Todd Howard on Skyrim’s PS3 Issues: “Not Nearly as Bad as It Seems”

Industry Gamer has some additional comments from Todd Howard on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s issues on PlayStation 3, following on some statements he made at DICE. According to Bethesda’s game director, statistically the problem isn’t really as bad as it seems, but also added that people afflicted by the bug have all the rights to be upset:

“Statistically, it is not nearly as bad as it seems. Meaning, by all the internal and external data, this is our most solid release,” he began. “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].”

…

“So this is not one thing, this is this whole set of unique circumstances, and the point is, we’re going to get a hold of those people then and say, ‘Well, let us look at it.’ Because, look, when you spend this much time on a game, you want it to perform for everybody. So when someone says it doesnt, they have every right to be upset with us, and we want to attack that and, ‘ok, you tell us what’s going on. We’re going to fix this’,” Howard continued.

Considering how Bethesda has already acted on the issue, and his admittance of the affected users’ right to be disappointed, I’m not sure why even point out that statistic in the first place.