Everyone played The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered when it came out last April. Announced and published on the same day after years of reports of its existence, it has become an open secret over time that Bethesda and Virtuos are working on reviving the beloved RPG in some form. Then suddenly it was in our hands.
And for the most part it was excellent. Bethesda understood that its audience didn't want a radically redesigned gaming experience – the charm of its earlier efforts was how primitive it became in some ways. Players are dropped into a big wide world with all kinds of quests to complete, characters to meet, and enemies to conquer. But it's made possible by game systems that can be cracked in truly miraculous ways.
The same approach was chosen with its visuals. While Virtuos reworked enemy designs and NPC skins, for the most part many of the environments and models felt familiar, with tweaks that felt true to the classic RPG without pulling them in an unwarranted new direction. Unfortunately, it retained many of the same annoying technical issues.
Why is Oblivion Remastered still running so badly?
Oblivion Remastered is an unusual beast. It uses Bethesda's Gamebryo engine, which powers the game's core logic, artificial intelligence and physics; while Unreal Engine 5 sits on top of this original experience to deliver performance and visual effects. I can't imagine it would be easy for developers to bring this to life, even though the vast majority of the industry is moving to UE5 for ease of use and wide availability.
Unfortunately, it is far from the most optimized engine in the world and has become infamous for inconsistent performance, visual issues, high system requirements, and a host of other issues that have made it the bane of modern video games. Whenever I see a huge game that uses this, I roll my eyes.
I know he's capable of magical things, but they're just not worth the glaring flaws. Oblivion Remastered was cursed out of the gate, with users on all platforms – including super-powered PCs – reporting performance glitches that really shouldn't be happening. Digital Foundry called it one of the worst games they've ever tested, and even a year later, very little of the experience has been fixed.
I've played Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim on PS3, so I know a thing or two about how badly these games can run when technical flaws aren't checked.
Shortly after launch, players began reporting that the game took longer to run the longer you played it, 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 issues started appearing regarding the size of individual save files and their impact on performance.
None of these issues were resolved, the last update arriving in July 2025 before things were left alone or for the community to jump in and fix. Unfortunately, it's not enough for a game of this caliber.
And why didn't Bethesda try to fix it?
There are many reasons why Oblivion Remastered hasn't received a patch in almost a year, despite being very popular and in a less than optimal state. The remaster was largely developed by Virtuos and the final product may have been handed over and those responsible for bringing it to life have now moved on to other projects. As for Bethesda, I like to think it's deep in the Elder Scrolls 6 mines, with Starfield far, far behind.
Regardless of the reason, it's bad form to turn away the millions of players who have picked up a game like this and want to have a good time, but its technical flaws just can't. My brother latched onto it at release and messaged me a few times, wondering if his PS5 was suddenly moving, only for me to inform him that Oblivion Remastered was being scrapped.
Returning to Digital Foundry again, for the game's first anniversary, they revisited the game on all platforms to see if anything had improved. You can probably guess the answer:
“The game hasn't been patched on PC since its 1.2 update arrived in July 2025 – a very short window of post-launch support considering the game was only released in late April of that year. […] Unfortunately, this abandonment means that the game remains in a state that could be described as anywhere from “annoying” to “virtually unplayable”, depending on your taste for constant lags and stutters, crashes or other deep technical issues.”
Blame can be placed on Unreal Engine 5 not playing well with the game's original logic, or Bethesda simply released the game to critical and commercial acclaim only to believe that its most important work was done and the state of the immediate game simply didn't matter, or at least not enough to bother fixing it.
However, letting Oblivion Remastered fall into this state of confusion feels more like a missed opportunity than anything else. Bethesda's slate of RPGs has always been criticized for a confusing list of bugs and performance issues, but by bringing this classic back to life, it might turn our expectations upside down for the first time in history. Imagine if it ran smoothly at 60 frames per second at a consistent resolution across all platforms, instead of struggling every step of the way. It's a distracting way to enjoy a returning classic that should have been better.
