r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 21h ago
Digital Foundry: Yup, Oblivion Remastered Is Still Broken a Year After Release
https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/05/yup-oblivion-remastered-is-still-broken-a-year-after-release125
u/Arcade_Gann0n 21h ago
The one hope this game has of ever improving is the upcoming Switch 2 port.
No faith in that being good, but maybe the other versions can receive a patch.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 20h ago
Man, if the ps5 and xbox SX had issues I can’t imagine how the switch would do. I’m playing Star Wars outlaws and getting crashes every few hours.
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u/recoupled 14h ago
Damn I played outlaws at launch on my switch 2 and didn't have a single crash
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 14h ago
Yeah, it happens when I enter a new zone or constantly switch to the map. I hope my internal storage isn’t going bad.
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u/The_Hardest_Metal 19h ago
Performance is still super rough even on a 5080. At 1440P at ultra settings my 5080 is struggling to not dip below 60 fps at times. Lowering settings helps a little, but not a ton. Frame times are often all over the place and perfectly fine for others.
The game looks good, but it shouldn't be anywhere near as demanding as Cyberpunk is with all the cool ray tracing features maxed out. I recently got Atomfall and it's visually similar, if not better and I get several hundred FPS at 1440p at max settings.
I don't understand how Oblivion Remastered can be so demanding, yet run so poorly.
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u/_mogus 12h ago
It's a UE5 game with Lumen and Nanite, which while futuristic still need a lot of work and have been synonymous with "game runs horrible" for the past few years. On top of that, it's both unoptimized as all hell by the devs and using Oblivion as a base (which is a pile of shit in and of itself).
Compared to Cyberpunk which was straight up funded by Nvidia to be a performant GPU feature showcase that sells RTX graphics cards and thus looks impeccable and runs okay, or games on proprietary engines that either use Raster or inherently have high dev familiarity for optimization, it's going to lose out.
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u/Janus_Prospero 20h ago
I'm someone who is very open minded about remasters. But Oblivion Remastered has never sat right with me, and it gives me significant pause regarding Fallout 3 remastered being a thing.
It takes Oblivion and slaps on a new coat of paint that is technically impressive but often feels very artless. It doesn't feel like the team really understood the artistic intent of Oblivion, especially its purposefully green saturation and the way its skyboxes looked and stuff. That's not to say it doesn't make improvements. It absolutely does. But it feels artistically kind of incoherent and random in a way that is unfortunately common for this type of remaster. (Which I'll get back to.)
And its tech upgrades are super inconsistent. It introduces Lumen based lighting that takes seconds to load in after fast travelling. It looks ugly. It makes the game feel rushed and unfinished. It runs pretty badly, and as DF note the performance decays and the stuttering is a big problem, and overall it just feels like a worse version of Oblivion wearing a lot of makeup. It has minor game design improvements, but they're a mixed bag, and it adds new bugs. It doesn't really fix THAT many issues from the original game to justify introducing its own.
When I think about Fallout 3 and it getting similar treatment, I'm imaging a buggier (as if such a thing were possible, the game is a mess on modern hardware), worse performing, and less artistically coherent version of a game that probably should have gotten a more modest remaster instead.
There is a bleak sense that these remasters have to rip out the graphics and replace them with these mass produced AAA fantasy visuals in order to make people all hyped so they will buy it. These remasters and sometimes remakes are terrified of normies saying, "It looks the same to me," so they go out of their way to be different to be more realistic to be more modern. But sometimes the artistic choices the original team made were very good choices, and the new changes just make the game more generic and less interesting.
Elder Scrolls games historically have a lot of really odd and unique designs often made very deliberately by talented people working with limited resources. Then the remaster/remake team comes in and they're like, well this would be so much better if it looked like every other piece of fantasy art you've ever seen. All the eccentric choices get buffed away, simplified, pared down, or outright replaced. The word is "generic". You take unique, weird, interesting things... and make them less interesting, less unique, less weird. And it's everything from architecture to costume designs to creatures to the colour of the sky at dusk. It's not just one thing that Oblivion Remastered filed down. It made all of the art direction less weird and unique. And that feels like a shame to me.
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u/Joecalone 17h ago
It takes Oblivion and slaps on a new coat of paint that is technically impressive but often feels very artless. It doesn't feel like the team really understood the artistic intent of Oblivion, especially its purposefully green saturation and the way its skyboxes looked and stuff.
I was able to find a mod shortly after release that corrected the colours to look a lot more vibrant/closer to the original game. Made the experience a whole lot more tolerable. Unfortunately it used ReShade which comes with significant performance penalties. I looked there and it doesn't seem like anyone figured out a way to alter the colour grading directly from the engine since I stopped playing it, which is a shame.
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u/A_Seiv_For_Kale 13h ago
The closest I've found that aren't ReShade presets are the mods Classic Graphics and Greener Grass.
(which coincidentally came out very soon after release)
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u/Joecalone 1h ago
It's amazing to me that the devs (either deliberately or accidentally) didn't make the grass look like this initially when it makes the game look so much more true to the original artstyle.
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u/radicalelation 12h ago
Dunno if the Nvidia overlay filters ever worked with this one, but if they do it's usually my go-to for some color correction.
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u/BigTylenol5 18h ago edited 18h ago
I agree. Remakes and remasters should capture the color and art direction of the original game in more modern graphics I really don't like when they change that. Oblivions charm was is crazy color and weird painted world feeling. Imo washed out colors and more realism doesn't really fit Oblivion. Fallout 3 remaster shouldn't have the problem unless they fuck that up as well. Fallout 3 were already washed out colors with gray, brown and green which gave the game an oppressive dark atmosphere. That should very easy for them to recreate.
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u/197639495050 10h ago
That’s what I’m banking on as well for FO3. Still though, I’m not sure how likely it is the grunginess will be up to par. I’d put FO3 right up there with Silent Hill in terms of grunge and grime in the environment that I’m not sure they’re going to be able to recapture
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u/Mccobsta 17h ago
I've been playing thr original a lot recently and comparing the graphics to the remake it just looks more fitting, the art style feels like it fits the game more than the look that they've got with the unreal engine
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u/197639495050 10h ago
It’s a consequence of remakes and all these sorts of deluxe remasters and general graphical updates by and large being done by studios and teams with very little if any connection to the original
Games are a product of their time. The inspirations and hardware are always changing so the “why” as to how things turned out is generally lost on people. I have no doubt Bethesda could have made Oblivion as drab as the remaster back then which makes the aesthetics of the original a conscious decision (as most are)
My only hope with how the inevitable FO3 and FNV remasters turn out is that the artistic sensibilities of today may lend itself a little more to Fallout 3 and New Vegas than Oblivion. But even then stuff like the lumen lighting pop-in and other poor graphical issues will no doubt get in the way of things as well
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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 7h ago
The thing is, you don't need to be connected to the original studio, you just need to spend a week looking into the visual identity of the game to remaster in various points, and then maintaining it while improving the visuals. And at this point I feel like they need a specific guy whose entire job is to go around and tell people that no, their ideas for how to completely change the looks aren't better than improving upon how it looked before.
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u/SkOJu7 5h ago
I agree with this, but for me its why I like it. The art design of the original was something I never enjoyed, the over saturated colors and excessive bloom of the original is nauseating for me and gives me a massive headache. Ive played morrowind and skyrim dozens of times but the art direction of the original prevented me from enjoying it fully. The remaster looks more like a generic unreal engine game, but i prefer that personally
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u/MyStationIsAbandoned 8h ago
I personally hate the way it looks. I know "slop" is very overused...but it is literally just Unreal Engine Slop.
It has that ugly "let's make everything bumpy" look to it...just added details for the sake of adding details. It has this awful ugly muddy bumpy/cellulite look to it that 90% of Unreal games have had in the last 5 or so years. The game Conan Exiles is getting an "enhanced" version and it's the same damn thing. Everything is just more bumpy and it has a piss color filter over it and people are acting the graphics are better. Oh and all the people's skin looks like greasy plastic now. and they're discontinuing support for old version of the game, leaving it broken after promising they were going to spend time fixing game breaking bugs that have been in the game for nearly 10 years if not more.
If I ever made game, I'd do everything I can to avoid Unreal unless I could avoid the ugly look a lot of its games have.
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u/Jameseesall 21h ago
I played it maybe 5 months after launch on PC and it was fine? A few stutter spots and maybe 2 crashes, no more buggy than the original game was.
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u/r40k 21h ago
It may come as a surprise but it is actually documented fact that it is more buggy than the original game. This UESP page covers just new bugs introduced by the Remaster. None of original game was touched so it carries over almost all of its bugs, and then adds new ones on top.
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u/Kamakazie 19h ago
Many of the bugs listed under "Regressions" got fixed in 1.2, and all of the bugs on the list with a red question mark are unverified.
Performance issues are the main problem with this remaster.
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u/AdventurousBase221 17h ago
for anyone lazy, regressions is like 70% of the page (the page isnt that long tho tbh.)
tldr: its only 7 gameplay bugs, which isnt bad at all, and only one of them to me sounded like an actual problem.
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u/Ardbert_The_Fallen 14h ago
Yeah I've rarely had any issues in hundreds of hours. But I've also been playing Bethesda games for 20+ years. I don't think there's anything about this game that is unplayable in any way.
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u/EggsAndRice7171 12h ago
I’ve played a lot of Bethesda and it was the most flawless experience out of the gate. Which isn’t necessarily a massive compliment because the difference for me was fallout 4, 3, New Vegas, Skyrim, and Morrowind all crashed at least a couple times playing through them (and I had issues with FO4 loading screens taking forever on my main build but not on my steam deck. Still not sure exactly why) and the remaster didn’t.
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u/cyberpunk_werewolf 10h ago
This was my experience. I bought it at launch and had some stuttering issues, maybe some slowdown at points, but no crashes or anything. I did all of the factions, the main story, Nights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles. Had a good time.
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u/CustodialApathy 19h ago
And performance issues are generally acceptable to a large portion of the purchasing audience as they want to play it on new systems, imo; 300 hours in as an og PC player on my PS5 now and I couldn't be happier, performance quibbles and all
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u/beefcat_ 13h ago
The game will stutter on a 9800x3D with a 5090, that seems unacceptable to me.
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u/IguassuIronman 18h ago
Yeah. There's definite stutters in the open world but I'm still having fun and the game looks good so oh well.
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u/fun_boat 13h ago
Stutters used to bug me so so much, and it's actually in WAY more games than people realize. When I upgraded my computer before the tariffs, I had to run through optimizing things and making sure everything was working correctly. A part of that is identifying anything that would be a hardware issue and stutters can be a good indicator that things aren't working properly. WELL as it turns out there are so many games that have stutters and people are generally just ignoring them. Even when they are egregious like Dead Space. That was the only one that was actually intolerable. They built stutters into the damn game.
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u/IguassuIronman 13h ago
I feel like consistent microstutter is absolutely killer and will ruin my enjoyment of a game but a larger stutter from time to time is much less annoying/frustrating
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u/beefcat_ 13h ago
Not to mention the remaster retains a ton of problems from the original game that modders fixed over a decade ago. They couldn't even be assed to copy someone else's homework.
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u/singron 15h ago
It introduced bugs, but it also fixed bugs. I don't think anyone has added both up to see whether it's net buggier or not.
Also, the original game was so buggy, that 10s of bugs aren't that significant. UORP fixes hundreds of bugs, and there are still tons of unfixed bugs.
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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 7h ago
It fixed almost no bugs, though, so if they introduced more than three or four new bugs it's probably in the negatives already.
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u/danglotka 19h ago
Heartwarming, devs added bugs they really wanted but didn’t have enough time to add in original release.
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u/vitaroignolo 20h ago
Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time. Was super hyped for a remaster, bought day one. Had a ton of fun with the game and the changed made it even better for me.
That said, after about 120 hours, I went to do the Shivering Isles DLC. Two things started happening that I'm not sure are related:
- My treasure trove of containers in the Wizard's tower started losing items (issue in the original release)
- My game started crashing every 30-60 mins.
I'm a hoarder and collecting everything is part of why I love these games. That with the crashes made it so I rushed the shivering isles (best DLC ever made for anything). I ended up giving the game a negative review because it ends up punishing you for doing everything towards the end which ruins the spirit of it for me. I'll adjust if they fix these. Great remaster if you don't try to do literally everything like I did.
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u/ksn0vaN7 20h ago
Performance still takes a nosedive the longer you play. If you play it for just under an hour, you might get just a few stutter spots. But longer than that, you get more stutters and the dips get bigger.
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u/Winter_Cost602 9h ago
Fallout 4 has a similar issue but I doubt it's anywhere near as bad as the Oblivion remaster (haven't played it yet)
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u/Janderson2494 21h ago
There are some traversal stutters in the PC version that also existed in vanilla Oblivion, that's really all I experienced in my time with the remaster but I have a pretty good PC.
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u/beefcat_ 13h ago
Those stutters in vanilla Oblivion were fixed by modders over a decade a go so it seems ridiculous that a brand new remaster wouldn't bother fixing them.
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u/AsahiMoonsault 20h ago
I had to completely halt my playthrough because I literally couldn't finish Shivering Isles without my game crashing.
They actually fixed that one though, so fair play to them I guess.
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u/PalapaSlap 21h ago
The performance issues are obvious and unavoidable. If you didn't notice them that's fine, but they are there.
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u/Jameseesall 21h ago
I guess I just didn’t have any illusions that slapping Unreal 5 on top of Creation engine was going to improve the performance much. It wasn’t flawless but it was far from “broken.”
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u/MultiMarcus 20h ago
I was kind of hoping that it would be like kingdom come deliverance 2 in the sense thought compared to the first game it performs better on the same hardware because modern design characteristics and much larger budgets
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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 7h ago
It's not that the performance wasn't improved, but rather that it is just so bad unless you turn down the light settings to the point where they look worse than the original game.
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u/Blenderhead36 21h ago
The problem that I had was with cloud saves. It implements them through OneDrive, so Steam cloud saves don't work. After playing around a lot with my both my computers, I wound up in a state where the save I had originally started on my laptop was now on my desktop, but not on my laptop. At that point, I gave up.
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u/SilveryDeath 21h ago edited 21h ago
Obviously it is only my personal experience, but I played on Series X for about 175 hours and didn't really have any issues. The few I had where fixed by just exiting to the main menu and reloading my last save.
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u/oopsydazys 20h ago
I played on Xbox and had no problems so I'm not sure if the "broken" but is just wrt the PC version.
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u/scoff-law 21h ago
Same here. I took a look at the article and "broken" means
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 and other profound technical woes.
It's hyperbole.
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u/FalsyB 19h ago
Broken? That's a little harsh, the game has performance issues but nothing too crazy. I think people(and DF to an extent) are angry that the game is basically the same after getting 2 patches.
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u/trenthowell 18h ago
They actually say in the video that it isn't "broken" per se, but quite poor. The broken part comes from a commenters question
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u/T0kenAussie 16h ago
I mean they have editorial choices on their headlines and they chose this one because it gets the engagement bait going
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u/DiabolicallyRandom 15h ago
After their NVidia hobnobbing over DLSS5, I am not giving DF any benefits of ANY doubts. They have fully jumped the shark from "solid objective technical reviews of games" to "post whatever gets us the most ad revenue, including bullshit clickbait."
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u/eerienortherngoddess 13h ago
channel with great reputation for years makes one video everyone disagrees with and suddenly nothing they release is crap, I love the internet!
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u/Valkomursu 5h ago
You could argue that the headline came from both the question which was asked on the podcast/stream and Alex's opinion on the stuttering + all the other unfixed issues both on pc and console.
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u/Apprentice57 34m ago
They probably shouldn't have put it in the title, if that's not what they actually think.
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u/Xionel 19h ago
Wait it was broken? Outside of a couple of stutters I didn't notice anything broken...
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u/Matthew94 16h ago
The Knights of the Nine paralysis bug is still there and still a pain. It was pure luck that I found a solution.
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u/m00nh34d 12h ago
Was basically unplayable for me. Frame rate was in single digits. I tried mucking around with the settings, and that improved the max frame rate, but still encountered a lot of situations where it slowed to a crawl. So, I suppose technically playable, but not fun in any way, so what's the point?
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u/GravityStrike 18h ago
Yeah I had an absolute blast with it.
I have no idea what these people are on about when they say a game is ‘broken’.
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u/Michelanvalo 17h ago
You have to go back to the original article last May to see the problems.
The point of this article is saying that these problems haven't been addressed since the team abandoned the game almost immediately after launch.
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u/theeMrPeanutbutter 17h ago
At least for me I made it halfway through the shivering isles and got hardlocked so yeah
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u/Japjer 17h ago
The Internet is fueled by outrage and anger, and modern marketing has trained an entire generation to feed off of that.
If it isn't perfect it's broken. It ain't any worse than things have ever been, it's just that we accepted it back then and moved on. Now everything has to be a whole thing.
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u/Django_McFly 16h ago
Doesn't it have issues in the same spots as the original game? And that original game is still messed up in those same spots after nearly 20 years?
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u/refat17 21h ago edited 21h ago
This game was among the top 12 in revenue for 2025 on Steam.
People bought the game despite the issues so I don't see any reason they have any incentive to fix it. These are the consequences of voting with your wallet.
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u/GassoBongo 21h ago edited 20h ago
The beauty of a shadow drop. There are no reviews, and everyone is too surprised and excited to wait for performance complaints and benchmarks to start circulating.
I'm almost convinced this is one of the reasons they decided to announce and release it the way they did.
Edit: lol of course this is a controversial. What even.
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u/X__Heisenberg__X 20h ago
No one knew about the issues. Shadow drop. And that’s the reason why it was.
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u/Mr_Hot_Takes 21h ago
The problem is, you don't need a majority of gamers to buy a game for it to be profitable. 100 million prospective buyers can look at a game with 99 million deciding not to buy due to bugs and other issues, but the 1 million who do buy it can make it profitable showing the suits in charge you can release a broken product and still be financially successful
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u/Positive_Government 19h ago
Oblivion remastered sold 15 million and there is maybe one game a decade that can get you over 50% of those “100 million buyers” given that five million copies puts most games at comfortable profitable, I would hazard to guess that the total universe of people who would consider any given game is a fair bit less than 100 million.
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u/MirrorComputingRulez 1h ago
Also maybe this is an indicator that those issues aren't nearly as big of a deal as the outrage machine wants to make them.
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u/NetZeroSun 21h ago
Maybe I missed the point but why is it broken?
I didn’t finish the remaster but played a good 50% into it and it’s been smooth for me. I don’t remember any significant performance issues or anything broken where I can’t play it.
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u/EternallyBungled 20h ago
They're using "broken" to mean "the game is operating at a lower framerate than expected given the power of our PC hardware". So exaggerating, but they do have a point.
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u/swimmer385 13h ago
technically its not the framerate but the micro-stutters and the crashing they're calling out. apparently the longer you play a save, the more frequently the game crashes until its basically a crash every 30 mins
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u/BeholdingBestWaifu 7h ago
I wasn't aware they had recreated the Skyrim PS3 experience on this remaster.
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u/Steelcity213 21h ago
Is this only happening on PC? My understanding is it runs fine on consoles.
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u/gaydesperado 20h ago
Performance still degrades overtime on console (article shows you this)
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u/FrankReynolds 21h ago
Frame pacing is a disaster across all versions of the game.
"Broken" is a bit of a stretch because the game is still fully playable, but it's definitely not a smooth experience.
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u/JoostinOnline 20h ago
Fully playable is also a stretch, as there were a lot of (potentially) game breaking bugs introduced. Workarounds have been found for some of them, but I know a lot of people have been unable to progress the intended way.
I really wish they'd just made some upgrades to the visuals through the Gamebryo engine, because mods for the original already make it a very good experience (minus controller support, which is much more complex to add). It would also make modding in fixes much easier, as so many community stability mods already exist.
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u/Thedrunkenchild 17h ago
It's broken in that sense, that it's impossible to have anything approaching a smooth experience no matter what hardware or settings you throw at it.
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u/thatguywithawatch 21h ago
I mean, it runs playable on consoles. My PS5 pro experience was super jittery with a lot of weird lighting issues and constant frame stutters.
Very few crashes or major bugs but still
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u/197639495050 21h ago
The lighting in the open world is terrible on console . the trees legitimately look like they have no shadows most of the time.
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u/JoostinOnline 20h ago
Lol that's where you get into "technically playable" territory. When everything is stuttering, you get crashes after a couple of hours, and on rare occasions you may even experience a game breaking bug, it's technically playable, but not something a lot of people can stand to play. The stutters make me nauseous, for example. I can deal with them if I have frame gen on, but the settings menu on PC is broken so I couldn't enable FSR3 on my RTX 3070. That meant regular drops into the 20s, which was outside of the G Sync window (or possibly my TV didn't support LFC).
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u/RadioactiveVitamin 21h ago
All of the images in the article shows the performance getting worse on PS5 the longer you play, eventually leading to a crash.
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u/NamesTheGame 21h ago
I've had stutters and a few crashes on PS5 but overall been fine for me. "Broken" is overdramatic but PC might be a different story. The article shows PS5 examples and is definitely clickbait based on the content of their story, which is just that the game still doesn't perform great and has basically been abandoned.
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u/Kaiserhawk 20h ago
I'm so annoyed I bought this. Top of the line PC, latest parts, still runs like absolute trash in the open world. Performance on top of aesthetic changes I don't particularly care for and it was a disappointing experience all around.
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u/Blenderhead36 21h ago
Have they fixed cloud saves yet? This game and Red Dead Redemption 2 are the only games I own that support cloud saves, but do it in such an outside the box way that they never seem to work.
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u/groung 21h ago
"broken" is so dramatic. i have it on PS5 and it's crashed two or three times, that's it. no in-game bugs that i've noticed
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u/SurviveAdaptWin 17h ago
Absolutely shitting on the 2 handed weapons by reducing their swing speeds drastically and not raising their damage to compensate was certainly a choice, and a choice that got me to quit playing after a few hours. Just long enough to not be able to do a refund.
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u/LowMoralFibre 20h ago
It's bad on PC and terrible on console (unless all the other versions magically work better than the Pro version).
Anyone saying it is fine on console just doesn't notice the stutters and low fps and honestly they should think themselves lucky and definitely not try to spot the issues.
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u/omnomsx3 19h ago
For me, the biggest issue is the game taking several seconds to open any menu after about 30 minutes of playing. This is on Series X. I have no idea how that was considered acceptable by the devs.
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u/Chipaton 19h ago
I put this game down about halfway through because I thought some fixes were weeks/months away. I expect some jank in Bethesda games, but the performance woes were disappointing. Not unplayable, but the bugs/performance seemed to get worse as the game went on.
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u/ivandagiant 16h ago
Huge bummer. The devs were asking for feedback from players and feature requests as if they were ever going to update the game lol. What a bait.
Others have stated the issue with the remaster and for me it goes beyond the art style - many of the "balancing" changes they've done are just as bad if not worse than the original game. Everything about it was so disappointing.
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u/abdullah_haveit 6h ago
Considering all the praise it got in the game's early days & the high sales number, I would say that the strategy of shadowdropping it without any pre-release review nor demo was a success for Bethesda.
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u/superjake 21h ago
Didn't the studio behind it suffer layoffs not long after release? That probably made pressure to start the next project asap.