Oblivion was an incredibly popular game back in the day, but the recent Bethesda remake unfortunately launched with a host of technical issues. A year after launch, have those problems been fixed or at least improved? We checked, and the results ain't pretty.

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. 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.

Dead Space is another recent remake with stuttering problems that feels similarly abandoned, and it's hard not to look ahead to the prospects of Halo: Campaign Evolved and the rumoured Fallout 3 remaster without some sense of technical dread. Even Starfield's recent launch on PS5 was not without controversy, given how the game regressed technically on Xbox Series consoles under the new patch and some smaller problems remain with the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions. Given that both Halo and Fallout lie within the Microsoft umbrella, there's a real possibility that both launch with issues that never get resolved.

One potential bright spot is the upcoming Switch 2 version of Oblivion Remastered, which might provide a logical opportunity to back-port performance and stability improvements to the game on all platforms. Early footage from that version doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence, but we'll need to wait until we have the final version in our hands before delivering any kind of judgement there.

For now then, Oblivion Remastered is unfortunately still in a bad place. And while we re-tested on PlayStation 5, other versions remain problematic too. With an estimated 2.5 million Steam owners, many of whom would have paid £33 to £50 to play, surely continued support isn't too much to ask?