When The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion got its fancy new remaster earlier this year, fans of Bethesda’s open-world RPGs, myself included, were elated at the return of this vintage classic.
Sadly, the enthusiasm wasn’t made to last. As seems befitting of its origins as a Bethesda-developed game, Oblivion Remastered is plagued by bugs and crashes on PC, especially following its 1.2 update which has ticked off enough players to see its Recent Reviews status on Steam sink to the dreaded pale orange “Mixed” designation. Recent reviews cite quizzical issues with performance across the board, crashes, unfair difficulty scaling, and frustration with Unreal Engine 5, a sentiment only becoming more and more common.
“I stopped counting the crashes,” reads one review taking aim at crashes encountered whenever trying to sleep or skip time in the game. “I really want to recommend this game,” starts another, “but I can’t due to technical issues and performance.” The same review cites the “few and far in between” patches the game has received, and the recent 1.2 update certainly hasn’t helped. “Started playing at launch with mods,” writes another reviewer, “and the game was perfectly fine to me. Came back this week and can’t for the life of me find out how to fix the “gpu crash dump triggered” crash.”
Frustration over performance is certainly one of the louder sentiments among Steam reviewers, especially with the remaster exhibiting the well-known stuttering issues seen in other Unreal Engine 5 games. But as another reviewer points out, not all the issues are unique to the new version. “Old 2006 Oblivion bugs have been faithfully ported over to the 2025 remaster,” they write. “I was shocked to find issues, look them up online for [a] workaround, and [saw] these were the exact same bugs from the 2006 game.”
Speaking for myself, the wildly inconsistent framerate and stuttering have definitely meant that I’ve spent considerably less time with the gorgeous remake of Bethesda’s 2006 open-world RPG than I was hoping to. Bummer!
