Performance Degrades With Increasing Playtime in Oblivion Remastered, Says A Tech Expert

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is facing significant performance issues, particularly for console players. These issues cause the game to run more slowly as playtime increases and eventually lead to crashes. 

Thomas Morgan, a Senior Staff Writer from Digital Foundry, conducted technical testing on all major consoles, including the PS5, PS5 Pro, and Xbox Series, and concluded that "no platform is spared of issues."

Morgan highlighted a few aspects of the discoveries in a recently published article, like the game suffering from traversal hitches on the devices when players explore the open world, and as the playing time increases, the performance slowly degrades. Last but not least, the software occasionally freezes, causing PlayStation and Xbox consoles to crash back to the system menu when loading a save too many times.

Performance testing reveals the "most glaring problems." When the game runs at 60fps performance mode on both PS5 and Xbox, it was noticed that "a completely fresh boot of the game - that is, closing the software, re-opening it, and loading a save for the first time - gives you an often significantly higher frame-rate when compared to a playthrough that's been running for 15 minutes or more."

Some might seek frequent saves, but this will not be a great solution, and instead, it brings unexpected bugs. For example, a bug that could occur is that the Lumen GI setting is changed, leading to thicker shading across the scene at times. The other possible bug is that the camera angle often becomes too high when riding a horse, which can block the player's view. 

A look at Oblivion Remastered's review on Steam echoes Morgan's findings. Although it currently sits at 82% positive on the platform, the negative feedback highlights some players' struggles to make the game that they love run well. "Crashes to desktop are frequent, often occurring during loading screens or fast travel," one said. "You need some high-end hardware and luck to make it run smooth." 

As soon as the game was released, it was noticed that it struggled to run on Xbox Series S. With a large number of players rushing to the game in a short period, four million players in three days, these issues are quite urgent and impact the overall gaming experience for those on consoles. Morgan suggests that Bethesda and Virtuous release a patch to resolve these "profound issues."