DF Direct Q+A: Oblivion Remastered - Can Switch 2 Optimisations Fix PS5/PC/Xbox Versions?

**Richard Leadbetter** (0:02)
Hello there, and a very cool welcome to this, the latest edition of the DF Direct Q&A show. I say cool because the UK has just made its way through its fifth heat wave of the year, and we've emerged unscathed. It looks like cool weather from here on out, but who knows. Joining me to discuss the questions this week, first of all, Tom Morgan. Hello.

**Tom Morgan** (0:25)
Hello. All of that is for naught, I think, because I've kept the windows closed and the fan off in this room for acoustic reasons.
But it will be fine. It's going to be fine. It's nice to be here.

**Richard Leadbetter** (0:36)
It will be fine.

**Tom Morgan** (0:37)
Yeah.

**Richard Leadbetter** (0:38)
Also joining us Oliver McKenzie. Hello.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:42)
Yes. The weather has been pretty good in Vancouver, but regardless, I've stayed chilled in my apartment with my mini split unit insulated from any heat and any consequences in here, so I really couldn't tell you too much about the outdoors.

**Richard Leadbetter** (0:57)
Good for you. Yeah. I'm very pleased to hear it.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:59)
It's lovely.

**Richard Leadbetter** (1:01)
But before we go on, I just want to make a shout out here. We've updated the Digital Foundry Merch Store. We have our new pint glass. Yes, you can now consume your beverages in pint-like configuration with our special glass. Highly recommended. Do check it out. store.digitalfoundry.net. Okay. So let's tackle our first topic. A question here that comes from, what does dog need with a starship? Good question. Question slash comment about the Oblivion Remastered lack of performance on multiple platforms. So my cursory investigation, it seems the original engine called Gamevio for this game doesn't work very well with multiple cores slash threads. So one could assume that that's why even with six available cores on Switch 2 and even more on PS5, it's probably still limited by the performance and throughput of a single CPU core. So synchronizing with the Unreal Engine shell must completely block the single thread running the base game engine, causing these horrible stutters and lack of scaling, even with big PC rigs. That's just my guess as a non-game programmer. But do we have any evidence to this effect? As an aside, it's a shame the game program isn't open source. Maybe somebody could take a crack at it and fix the issues if Bethesda isn't capable of fixing things itself, despite all the money we're throwing at them. So this question comes in the wake of the release of Oblivion Remastered for Nintendo Switch 2 last week, where essentially there was a lot of demand from Bethesda to actually go back to the existing versions of the game, Xbox, PC and PlayStation, to improve them, because there's fundamental issues here that have never really been fixed.
The evidence of a Switch 2 port, on the one hand, does confirm that there is ongoing development with Oblivion Remastered, but it doesn't extend to actually fixing what I think we could safely say is a pretty broken game. There's also some conjecture that there are optimizations for the Switch 2 version, and maybe those optimizations could be brought across to the existing versions of the game. We actually have this comment, this tweet from Bethesda Game Studio. We've heard your feedback asking for an additional patch for Oblivion Remastered. The Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game has a number of optimizations that we are looking into bringing to other platforms, and we will share more when we are able.
Tom, first of all, I believe that the feedback from users here is entirely justified. The concept of actually bringing out an entirely new version of Oblivion Remastered when the existing game hasn't been touched for over a year and has profound issues.
I think it's a fair comment to say, well, hey, what's going on here? I guess I've got two questions here. Can you just sort of sum up the existing issues with Oblivion Remastered? I mean, we've done it before. We did it in May. We did a sort of recap.

**Tom Morgan** (3:49)
Yeah.

**Richard Leadbetter** (3:49)
A health check. Yes. Again, and it failed. I think it's fair to say.
Do you think there are optimizations in the Switch 2 version that could be brought to bear in attempting to fix that particularly poor showing?

**Tom Morgan** (4:05)
I mean, when you release a tweet like that, you're releasing it in the context of there being so many performance issues. So when they use the word optimization, I'm hoping they're looking at one of the big three with the existing code, the unstable frame pacing at 30, the hitching and the crashing.