Played Shivering Isles on your PC yet but haven’t heard anything about a patch being required? I suggest you head here immediately and then come back once you’ve sorted your game out. Still here? Good, then you will be interested to know that a very serious bug has been found in Oblivion’s latest content, which could render your game useless. The PC version has already been fixed, but reports are suggesting that the 360 version may suffer the same problem.

The original problem lies with identification numbers. The game generates a huge number of these, for objects, NPCs and so on, and once the allocated space for the numbers is exhausted, new objects simply disappear from the world of Oblivion forcing the game into a crash. This problem can happen anywhere from 50 hours to over 110 hours of play, depending on the number of frames per second your PC operates at. The more frames per second, the faster your game is likely to crash.

That problem has now been fixed for PC users, but does the problem remain? Bethesda have said that they have not managed to so far generate the extreme circumstance on the 360.

“We have verified this problem can happen on the PC and are still looking into whether it is possible on 360, since we don’t have any reported cases of it happening on that platform, nor have we been able to recreate it on 360 ourselves [Bethesda]”

Knowing you could disappear at any moment would naturally cause concern

Despite this, there are rumblings in the forum underworld that the problem does exist with the 360 version too, but considerably more play time is required to achieve the same crashing state as the PC. But as mentioned, there is no proof of this yet. We will keep you updated should anything develop on this situation.

Let us know below if you have had any problems with the 360 version. More information is available at the dedicated Wiki.