Skyrim’s PlayStation 3 Patch Improves Performance, Does Not Make Textures Look Worse

It always irks me when gaming news sites use what they read on forums as actual news posts. There's a difference, of course, in reporting a piece of news based on some scoop that a reader or forum-goer has found on NeoGAF, with screenshots and evidence beyond the realm of the anecdotal.

More to the point, I'm irked by yesterday's reports that PlayStation 3 patch for Skyrim improves the game's performance at the cost of graphical fidelity. Based on the word of a single user, Eurogamer quoted a user named "kenTucky" as saying that the patch "minimized the texture details." There is nothing to go on without evidence of the visible reduction of graphical quality.

Contrary to his belief, however, the patch actually removes and reallocates items left strewn about in the world to reduce the memory hog on the PS3—as evidenced by the 10-15% drop in the filesize of the save games. Further evidence can be seen as you revisit old dungeons to find that the corpses, which would previously remain in place indefinitely, are all but gone. Even the messes you make in Whiterun (or any other location, except for the homes you own) are all tidied up the next time you revisit the area.

Suffice to say, the patch does nothing to reduce texture quality. There is some evidence provided by the video below that Bethesda reduced the shadow fidelity to grant tremendous improvement to the framerate. The shadows simply aren't as deep as they used to be. But so what?

As you can see from the video, the textures look exactly the same, and the improvement to the framerate is very noticeable. No longer does the game freeze, stutter, and otherwise play like a slideshow—so any kind of "outrage" towards Bethesda for making the game run better is simply misguided.

Ultimately, it is difficult to defend any time a website writes a report on a single user's shared experience—especially when it comes to the performance of a videogame. It's no different from writing a news post of a product based on a 1-star user review on Amazon.com. It's anecdotal, and exists without any evidence to back it up. Unless the reports happen to be widespread (with more than a dozen users complaining about their experiences), it's hard to justify any sort of report that hinges on the word of a single person.