Skyrim Patch 1.7 Beta Now Available on Steam

As PC and PlayStation 3 fans patiently wait for Skyrim‘s Dawnguard expansion to come their way, Bethesda has announced that a beta version of the latest patch for the game, patch 1.7, is now available on Steam.

The patch, which will be hitting PC first and consoles soon after, gets the PC and PlayStation 3 versions ready for Dawnguard, fixes a few of the expansion’s bugs for Xbox 360 players, and includes a number of bug fixes and performance tweaks.

For Xbox 360 owners, Bethesda says that Skyrim patch 1.7 will improve Kinect’s voice recognition, proper support for French, German, Italian and Spanish dragon language shouts, and so on. On the PlayStation 3 side, Bethesda will be including mounted combat, which was added in patch 1.6 on PC and Xbox 360, and all platforms will benefit from general “memory and stability optimizations.”

Unfortunately, Bethesda still isn’t saying just when Dawnguard will be making its way to the PC and PlayStation 3. Its 1-month timed exclusivity period is just about up, so we won’t likely be waiting too much longer.

For information on how to enroll yourself in the Steam beta for Skyrim, you can head over to this post. If you’d like the Skyirm 1.7 patch notes in list form (and in full), you can find that below.

– 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)