The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, without a patch on PC since July 2025, still suffers from issues that plagued it at launch, including worsening performance the more you play.
In May last year, the tech experts at Digital Foundry said The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered suffered from significant performance problems, including hitches while roaming the open world, frame-rate problems, and even performance degrading slowly with more playing time, potentially due to a memory leak.
Now, a year after the game’s release, Digital Foundry has revisited Oblivion Remastered to check in on how it performs, and found many of the same issues.
“As you may have noticed, 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,” Digital Foundry said. “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 hard to look beyond the initial design phase when it comes to apportioning blame, which sandwiched the original game’s architecture within an Unreal Engine 5 front-end. Both of these elements are notoriously CPU and GPU heavy, so the combination presents with extremely poor frame-time stability that gets worse the longer you play. Still, the lack of updates suggest that Bethesda didn’t feel like meaningful improvements were possible, and not even making the attempt feels even worse.”
It’s yet another damning assessment of Oblivion Remastered, which has a ‘mostly positive’ Steam user review rating for all reviews, but a ‘mixed’ user review rating for recent reviews. “Abandonware,” declared one negative review left in April. “There are still glaring bugs and performance issues. They updated twice after release and now we are getting close to one year without anything.”
“Whatever update they did last ruined the performance for me,” said another disgruntled player. “The game even lags on the main menu, when previously I was able to play the game at an acceptable level. Unfortunately I can’t get a refund with over 100 hours played. Game’s abandoned.”
Oblivion Remastered, overall, seems like a big success for Bethesda, which contracted Virtuos to help remake its much-loved role-playing game using Unreal Engine 5. It’s seen over 9 million players, and Bethesda development chief Todd Howard told IGN in December that the studio was “really, really pleased with how well it did.” So it seems somewhat odd that the game hasn’t seen an update since July 2025.
Digital Foundry suggests the release of the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 version of Oblivion Remastered may be the time for an update for all versions. It’s due out at some point in 2026.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
