Even though the Oblivion Remaster has become one of the biggest hits of the year, the Open World RPG has some glaring technical problems under-the-hood which can surface as crippling performance issues that can severely hamper the overall experience for players on consoles. According to Digital Foundry’s extensive analysis of the Oblivion Remaster on all consoles, the game does have pretty significant performance problems across the board.
“No platform is spared of issues: whether it’s PS5, PS5 Pro, or either Xbox Series machine, all struggle with traversal hitches while roaming the open world. Secondly, there’s major sub-60fps frame-rates, where I’ve also discovered that performance slowly degrades with more playing time – quite possibly down to a memory leak. And finally, software freezes are the icing on the cake, with all PlayStation and Xbox platforms crashing to the system menu on loading a save one too many times,” DF’s Thomas Morgan stated.
Also, according to Digital Foundry, a “charged” playthrough of the Oblivion Remaster, which is any continuous playthrough of the game that’s loaded from a save file, is far more prone to bugs and other technical issues than a freshly started playthrough. And one of the persistent and annoying bugs that’s found more in any “charged” playthrough is the position of the in-game camera being too high while riding a horse, and can be fixed by just resetting the game.
But the biggest concern is the performance degrading over time as the result of a memory leak which can lead to a crippling and even game-breaking experience in the Oblivion Remaster. Plus, there’s also another problem where loading a particular save too many times can crash the game entirely. Both are pretty alarming performance issues that need to be patched out by Virtuos as soon as possible before they surface, as the more the game is played the more it becomes prone to exhibiting these problems.
Also, back when the Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was released, there was a similar issue on both the PC and the Playstation 3 where a longer playthrough of the RPG can lead to massive performance dips as the game crawled under 30 FPS which could only be fixed by clearing out the in-game inventory. It’s terribly unfortunate that the recently released Oblivion Remaster, despite running on a completely overhauled and much more advanced game engine, still carries the same DNA that had plagued an older Elder Scrolls title across multiple platforms.
