UPDATE: Bethesda speaks on Shivering Isles bug

An unavoidable bug in the Oblivion expansion pack Shivering Isles has recently been discovered, which renders it unplayable after extended gameplay.

By Frederick Cannon

UPDATE: Bethesda's Pete Hines offered us the official response to this issue:

"We have verified there is a problem that can happen on the PC and we are still looking into whether it is possible on 360, since we don't have any reported cases on that platform so far and haven't been able to replicate it ourselves on that platform. We're testing a fix for it right now and hope to have it out as soon as possible. When we have more info, we'll let folks know."

The recently released Oblivion expansion pack, Shivering Isles, may have grabbed positive reviews thus far, but a dangerous and unavoidable bug for the game has recently been discovered, making it unplayable after as little as 50 hours of gameplay.

The problem lies in a technical hiccup in the game's coding, in which certain NPCs use up areas of the game's programming script during their animations, which have also been allocated to the creation of new items. This causes the game to run out of coding space for creating items much faster than it should, forcing newly created items to disappear from the gameworld altogether.

The problem is less pronounced on the Xbox 360 version due to its lower framerate, as players can expect the problem to occur anywhere between 80 and 150 hours into the game. However, PC owners with powerful computers will experience the problem much sooner, as early as 50 hours into the game.

Oblivion and Shivering Isles' developer Bethesda spoke on the game's official forums to confirm that they're looking into the bug and attempting to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

"Regarding the issue in which Form IDs are being used at a high rate in the Shivering Isles content; we are aware of the issue and we are currently looking into a solution," the site says. "We appreciate your patience, especially from those of you affected by this issue, as we carefully work out a fix that will correct this problem without adding any new issues."

Xbox 360 users have been advised to save their character data and hold off on playing Shivering Isles for a few days. Alternatively, they can work on creating and building up a new character until Bethesda releases an official patch to fix the bug. On the other hand, PC gamers have so far been advised to head over to the game's wiki and install the patch immediately. However, be advised that this patch is unofficial and not supported by Bethesda.

GamePro will keep you updated once news of an official patch for both formats become available.

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