Regardless, the remaster appears to have been rushed out due to increasing leaks, no? It's hard to believe that with the technical issues the release was actually intended to land in April 2025, instead of fixing issues until March 2026 and releasing it as an anniversary remaster.
Bethesda farmed the remaster out to another studio and the issues are mostly performance related. They chose to utilize Unreal Engine 5 for the graphics[0] which means you get all the stuttering and uneven frame times present in most games using it.
0: I recall reading somewhere that the game uses a really old version of Bethesda's proprietary engine too - but only for physics.
It's a pattern a few remasters have used: Run the entire old engine for the game logic, but bolt a more modern engine on top for the rendering. So it's not just physics but pretty much all gameplay logic thats done by the old code. Which is also why mods that don't touch graphics were apparently easy to port to the remaster, but changing models etc needs adapting to the new system.
This one does feel extra infuriating though, since it still has bugs that were fixed by fan made bug fixing mods from the original game. It doesn't really even feel like they try to fix bugs
This is also not surprising for BGS as was demonstrated with the multiple Skyrim re-releases, which didn't fix all issues patched by the unofficial patches, and even introduced more.
I think the remaster may have been an experiment with Unreal Engine on top of Bethesda’s scripting / etc. I love Starfield, it is my favorite BGS game by a wide margin, but Creation Engine 2 is very difficult to work with - the Creation Kit is intolerably slow, I imagine BGS rank and file got very frustrated. Creation also lags with fancy lighting / fog effects, and might not ever support PS5[1], so I can see why Bethesda would explore the option for the next Elder Scrolls.
I don’t care for Oblivion but I hear the remaster crashes a lot, whereas I’ve had 3 crashes in 400 hours of Starfield. Two of those crashes were BSODs that Microsoft was responsible for. Maybe the Oblivion remaster’s instability indicates they will stick with Creation 2 in TESVI: I was skeptical that UE memory management was a good fit for BGS games’ complex global state. My suspicion is that Creation 2 uses multithreaded scripting, and Starfield on release had some odd bugs suggesting dangling threads (e.g. NPCs which stayed stuck on “busy” and couldn’t be interacted with). But in recent updates they’ve hammered a lot of that stuff out.
[1] Obviously Microsoft has a strong incentive for console exclusivity but the other side of this is that BGS games always sucked on PlayStation. Morrowind was also PC/XBox only, and Bethesda’s roots are in PC development.
Anecdotally, playing Oblivion Remaster made me nostalgic for Creation. I have a beefy card and ample RAM, but it just runs like crap and I don't think it looks that much better than e.g. Starfield or Fallout 76
In some ways, the bugs are part of the charm. Sometimes anyway. Having to run esoteric commands to fix broken quests in a years old game isn't so endearing.
True! On the other hand, performance appears to be quite bad and there seem to be tons of very obvious visual glitches with transparent objects, foliage etc.
It using the UE5 renderer of course means the usual reservations of that engine also apply - it will most likely never run smoothly, as Unreal Engine games invariably have more or less severe stuttering.
My controversial opinion is that Fallout 2 is by far the worst mainline Fallout game: it was obviously written by sexist 90s teenagers, the humor is plain awful, and most of the game is incredibly tedious, especially the dungeons. It’s also by far the buggiest Fallout. I think people give it points for ambition + a desire to take Bethesda down a peg, without actually playing it. Alternatively, they last played when they themselves were 90s teenagers so they’re looking through 30 years of rose-tinted glasses, and never noticed how misogynistic the script is.
Speaking as a grownup who got about halfway through a few years ago, Fallout 2 sucks.
GP is referencing how rumors of the remaster were spreading a few days before the official announcement. There were some early topics on Reddit at least.
Personally I doubt the "leaks" have anything to do with the release date. The game worked fine on day one for me. Yes there are some bugs, but none serious and none that made me think "this was rushed".
