Skyrim's ambitious offering of possibilities made it a major success with players and critics, but also created a large number of technical issues across all platforms, particularly on the PlayStation 3. That's why the development team at Bethesda Game Studios have learned from past experiences and carefully refined their process to make the upcoming launch of Fallout 4

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Speaking with Game Informer , Fallout 4 director Todd Howard explained that Skyrim's popularity and large amount of player data led to difficulties in bug troubleshooting post-launch.“It probably took us a month or two before we really had a handle on it,” he said. "“All of the updates we did on Skyrim, and all of the DLC – once we sorted [the bugs out] we had a different process for how we checked the content out. There will always be some problems.”Open-world games contain a massive spread of areas, assets, systems, and content that can create programming challenges and often lead to glitches and bugs slipping through the cracks of QA testing prior to release. For Fallout 4, Howard and his team are addressing the big issues before it's in the hands of the consumer to preemptively stop them from affecting people's experience. Their biggest concern? Save data."I think we’ve gotten way better there,” Howard said of learning how to fix these technical issues. “For us, [the player's] saved game is the number one thing. If the game crashes that’s bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as someone’s saved game being hosed. That’s our scenario that we will do anything and everything to avoid. We made a lot of progress given how Skyrim went, but we did it during Skyrim. This just builds on that."Fallout 4 is the fourth entry in the long-running post-apocalyptic open-world RPG franchise. It will release on November 10 for the PlayStaiton 4, Xbox One, and PC.During E3 2015, IGN sat down with Howard and learned several new details about Fallout 4, including his plans for Mod support companion immortality , and the studio's post-Fallout 4 plans

Cassidee is a freelance writer and the co-host of a podcast about freelancing. You can chat with her about that and all other things geeky on Twitter