‘Skyrim’ 1.7 Update Releasing for Consoles This Thursday

While gamers had been led to believe that Bethesda has been having problems with the PS3 version of Skyrim in recent weeks, especially in their attempts to bring their recently released Dawnguard DLC to the platform, a new concurrent update release suggests otherwise. That update in question, number 1.7, is expected by Bethesda to release this Thursday for both the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Unfortunately for PS3 owners in Europe, though, Bethesda revealed that the 1.7 update should hit their copies of Skyrim some time next week. It’s not the ambiguous release date we had been given for Dawnguard, but it is a longer wait.

PC players, on the other hand, have been enjoying the fruits of 1.7, which has only made minor improvements to the world of Elder Scrolls 5, for about a week now. They also were recently treated to the release of Dawnguard – which will give them to chance to fight with or against the vampire lords.

For those that might not have been following the news regarding update 1.7 here’s a quick refresher of what Bethesda is fixing/adding:

• General memory and stability optimizations
• Fixed crash related to new water shaders
• Fixed rare crash related to dragon landings
• Fixed logic error with loading screens from add-ons (Xbox 360)
• Using vampiric grip and swimming no longer prevents swimming animation from playing afterwards
• Improved recognition with Kinect voice commands (Xbox 360)
• Kinect-enabled dragon language shouts for French, German, Italian and Spanish work properly (Xbox 360)
• Fixed issue with Dawnguard Kinect-enabled dragon shouts for French, German, Italian and Spanish (Xbox 360)

As was mentioned before, the update isn’t as revolutionary as past updates, but it does implement some increased support for the new Kinect shouts that were introduced in an earlier update. The feature itself is a bit gimmicky, but being able to call out commands does have its advantages when compared to the old fashioned button press.

There are still arguably more additions Bethesda can make to the world of Skyrim, both on the consoles and the PC, but for now the focus is placed squarely on the resurgence of problematic PS3 development, and where it leaves future DLC releases. If Dawnguard can’t play nice with the console, who is to say that the next expansion (which have heard literally nothing about) won’t be just as frustrating?

What improvements and fixes do you hope to see in a future Skyrim update? Are you surprised to hear the PS3 update is releasing on time?

Source: Bethesda