One Year Later, Oblivion Remastered Feels Like It's Been Left Behind

Everyone was playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered when it launched last April. Announced and released on the same day after years of reports claiming its existence, over time it became an open secret that Bethesda and Virtuos were working on a revival of the beloved RPG in some form. Then, all of a sudden, it was in our hands.

And for the most part, it was excellent. Bethesda understood that its audience didn’t want a radically reimagined gameplay experience — the charm of its earlier efforts was in how primitive it had become in some respects. Players are unleashed into a big wide world with all sorts of quests to complete, characters to meet, and enemies to conquer. But it is made possible by gameplay systems that can be broken in some truly miraculous ways.

The same approach was taken with its visuals. While Virtuos reimagined enemy designs and NPC appearances, by and large many of the environments and models felt familiar, outfitted with enhancements that felt true to the classic RPG without pulling it in an unwarranted new direction. Unfortunately, it kept a lot of the same awkward technical problems as well.

Why Does Oblivion Remastered Still Run So Terribly?

Oblivion Remastered is an unusual beast. It uses Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine to power its core gameplay logic, artificial intelligence, and physics; while Unreal Engine 5 is placed atop this original experience to output performance and visuals. I can’t imagine this was easy for developers to bring to life, even as the vast majority of the industry pivots to UE5 for its ease of use and wide availability.

Unfortunately, it is far from the most optimised engine in the world and has become infamous for inconsistent performance, visual hitching, high system requirements, and a range of other issues that have turned it into a boogeyman of modern video games. Whenever I see a huge game making use of it, I roll my eyes.

I know it’s capable of magical things, but they simply aren’t worth the glaring shortcomings. Oblivion Remastered was cursed out of the gate, with users across all platforms — including supremely powerful PCs — reporting performance bugs that really should not be happening. Digital Foundry called it one of the worst games it’d ever tested, and even a year later very little about the experience has been fixed.

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I played Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim on the PS3, so I know a thing or two about how badly these games can run when technical flaws go unchecked.

Shortly after launch, players began to report that the game started to run worse the longer you played, which is far from ideal for an RPG suited to longer sessions. The official advice was to simply restart the game and go from there, but then similar problems began to arise regarding the size of individual save files and how they would impact performance.

None of these issues have been addressed, with the last update arriving in July 2025 before things were left alone or for the community to jump in and fix. For a game of this caliber, it’s sadly not good enough.

And Why Hasn’t Bethesda Tried To Fix It?

There could be a multitude of reasons why Oblivion Remastered hasn’t received a patch in almost a year, despite being highly popular and in less than optimal condition. The remaster was developed in large part by Virtuos, and perhaps the final product was handed over and those responsible for bringing it to life have now moved onto other projects. As for Bethesda, I like to think it’s deep in the Elder Scrolls 6 mines right now that Starfield is far, far behind it.

No matter the reason, it’s poor form to reject the millions of players who picked up a game like this and want to have a good time, but because of its technical shortcomings, just can’t. My brother grabbed it on release and messaged me multiple times wondering if his PS5 was suddenly acting up, only for me to inform him that Oblivion Remastered is busted.

Going back to Digital Foundry again, to mark the game’s first anniversary, they returned to the game on all platforms to discover whether anything had improved. You can likely guess the answer:

“The game hasn't been patched on PC since its 1.2 update arrived in July 2025 — a very short post-launch support window, given that the game was only released in late April the same year [...] Unfortunately, that abandonment means that the game remains in a state that could be described as anywhere from ‘annoying’ to ‘practically unplayable,’ depending on your appetite for persistent hitches and stutters, crashing, or other profound technical woes.”

Blame can be placed on Unreal Engine 5 not playing nicely with the original game logic or Bethesda simply releasing the game to critical and commercial acclaim only to believe its most important job was done and the state of the moment-to-moment gameplay just didn’t matter, or at least not enough to bother fixing it.

More than anything though, letting Oblivion Remastered fall into this state of disarray feels like a missed opportunity. Bethesda’s slate of RPGs has always been lambasted due to a laundry list of bugs and performance issues, but in bringing this classic back to life, it could have, for the first time in history, subverted our expectations. Imagine if it ran at a smooth 60 frames per second at a consistent resolution on all platforms and didn’t instead struggle at every turn. It’s a distracting way to enjoy a returning classic that should have been better.