Skyrim looks worse when installed to Xbox 360 HDD (for now)

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Bethesda working on fix for texture-downgrade issue

If you're planning on rushing home and installing your new copy of Skyrim on the Xbox 360 you might want to wait a bit. Bethesda has announced it's working on a patch to fix texture issues reported by Xbox 360 owners. While the game's day 1 patch fixed a number of minor bugs detected between pressing and launch, one issue that made it through undetected is the texture scaling caused by the game's dynamic streaming when not running from the system cache. Or, in simpler terms, the game sometimes looks kind of weird if you install it, but that's getting fixed.

As you can see in the comparison shot above (here's the full video, if you've too much free time), some pretty noticeable texture pop-out can result from installing the game to the system HDD. Bethesda says it's “verified that this issue does not occur when playing off the disk and when the game is fully cached (not installed).” The developer promises it'll be remedying the problem in an upcoming patch for users who diligently sat through that agonizing install-bar, only to see performance the worse for it.

Skyrim players, it could be worse: not only is your dragon-filled fantasy game still freaking gorgeous (and 10/10 excellent), but at least when your textures get all de-veined and inhuman-looking, someone's on hand to fix it for you.