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.
It still has that memory leak issue too where the longer you play the more your performance degrades. You can see an example of it in the article version of this.