While it isn't much consolation for PS3 gamers who have been having a hard time with Skyrim, Bethesda's Todd Howard had some words to say about the issues the game is experiencing on that system. According to him, the problem is "not nearly as bad as it seems". I suppose it depends on how you look at it.
One thing I do know is that, generally speaking, the problems with any game like this seem bigger than they really are because the very vocal minority is the only ones on the forums and other sites pointing them out. What we don't see is the much, much larger group of gamers who aren't having any issues and are quite content just playing the game.
However, issues do exist. Howard continued to explain in more detail:
Statistically, it is not nearly as bad as it seems. Meaning, by all the internal and external data, this is our most solid release. It's also our most popular by a large factor, so we do have a lot of people on the PS3 who play the games a lot and their games are at a state that the game is just taxing the PS3 enough. That's a fact; so, it really wasn't until we were able to get save games from the users – because, literally, how they play the game over 100 hours – some of it, very little of it, we were able to reproduce and take care of on our own and a lot of it that you're seeing now, we weren't. So over the course of, like, December, the community helped us. We got their save games. We'd literally have to look in and say, 'What quests do they have running, what order? Oh, he's doing this. He's got these dragons here. This script is running. Why is it kicking out this many things?' And the 1.4 update is coming out today on the PS3 and it should – in our internal tests on those games - it fixes it, it takes care of it. But, going through this, we now know, there will still be – a smaller set, but there are probably still people we don't have their saved games and they have [other problems].
I suppose PS3 users will just have to grin and bear it until the problems are completely sorted out. But, he's right - it's a gigantic game and there are so many factors to take into consideration. There may always be issues that are nearly impossible to resolve.