Skyrim ships 10 million units, receives another patch

Bethesda Softworks has announced that its award-winning role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has shipped 10 million units worldwide.

Actual units sold were not revealed, but Bethesda estimates approximately $650 million in sales since its November 11 release. This makes Skyrim one of the most successful multiplatform releases in video game history, alongside Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which released in October and November of this year, respectively.

Although Elder Scrolls titles, especially starting with Morrowind for the PC and Xbox, have always been very successful, it’s impressive that a single-player-only experience spanning hundreds of hours of gameplay can thrive in a videogame industry that tends to favor multiplayer and casual games.

Unfortunately, along with its great success, the Elder Scrolls franchise is notorious for launching with countless technical issues. Bethesda has recently submitted the latest patch, version 1.3, to fix a small handful of issues, including those it caused with the last patch:

• General stability improvements
• Fixed Radiant Story incorrectly filling certain roles
• Fixed magic resistances not calculating properly
• Fixed issue with placing books on bookshelves inside player purchased homes
• Fixed dragon animation issues with saving and loading
• Fixed Y-look input to scale correctly with framerate
• Optimize performance for Core 2 Duo CPUs (PC)

The patch is now live on Steam and Xbox 360, with the PlayStation 3 version still in the approval process.

It’s interesting to note that while Bethesda is touting its success, the top comments on their latest blog are all related to outstanding problems players are having with the game. Some choice quotes below:

Bethesda,
Please fix the never-disappearing ash piles and the super-glowy nirnroots. That should help everyone with large save files.

Note that this issue was mentioned in our review.

Yeah- these are all great- but how about fixing the glitch that leave quest items in my inventory even after the quest is completed! Sure the dont effect my total carrying capacity- but they are annoying to have stuck in there! you’d think Bethesda would have figured this out after Oblivion!

I can’t absorb dragon souls and the talos shine blessing to reduce your shout time is still that 0%.

Please fix a glitch where your companion dies and people still think he/she is with you! The 3 day reset isn’t working.