So last night we dutifully fired the game up on our Xbox 360, downloaded a compulsory update thinking nothing of it, and then headed off to the Eldergleam Sanctuary, where we’ve deliberately left a dragon alive who likes to circle rather dramatically around some very pretty scenery before coming in for a fight.

Only this time, things didn’t go quite as expected. For while the dragon looked fine from a distance, as soon as we got close enough for it to go into ‘combat mode’, it went completely mad. It started flying into trees and hills. It would stutter along in the air before then suddenly surging across the screen at UFO-like speeds. It would twitch its wings and legs like a dying fly. It flat refused to land or come anywhere near us. And most remarkably of all, it flew BACKWARDS. Sort of like moonwalking, but with wings. And on a far grander scale.

Skyrim: Although it's hard to tell from this, um, still image, this dragon is flying backwards.

Assuming this to just be a momentary bug, we doggedly chased the crazed lizard up and down the whole valley, with fireballs at the ready, and gradually managed to chip its health down to only having a third left (chiefly thanks to the dragon suddenly getting ‘stuck’ on some invisible barrier in the air).

But then the damn thing moved, flew insanely around the valley again for a bit, and ended up high in the sky stuck in some bizarre, twitchy animation ‘loop’. It was out of fireball and arrow range, and so impossible to kill. And worse, its frenzied, looped actions caused the game’s frame rate to drop to as low as 5fps.

Fortunately, the child found all this quite amusing. We, though, did not.

So we quit out and went back to it later by ourselves. Only to find that exactly the same thing happened. Only this time the final ‘freeze’ position of the dragon was within range of our fireballs, so we actually managed to whittle away all of the dragon’s health until it died. Except that it didn’t die. It just flew off again in the same glitched fashion, and refused to settle down anywhere.

Utterly bonkers, and totally broken.

Skyrim - A Dwemer Centurion Master. We refer you to the final line in this story, and leave the rest to your imagination.

A quick search of the good old t’Internet confirmed that we were certainly not alone in seeing this bizarre glitch. In fact, it seems that almost everyone playing Skyrim on the Xbox 360 and PS3 is suffering the same ‘reversing dragon’ madness following Bethesda’s patch yesterday.

It also seems that some people are experiencing problems with their magical resistances, though we personally haven’t noticed this – perhaps because we tend to use destruction magic hard first and worry about resistances later.

Much as we adore Skyrim – indeed, we’ve been playing it so much it’s stopping us from doing about 12 reviews we’ve got lined up – this massive cock up from Bethesda is bad enough to stop us from playing the game any more until it’s fixed. A pretty ironic situation considering that prior to this disastrous patch, we hadn’t experienced any game-breaking glitches at all.

It’s probably worth adding that we also found a problem last night where the Witchmist Grove location didn’t seem to function properly, but we don’t know if that’s related to the patch as well, or just a general bug (though if it is, it’s the first quest glitch we’ve found in more than 50 hours of play).

Needless to say, as soon as Bethesda comment on the problems with the new patch (so far they’ve remained tight lipped), we’ll tell you what they’ve got to say.

This is all far too reminiscent of a glitch in Skyrim’s predecessor, Oblivion, that stopped us from being able to complete a key Guild quest for weeks until a patch finally arrived.

We guess in a game as almost unbelievably complex and in-depth as Skyrim that some glitches will get past play-testers and won’t emerge until literally millions of people start playing the game. But this dragon nonsense seems so widespread and basic that you have to wonder if Bethesda really tested the new patch at all!

Bah. As you can tell, we’re angrier than a Dwemer Centurion Master with a lighting bolt up his butt.