User blog comment:G0LD3NF1RE/Dawnguard encounters issues with Playstation/@comment-71.56.125.167-20120910014933

Wow, just wow. So much garbage flying around. I really doubt that Beth and M$ would go any further than a generic timed release. If it was, Beth would have come out with a hard reason not to initiate development for the PS3 of DLC early, that way they could reassign PS3 coders and qc and so on rather than pay what would likely amount to tens of thousands of dollars in unused man-hours. And if they had done this and not said anything, someone would likely have come out, particularly if any downsizing gets involved.

As for the actual coding, speaking out of school, I wonder if it's part of the issue Beth has always had with memory growth. Gamebryo had issues with ever-growing save files because it held onto loadout data, corpses, etc for a huge number of spaces (I remember some of the FO devs noting that with the save file errors on consoles). It looks like they toned that down in the Creation engine (respawns and so on), but habits and history always a nice way of looking at where failures can come from (people don't change coding habits easily). I'm kinda wondering if it's that and the PS3 memory setup that causes problems (PC and to a lesser extent X360 have more fluid memory). Dawnguard may run fine on general gameplay, but horders or long gameplay could cause faults...although if it was just that I'd have said so, so there may be other issues.

As far as other games, once the language and hierarcy is understood, any shooter should be readily portable (graphics engines are gonna be the big hurdle here). I can't say much about PS3 RPGs, but I'd be surprised if they are not linearish and configurable via the use of completion scripts, or stage based. Same with DX:HR. Each stage may not be linear, and you do have a lot more freedom for moving objects, but it's not a persistant environment; it is level based and thus you can wipe writable memory after leaving a level. (even if you can wipe areas in Skyrim after a certain time passes, the game still needs to remember what merchants have what stocks if you've sold stuff to them, what you gave to followers, where corpses are, dragon bones, etc and anything that is different than the default balloons the file size). In DX, you can set simple flags for how something was completed and then just transfer those between areas, allowing the use of 'default' character templates which will require less write memory than a modified char (think NY vs Hong Kong Vs Unatco HQ in the original...I was underwhelmed with HR, so sue me).

It honestly looks like Beth got to a point of good enough to run on all the machines without unduly handicapping either just one platform (what if the PS3 version nuked inventories at predetermined intervals and PC and XBox didn't...or PC could have battles with dozens of participants while consoles maxed out at five...or consoles had 2player and pc did not?), but neglected to allocate enough space for growth. Piss poor planning and execution, yes, but I also wonder how much of the fault trickles out to both expectations of the game (Beth prides itself on its modifiable world and the like) and idiosyncracies of the PS3 platform (I'd be surprised if general practices are similar, although not identical between PC and XBox), plus general newness to PS3 on Beth's part. If you want to blame something, blame the gotta port mentality. The base code needs to be pretty damn close between platforms so that you are only making one game, not three with all the concurrent issues with coding and translation. This means that ideas need to be nerfed or stretched to meet these various platform issues (memory, video cards, sound cards, cpu power, etc) and nothing is optimized for the eventual end user.

In short, looks like Beth did make choices which were bound to lead down this path, gambled and lost. And because of it, they are getting a black eye in the community, some lost productivity from coders (how many programmers are debugging code as opposed to new work, and were people or consultants pulled from other projects to try to fix the issue), and lost sales. All that can be done right now is to hope they can learn from it.

For the record, do not own PS3 or XBox (Don't care for consoles) and run a workstation computer (sans the $500 Open GL card I need) at home, so I know I'm not the "typical" gamer demographic.

Edit - Just looked at the Beth Board. Looks like it is a memory bug for large save files. Per Pete Hines, the DLC works, but large save files cause lots of issues (lag, bugs, perhaps even overruns nuking saves, etc). Sony was brought on to try to work and rearrange the way everything is saved (I'd guess that these save files are some sort of compressed file that has to be read and there is interplay with the hardware/firmware involved that may bloat it (how allocation is performed, what is allocatable, etc).