With more than 20 million copies sold to date, Skyrim is without a doubt one of the most successful video games of all time. Such an impressive sales feat is due in no small part to the title's incredibly diverse contribution of gameplay features, which not only helped Skyrim's bottom line, but also assisted in establishing the action role-playing game as a fan-favorite and a critical darling. However, with the game's scope being so wide-reaching, and with it being available across so many platforms, a bevy of technical issues became a commonplace occurrence, especially with the release's PlayStation 3 port.

Thankfully, with Fallout 4 being at the forefront of most gamers' minds, Bethesda's development team have studied the inherent bugs and glitches of Skyrim in order to refine their creation process and make the forthcoming release of the next entry in the popular post-apocalyptic RPG series go as smoothly as possible. In fact, when speaking with Game Informer, Fallout 4 director Todd Howard explained that Skyrim's popularity created a huge sum of player data and caused a lot of strife for Bethesda when it came to troubleshooting buggy code post-launch. Although the situation was difficult, Howard went on to say that the experience helped him and his development team learn how to fix such technical issues more quickly and effectively for future releases.

In reference to the amount of time and effort it took to iron out most of Skyrim's bugs, Howard says:

“It probably took us a month or two before we really had a handle on it. All of the updates we did on Skyrim, and all of the DLC – once we sorted [the bugs out] we had a different process for how we checked the content out. There will always be some problems."

Open-world titles such as Skyrim and Fallout 4 often present an enormous amount of programming problems due to having hordes of content that game designers have to map out, which typically leads to glitches and software flaws being overlooked during testing phases. But, as previously mentioned, Bethesda has learned some lessons from Skyrim's development process, and are applying them to the creation of Fallout 4 so as to avoid disappointing fans once the game goes live.

One of the most pressing issues that Bethesda is facing when it comes to Fallout 4's production concerns saved game data. Addressing the matter, Todd Howard claims that he and his crew have made definitive progress by keeping gamers in mind, saying:

"I think we’ve gotten way better there. For us, [the player's] saved game is the number one thing. If the game crashes that’s bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as someone’s saved game being hosed. That’s our scenario that we will do anything and everything to avoid. We made a lot of progress given how Skyrim went, but we did it during Skyrim. This just builds on that."

So far, similarly positive news has helped the hype surrounding the forthcoming entry in the nuclear wasteland-centric series, including, but not limited to, Howard's insistence that Fallout 4 PC mods can transfer to the Xbox One. In addition to such a crowd-pleasing attribute, Bethesda's director has also given fans something else to look forward to by confirming that the game's canine companion Dogmeat can't die. Plus, the company has announced revolutionary plans for the fourth official installment in the franchise with the inclusion of customizable settlements, weapons and armor. With so many cool features to look forward to, it's no wonder that Fallout 4 is one of the year's most highly anticipated titles.

Fallout 4 is set to release November 10 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

Source: Game Informer (via IGN)