User blog comment:G0LD3NF1RE/Dawnguard encounters issues with Playstation/@comment-71.56.125.167-20120910014933/@comment-128.61.42.131-20120913010055

(OP)

Heh, not a game programmer, just a rocket scientist who's integrating work in four coding languages right now. :D

As for HR, at each stage (think city) everything stays constant, but leave the stage and most items will revert. In Skyrim (and I think F3 and NV) you can sell goods to a vendor and some rarer items will stay with the vendor. It's not a full refresh when the vendors 'restock'. Don't ask me how that's defined, but I'm almost certain I've seen it in all three.

Another example is that mines refresh after you have not been in them for 30 game days. This requires the game to keep track of a counter and reset it every time you enter the mine. Another option would be to set a flag on the game day where the ore was mined and move out thirty days, and yet another option would be to set the flag to the day the mine was first mined (reset all veins after X days of first vein being mined to exhaustion).

Beth made the choice how far they wanted to go. Maybe it was a mistake not to handicap the PS3 version (nuke areas every X days, or something), but Beth looks to have screwed up the allocation and save file for it. Bad method yes, but the system itself has faults that make that even more likely given its constraints. Beth historically seems to default to the "more intricate is better" mindset, and that in itself will cause trouble on ports.

TLDR: Beth did screw up, but Sony wasn't a plus, either