Good work on the research, Soulwatcher, I've read your notes with interest.

I'm also a PS3 user and have the vanilla version. Up until the past couple of months I wondered what all the fuss was about regarding the PS3 version of this great game. I played through the entire main quest and almost every side quest (again, base game, no DLC), racked up over 100 hours and could count the number of freezes on one hand. It was great.

Then, having completed the main quests, I downloaded Broken Steel, The Pitt and Point Lookout from the PSN store. In that order. The freezes are much more common now. In my first 30 mins of play tonight I had two freezes requiring a hard console reset. However, the past two hours have been fine. You can't predict when it will happen.

Currently my latest save game file is 205 hours (I know). My game save file is 13MB. I've completed nearly all quests and can guarantee at least two or three freezes in any evening. Also, I've always used autosave, right from the beginning. Now, it might be coincidence, but reading this, and from what I've seen and read, we can consider the following possibilities -

- I downloaded the DLC as my game save file was getting too large anyway. So either the DLC for PS3 is basically bugged, or I happened to download them as the game was becoming more buggy anyway.

- I've read a lot about ash/goo piles in other forums and I don't know if this is a genuine problem, or an old wives' tale. I've used energy weapons a lot, pretty much throughout levels 10-20, so there are a lot of ash/goo piles in my game. The theory is that this increases the game save file, which in turn causes crashes. I'm not sure I believe that this is a big problem, but as someone who has used energy weapons a lot, I can't say for sure.

What we need is more data. We need someone who has done the following things, preferably at 100+ hours -

- Played through the entire game with just small guns/melee. Therefore no ash/goo piles.
- Someone who has not used autosave.
- ....and done the above both with and without DLC installed, with a 10MB+ game save file and 100+ hours.

Search the this forum for my posts. I did a bunch of testing with a new character not using auto-save and no reloading. I did this with all the DLC installed. I found that Point Lookout was the buggiest (low frame rate and freezing), MZ, OA and the Pitt about equal with bugginess and Broken Steel broke at Adam's Airforce Base.

But once my saves got over the magical 10MB mark, more and more the game would lag and freeze. It doesn't really matter what you do, cause the more you explore the larger the save file. The only other game that I noticed that had large saves was Bioshock, but then again the levels were small and corridors.

The Capital Wasteland, Point Lookout and Adam's Airforce Base are the largest open world areas, so those are the area's you will see all the lag and freezing the most, especially when the game starts to load in enemies.

Basically Bethesda developers aren't using all the cores properly on the PS3 and weren't to concerned with the PS3 ram (256MB) cache limitations vs. the Xbox (512MB). The more I think about it the more the PS3 version just feels like a quick port and that hasn't been properly converted to use the PS3 architecture.

I now have an Xbox 360 and will be mostly likely picking up Fallout 3 GOTY once the price drops (most likely after New Vegas), and plan to play it to see how it looks and feels on a system that seems to be what it was mainly designed for, I know it will have bugs and freezing, but those are the same bugs in the PS3 verison (GOAT test, Jefferson Memorial, ThreeDog talking about the future). I'm more talking about getting my character to level 30 and actually exploring each DLC with one character (so far on the PS3 it has taken 3 and I haven't been able to do more than 2 per character) without freezing and super lag (never enjoyed the ending of Broken Steel cause of all the damn lag, didn't even explore the airbase.

I sure hope Fallout New Vegas works on the PS3, I pre-ordered it for PS3 (collector's edition) and I tried to change it to Xbox 360 a couple weeks ago but they told me I was to late. Hopefully it works otherwise I will trade it in for the Xbox version (and miss out on the Classic Pack pre-order).