Gamers with the new Oblivion patch have been reporting a number of new issues since release. Primary among the issue are slow loading times in certain areas. It has been said that clearing the Xbox 360 hard drive cache will clear up these issues, but with this issue in Oblivion, and the issue that was seen earlier in MLB 2K6 with caching, perhaps it is too easy to fragment the Xbox 360’s cache. Will gamers be looking for a Norton Utilities 2006 Xbox 360 in the future to manage their hard drives?

Other issues include spurious game lock-ups, but there are few enough data points that this might not correlate with the patch release. On the other hand, while numerous quests have been fixed in the game, if gamers have already hit the bugged quests and gotten the corrupted data in their save file, some quests will still be bugged even after the patch. Bethesda’s offered solution: “start new characters if they want to experience these quests.” For those who have been playing since the game’s release, this is probably not the most ideal solution. Other issues have been reported against the downloadable content modules with the patch, as well.

There was a fairly large public beta for the PC patch, perhaps there should have been the option for this on the Xbox 360 side as well, as it sounds like despite all the work that has been accomplished with the patch, there could have been more polish before the release. With issues like this, though, it is largely a lose-lose situation for the game developers. Gamers rant daily about when they will get the patch, and when the patch is release, invariably new issues spring up that weren’t caught in QA.

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