITH ON THE GAME’S PS3 PORT

“The PS3 had a memory architecture difference [compared to] the Xbox 360,” Nesmith explains. “So they had this bifurcation of memory where you had 50% for game logic and 50% for graphics. And that was a hard boundary, you couldn’t break that. Whereas the 360 had a single block of memory and it was up to you how you wanted to divide it up.”

Nesmith admits the PlayStation 3 memory setup and its controversial Cell Processor did have specific advantages over the Xbox 360, but not enough to create an experience as smooth as on Xbox 360.

“It was a real struggle and it was much smoother on the 360 than it was on the PS3,” Nesmith said. “I remember the enormous amount of effort our programmers put into making it work at all on the PS3. It was a Herculean effort, and my hat’s off to everybody on that team who did that work, because that was thankless, hard, long hours to make that happen at all.”

The port was still rough

Skyrim on PlayStation 3 made full use of the console’s hardware to bring the massive RPG to Sony’s fanbase. For example, the game made use of mandatory install to call for assets as fast as possible, but this wasn’t enough.

Via Digital Foundry reports from the time, the game suffered from massive pop-in, lower quality visuals and huge framerate drops as soon as multiple light sources or effects share the screen. Over time, the port was cleaned up, but Nesmith admits the Xbox version was always the place to play on console.

“It was not as polished an experience on the PS3 as it was on the Xbox 360,” Nesmith told us. “By the time the DLC was released, we had made even more dramatic improvements and it was actually not a bad experience on the PS3 by then. Although I would still maintain the 360 was a better experience.”

Skyrim’s performance did lead to huge delays for expansions that Xbox 360 players didn’t have to deal with. Dawnguard released more than half-a-year earlier on Xbox and Dragonborn—which allowed for players to fly dragons across massive land expanses—also launched later on Sony’s platforms.

As Nesmith explained in a separate article, these expansions were the ultimate test of the console’s limits. By the release of Dragonborn, that power was all sapped up, and only the next generation of hardware could have handled any more content in the game.

While Skyrim on PlayStation 3 was an incredibly rough experience, it did launch at a time when framerate wasn’t as much of a hot topic as it is now. While the state of Skyrim on that console would definitely be unacceptable today, it was a different time, and Bethesda has since created surprisingly decent performance games with the release of Starfield. As with any project, Skyrim on PS3 was a learning experience for both Bethesda and PlayStation.