Developing Skyrim for PS3 Was “a Herculean Effort,” Designer Says

Over the years, there’s been no shortage of stories and testimonials from developers who worked on PS3 about how difficult it was to develop for the console, owing to its bottlenecked memory issues, courtesy of its architecture. Former Bethesda Game Studios designer Bruce Nesmith – who left the company in 2021 – has also offered details of his own experience with the console.

In particular, speaking recently with VideoGamer, Nesmith talked about getting Skyrim to run on the PS3, which he called “a herculean effort” and “a real struggle”, citing the console’s memory architecture.

“The PS3 had a memory architecture difference [compared to] the Xbox 360,” he said. “So they had this bifurcation of memory where you had 50% for game logic and 50% for graphics. And that was a hard boundary, you couldn’t break that. Whereas the 360 had a single block of memory and it was up to you how you wanted to divide it up.”

He added, “It was a real struggle and it was much smoother on the 360 than it was on the PS3. I remember the enormous amount of effort our programmers put into making it work at all on the PS3. It was a Herculean effort, and my hat’s off to everybody on that team who did that work, because that was thankless, hard, long hours to make that happen at all.”

Of course, Skyrim’s PS3 version famously received no shortage of criticism back in the day for its technical issues, something that Nesmith acknowledges, before adding that post-launch improvements did make the game’s condition on the console much better (even if the Xbox 360 version remained the ideal way to play on a console).

“It was not as polished an experience on the PS3 as it was on the Xbox 360,” he said. “By the time the DLC was released, we had made even more dramatic improvements and it was actually not a bad experience on the PS3 by then. Although I would still maintain the 360 was a better experience.”

Nesmith recently also spoke about Starfield and how he’s confident that Bethesda will be able to build on its foundations to deliver much better results with its sequel, whenever it releases. Read more on that through here.