Skyrim already patched more often than either Oblivion or Fallout 3
Game director Todd Howard says Bethesda has already done more to remedy some of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's less desirable features than any previous title.
"When you put all this time into something and someone can’t play it, you feel terrible. They have every right to be p**sed off," Howard told GameInformer.
"We already have more updates out for this than Fallout 3 and Oblivion in their lifetime. So we’re really committed to fixing everything."
The developer said that the game's success - greater than that of any Bethesda game before it - means the number of irate players is a lot larger than ever before.
"The percentage of people that have a problem on any particular system ends up a low percentage, but the raw number ends up being larger than we would have expected," he said.
Howard added that Bethesda can "always do a better job" in testing, identifying and eliminating bugs, but that Skyrim is the company's "most solid release".
"We learned a lot about this. In particular with the PS3 version was, 'Why aren’t we seeing this?'" he said of the company ongoing patching efforts.
"We saw some of [the bugs] that we were able to solve very quickly, but we eventually had to go to the consumer and ask for their saved game files. You’re looking at saved games where, not everybody, but certain people played for 100s of hours, and lots of different reasons it was happening. Fortunately we were able to fix it with the latest update.
"The main thing we did learn, now that we have the beta program on Steam, because we realized that no matter what we do internally, we have 10 million people playing the game and their saves are in all sorts of states, even if we test something to the nth degree, we’re still looking at this microcosm of everybody’s current live game. So that was new for us."