I think I can illustrate how many PS3 gamers feel with a story. I was a first day adopter of Skyrim and was very pleased with the game for a very long time. Sure it had a few glitches and it froze here and there and I even got to see the backwards-flying dragons later on but the game is so huge you can kind of forgive a certain amount of coding trouble with a production this massive. We all knew Bethesda had some trouble with PS3 so I cut them some slack.

Then I saw the news that the game could really break on you if your file got too large. I remembered the horrible frame rate slowdown that tarnished my Fallout 3 GOTY experience. That game is still one of my favorites of the generation but technical errors like that which make things unplayable are really discouraging. At this point we know that Bethesda shipped us a broken PS3 game. There were complaints on 360 but nothing this bad.

Later we learned that those timed exclusive DLC expansions that PC and 360 had might never come to PS3. They did come, finally, much much later than they should have but I thought the price cut was nice at least. So I bought Hearthfire because I like to build and customize stuff. It was just a couple bucks. Then after plenty of new patching and installing the download I decide to see if I can get into the game again. Time to build my house and do some quests right? No such luck. Now the game freezes every single time I go under water. Nothing fixes it. My 100+ hour game is broken and useless.

I was never one of the people who swore off Bethesda games because of stuff like this because they are so good otherwise but it has been a very bad ride for Bethesda fans who prefer to game on PS3.

Now that we have the specs on the PS4 and Xbox One I’m thinking Sony fans can expect a complete one-eighty from what they had to experience with Bethesda before. Since the developer does so well with PC architecture and PS4 is the more powerful of the consoles I think we can expect most if not all of the crimes against PS3 owners to simply go away in the next generation since the difficulty Bethesda had with programming for the PS3 is now gone. And honestly I think that alone is one of the highly attractive points of the new direction for Sony.

While the likes of Fallout 4 or another Elder Scrolls could run the same on Xbox One and PS4 there is at least the possibility that PS4 will be allowed to run the game even more smoothly with the extra graphics processing power. I can’t imagine a reason why certain mods couldn’t also be made available. All we need now is an end to the timed exclusivity of DLC and Sony fans can stop fearing the name “Bethesda” on their games.

Are you looking forward to this eventuality or has Bethesda turned you off too much to smooth things over now?