Skyrim player boots up their PS3 save after 7 years, finds nightmarish wasteland

One The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim player has run into a bit of an issue trying to get the game to work on PlayStation 3 hardware (to put things lightly).

Bethesda games are notorious for their bugs, but Bethesda games on the PlayStation 3 are an entirely different kind of bug-ridden mess.

That’s probably why this player on the r/skyrim subreddit booted up their old copy of Skyrim on PS3 and encountered something straight out of a creepypasta.

A lot of the performance and technical issues with the PS3 come down to a lack of RAM. All PlayStation 3 models have 256 MB of RAM, which was a bit of an issue for developers at the time who were porting games to the system.

The Elder Scrolls VI is next in line, if it ever comes out.

For comparison, Xbox 360s came with 512 MB of RAM. Gaming PCs during this period were also expected to have a minimum of 512 RAM, although having one or even two GB of RAM wasn’t uncommon either.

But that’s not the only reason Bethesda games ran awfully on the system. For reasons a smarter person than I would have to explain, the Gamebryo Engine and the PlayStation 3 just weren’t compatible.

This is why PlayStation 3 ports for Bethesda titles such as Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Oblivion were considered so inferior. But Skyrim used the Creation Engine, right? So why was the PS3 version still so awful?

The Creation Engine was still based on the architecture of the Gamebryo Engine, which is presumably why the PS3 version of Skyrim is so rubbish.

That isn’t to say that the Xbox 360 versions of several Bethesda games were not also buggy, but rather that adding a bunch of performance-related issues on top of an already bug-ridden engine just intensified a lot of its problems.

Honestly, it’s a wonder a PS3 port of Oblivion even exists, all things considered.