It's no secret that Bethesda's attitude with the Playstation 3 was certainly below the Xbox 360 last generation.

Oblivion came out on 360 first, Bethesda did not even do the PS3 version themselves and a number of the DLCs never even made it to the PS3 version.

Fallout 3 was technically superior on on Xbox 360, and Bethesda gave all the DLCs timed exclusivity on 360. The PS3 GOTY Edition was said to be a "broken product" due to a staggering number of bugs.

Fallout: New Vegas was once again heavily marketed on Xbox 360 with that also getting timed exclusive DLCs.

Then the Skyrim saga. The infamous horrible PS3 lag issue plaguing the game.....and Bethesda not even caring to be in any hurry to fix it. Once again they shower the 360 version with timed exclusive DLCs!!!!

But what an amazing and sudden change Playstation gamers have had with Fallout 4.

Look how fast they were to fix frame rate issues in certain areas in the first official patch they released? Every anolyst seems to say that the patch benefited the PS4 version more than it did the Xbox One.

Where was such swift efficiency when Skyrim was having all that lag issue on PS3?

Do you think that the PS4 version catering for 58% of global sale of the game has anything to do with this?

This is the first time a Bethesda game has sold best on a Sony system.

Also find it interesting this mod kit for console thing has suddenly fallen off the radar and not part of their announced DLCs over the next 3 months.

They initially said it was going to PC and Xbox One....then PS4 at a later time. But with the PS4 being their biggest profit generator now, do you think they are just going to wait until it's ready for PS4 before releasing them all together at the same time?

Certainly can't deny that there has been a major change in attitude from Bethesda toward the Playstation community from last generation.

Or it has to with the fact that the PS3 was a hell to develop for while the PS4 was intentionally designed to be as accessible as possible. That and it has a 40% stronger GPU than the Xbox One but is otherwise almost identical, so if you set your performance targets for the One you can very easily hit them on the PS4.

Also, Creation Kit and console mods info is coming March-April.

The early dlc stuff for Xbox was common place. Money talks. They did it with other games too. Kind of away for Xbox to try and bribe people to switch to their console.

Nah, the issue is bethesda do not have competent developers at the time working on it. They made tons of excuses when other big time devs like rockstar, naughty dog and others had 0 issues with the ps3 system. Hell even PC modders who took a crack on the PS3 system said it wasn't that difficult. I blame Bethesda for not having better developers. If people like Gabe Newell who talked mad crap about the system and then apologized and worked to make Portal 2 on PS3 as the definitive version that tells me the ps3 system itself wasn't that bad.

Blaming the console for your own mistakes is just sad.

As far as topic is concerned I can't say it feels more stable but lets see how the mods play out on consoles, they already favored the xbox AGAIN this time around with fallout so nothing has changed on that.

I can imagine it would be very difficult to develop cross-platform anyway. I don't think it has anything to do with competent developers. Their games have always had issues regardless of platform, especially for PC.

But that right there has to do with competent developers and the engine. I mean hell, they cannot even develop on there own engine they use. All the bugs and issues they fail to fix and it appearing to be simple, ends up being done to PC modders on the unofficial patches. Do you know how embarrassing that is for paid developers from a company can't fix the issues that non paid, non employed fans seem to do.

As i said, big time developers outside of bethesda has little issue creating games on ps3 but for whatever reason bethesda has never made a stable ps3 title at launch. Just boggles one mind.

yes,


the XBox360 ans Playstation 3 had very different hardware architecture.. this made direct porting (which is what they did with many of the OPs examples, they didn't design it to be played on PS3 from the start, they made it for the 360s architecture and then later tried to alter it to work on the PS3) quite difficult..



the XB1 and PS4 however, have quite similar architectures by comparison, making the development of cross platform titles quite a bit easier..

first, as someone who has worked in software development briefly (not games mind you, business management software), you are never going to find a single program that has no bugs.. and fixing bugs is not as easy as "ohh, just rewrite that one line of code", because when you fix something you are likely to break something else.. no software is ever going to be able to get rid of every bug in existence


second, most of the developers you mentioned designed their games to be cross platform from the get go, that isn't what Bethesda did as stated above..

First off, you'd have a point if PC modders didn't completely fix all the issues that bethesda fails to do on every game they release. I've talked to people and see comments saying "as usual bethesda doesn't know how to fix the same issue the engine showed on the previous 2 games. Sigh" and then later Unofficial patch version x.xx appears and they fix it. EVERY TIME.

Bethesda developers certainly are not skilled enough to fix the same reoccuring issues that all there games has had since morrowind. I wouldn't be surprised if fallout 4 also suffers those same issues. Likely ash piles and memory leaks. So maybe you're right, fixing bugs is not as easy..... for BETHESDA. But they should be there the pro developers who get paid 1000s of dollars a year, as a living, to do this stuff. There's no excuse.

And Secondly: That's another issue bethesda has and i'm not going to get into a long winded discussion on it but this could also be contributed to the previous point above. Either way beth needs more talented developers cause it seems to me even after working with the gamebryo engine for 12+ years they still are terrible coding with it. And Maybe they should have started and finished the PC version first then simultaneously work on both PS and Xbox Versions at the same time......but then again this would require more developers which they simply do not have.

Either way PS3 was NOT that difficult to develop for if you had good developers and didn't have sony give you the tool kits that made it easier.

I'm a PS4 player as well along with PC. I think they simply have a tendency to release buggy games in general regardless of platform. I played New Vegas on PS3, and I felt it had less issues than Fallout 3 for PC, but that's my own experience.

I don't think they're shafting Playstation owners though. They released Knights of the Nine for the PS3 before they did Xbox, and Oblivion looked a little better on PS3 than the Xbox, so I think they legitimately tried to use the playstation hardware with that release.

I'll agree though that they should take care to ensure all console users share the same experience. PC users have the most problems though, and I would really like to see them make a PC game the way it's supposed to be without resorting to mods to fix up the UI.

It is certainly nice that us PS4 players will be getting the DLC at the same time as everyone else and will hopefully even see access to many of those amazing mods that have been created.

Fallout 4 on Ps4 was a 360 degree turn in the good direction , they regained alot of trust with this and it was nessecary for me

have you ever used the unofficial patches? not only do they not fix everything wrong with the titles, but even cause some bugs of their own (oblivions caused quite a few i can remember)

not difficult if its designed for it from the get go.. its not just a Bethesda issue, other games that were designed specifically for one of them had issues when porting them to the other.. when they said "hey, lets make Oblivion" they hadn't intended to make a PS3 version, so they essentially had to try and ducktape the 360s inorder to get it to run on a console that works completely differently under the hood from the 360



cross platform coding is not an exact science especially when the architecture between the two is so different (go look up what hardware architecture is), all the devs you mention designed their games to work on both from the get go and not port them over.. your not just opening up the game and checking the "for playstation" box, you have to alter it to work with the way the consoles hardware reacts with itself.. if you specifically design a game for a console that works in a specific way its going to be difficult to get it to work properly on another.. think of it like trying to power a Mazda BT-50 with an engine designed specifically for a Volkswagen beetle, its possible but not an easy feat..

As far as timed exclusivity goes, it's not bribery. It's business. And it goes deeper than just video games. Besides, Sony does it too. The Skyrim debacle was horrible. I originally played it on PS3 before giving up and getting it for my 360. At least they did what they could to get the dlc up and running. They could've just written it off as a lost cause, and they offered a significant discount to all PS3 players.

As far as my opinion on Bethesda's latest effort... I think they've definitely stepped it up. I have this game for both consoles and it performs almost identically on both. Crashes are almost non existent (two on my PS4, a few more on my One) and neither really bog down on framerate all that much. The little glitches here and there aren't much of a bother to really have a negative effect on my experience. They've ditched the timed exclusivity, so the whining can stop on that subject. Now we just have to see how console modding will work out.

They used money to try and influence people. Bribery in my book.

I dont pay it much mind, as Beth was a pc only dev that stepped into cross platforming at a very difficult generation, especially on the PlayStation side, at least Beth spoke out about the issues, instead of twiddling there thumbs. Now with more cross platform experience and a more manageble generation of consoles, I was not surprised with the overall better quality.




Huh, never knew fully legal, above table acts could be called a under the table, illegal term.

Very impressed - I have had no bugs/glitches or framerate problems.

Skyrim ran like garbage on my PS3 in comparison

It's much better now but that's to be expected. I never been a fan of exclusive deals. They seem like a way to punish gamer who play on a different platform.

We're not talking about illegal, back room talks. It's a very public, contractual agreement. Was Sony guilty of bribery when they did the exact same thing with Assassin's Creed? Was Apple guilty of bribery when they did the same thing with the original iPhone? It's just business.

Never said it was illegal. Call it want you want. Sure it's free enterprise any business can do what they like with their money. It is what it is. Call it a reward for their customers loyal support and if they get new customers because of it, good. It's nothing personal, just business. How I see it and others see it is up to them. That's what it reminds me of though. Like I said, money talks.

Oblivion PS3 port was outsourced.

The PS3 had more bugs and lag for the same reason it always did with Bethesda game... its split memory design meant the game only had 256mb of ram to work with, unlike the Xbox's 512. Bethesda was "in no hurry" to fix the PS3 lag because they literally couldn't as it was a hardware issue that MANY game devs complained about, and not a software issue.

Xbox also had timed exclusive DLC, and is getting console mods first, because Microsoft actually WORKS with companies to get stuff out faster, where as Sony is notorious for basically being closed to the outside world and leaving more devs to fend for themselves.

Bethesda's attitude with the playstation hasn't changed one bit, its Sony not being idiots that sabotage their own system that has changed.

This. The closest they ever came to "giving up" was asking for hep from Sony's programmers to figure out what was wrong. It still took them like half a year after that before they could release it.


At some point, the issues on the PS3 stops being "gamesas have poor developers".

Boohoo poor Bethesda, other developers managed just fine. Either do it properly or just release for xbox360 and PC and just come out and say yeah our game won't work on the ps3, instead they went on for a year about how skyrim worked just fine on the ps3 and in the end they didn't even send ps3 copies to PS only reviewers pre-release, coincidence?. No excuses.

99% of other developers also make level based games where each level only takes about 30 minutes to cross, then unloads from the game's memory after you exist it. OFC they didnt have problems with it, none of them had a dynamic 15 square mile game world were each fork was moveable.

And skyrim did work fine on the PS for a large number of people, I know many who had it on PS3 and never got the lag bloat because they never played it for 300+ hours.

RDR worked fine, GTA IV worked fine a bunch of other games worked fine. And no, skyrim did not work fine for "a large number of people" on the ps3, it worked fine for the minority. You were one of them, good for you. I on the other hand wasn't. And the lag didn't always start at 300+ hours, on one of my characters it started at 10 at another at 30.

That's beside the point though, Bethesda knowingly shipped a product with a MAJOR game-breaking problem and at the same time they refrained from sending ps3 copies of the game even to PS only reviewers pre-release, which is suspect AT BEST.