it says it's steam deck verified, I disagree with that statement. I had to find an engine improvement mod and the unofficial bug fix patch to even have it run. Riding a horse outside is like a 10FPS experience.

tl;dr - Serious hard-locking bugs that are unacceptable in a remaster.

I have a very negative impression of this release. The whole point of a remaster is to modernize a game for newer hardware and systems.

In terms of art direction, Bethesda succeeded.

In terms of modernization and stability, this is a complete failure. After the first time you run it, changing some of the graphics settings (presumably generated-frames setting, but it's hard to be certain) causes the game to hard-lock on startup. Googling this indicates this to be an incredibly common, incredibly well-known problem, and it has been unfixed for a *year*.

**Shipping a remaster game that hard-locks on the title screen in 2026 is absolutely unacceptable.** (5080 RTX, 9800X3D CPU, 64GB of RAM).

Additionally, in ~30 minutes of play, I found another hard-locking bug - which put me into an infinite cycle of swapping between the different weapons - with no way to interrupt it (as the game thinks that I am attacking). This persisted through loading screens and save-reload.

A few hours later, I had another hard-lock - the level up message when picking a lock caused *a full UI freeze*.

This is not an acceptable release.

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The game's performance is generally not at acceptable levels, either. I have what is essentially a gaming super-computer, and outdoor scenes are at ~80 fps on 1440p. This is playable, but not good - and I expect that anyone with a worse setup will not have a great time with it.

The whole point of a remaster is to make the game run well on modern systems - *not on super-computers from the future*.

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This is by no means the worst remaster that we have seen - but it is very uniquely problematic.

Normally, I do not write negative reviews, because whether or not a game is good or bad is subjective. In this case, I cannot recommend Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remaster. It is very poorly optimized and unstable, even for higher-end setups. You would be much better off playing the original with a mod.