User blog comment:G0LD3NF1RE/Dawnguard encounters issues with Playstation/@comment-4248410-20120907234104/@comment-3492791-20120908065531

Setting, story, and all that other malarkey have nothing to do with coding. Coding is a purely technical aspect and is not in any way impacted by the lore. The only thing required to start coding is the basic gameplay features. They likely started from Oblivion's engine and added to it. Also since a dev team is modular, there is multiple aspects of the game being produced at once. This is not to support the "too much time" side here.

Programing is a very organic process. It's quite likely that major parts of the script were scraped and completly rewritten several times during development. Also since different platforms require different programs, they don't actually make one game for all systems, they make three identical games. One for each respective system. And since the programers are split between three different cells, each is realitivly small, further slowing the design process.

PS3 is difficult to multiplatform because it's such a rebel. Being that PC and Xbox have similar programing, the two teams can share tactics and speed the process up by the two teams working in tangent. The PS3 team gets the rough end of the stick and is forced to work mostly independently as the tricks PC and Xbox teams are sharing won't even work on PS3. This problem can usally be eased by spearheading the project on PS3, as PS3's programing transfers better to PC and Xbox, than the other way around. Skyrim however was most likely Spearheaded on PC.

Bottom-line; Programing is hard. Always follow the Ninety-Ninety Rule.