Oblivion Remastered is a month old and still broken

I am still enjoying plodding through The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered. Instead of beelining the main quest, I decided to dig deep into the DLC quests that I’ve barely touched before. It’s somehow both nostalgic and entirely fresh, as I try to recollect whether or not I’ve played through these sections or if I’m just remembering a save I had to reload from a few days earlier. I’m really doing my best to enjoy Oblivion Remastered, but unfortunately, the game keeps fighting me.

Part of the problem is that I’m playing on PS5. As of the time of writing, PS5 players are still a version behind the Xbox consoles, which enjoyed a healthy performance boost when exploring the open world. Even on the pricey PS5 Pro’s Performance mode with a VRR display, a smooth frame rate while exploring feels like a pipe dream. But I can overlook performance issues, especially when they happen in the places where the least amount of action happens. What I can’t overlook is everything else.

The Shivering Isles’ skeleton foes will often charge at me before T-posing on the spot, unable to do anything but stare at me and flinch when my strikes hit. Sometimes other enemies will approach and just be unable to do anything but make eye contact until their health dwindles. These issues are entirely immersion-breaking, but the worst is yet to come.

My first few crashes came at seemingly random points, but thanks to a reasonably frequent autosave system, I didn’t feel burned by them. It was when I consistently received three crashes in a row upon approaching Frostcrag Tower that I realised something was more seriously wrong with Oblivion Remastered on PS5.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. I’m not a technical wizard, just a humble man on the internet, but the team at Digital Foundry are technomancers of a sort. DF took a look at Oblivion Remastered on PS5, and found a fresh list of issues that I would’ve never found. Not only do they cover crashing issues and general open world performance problems, but they found that playing Oblivion for a long period of time – moving between locations, defeating enemies, normal gameplay stuff – then the game will start to perform worse, and the height of your camera when riding a horse will increase for whatever reason. 

Those are the kinds of issues you might overlook in an early access release, but in a remaster of a game that’s nearly 20 years old? It feels absurd — especially considering the memory leak issues present in the original on PlayStation. I might even overlook them if I were playing via Game Pass, but PS5 players will have had to pay full price in order to experience issues that still haven’t seen any attention a full month after launch.

I am sympathetic to the developers, of course. This remaster is a huge undertaking, and the team has taken care to keep the Oblivion experience intact (including fan-favorite glitches) despite obvious modernizations. But releasing games in this state still isn’t acceptable, as much as it keeps happening. 

I’m a big fan of Oblivion Remastered, and I think it does a great job of updating and streamlining an RPG that can feel a bit clunky otherwise in 2025. But I can’t, in good conscience, actually recommend that anyone pay for it until you can play for hours on end without degrading performance or a surprise crash. That really should be the minimum benchmark for a game to hit at launch, and Oblivion Remastered utterly fails.