Shivering Isles patch on Monday

By Tom Bramwell Published 27 April, 2007

FormID bug to be quashed.

Bethesda Softworks hopes to roll out a patch for Oblivion expansion Shivering Isles on Monday that will finally sort out the "formID" bug that's crippled the game for some dedicated players.

The bug, which has already been patched to some extent on the PC, renders the expansion unplayable on both formats after an extended period of time (between 50 and 120 hours on the PC, depending on your frame-rate, and between 75 and 150 hours on Xbox 360 depending on your play habits).

It has to do with the way the game identifies objects in the world. The simple version is that the game eventually runs out of identification numbers (formIDs) for things, confusing the way it manages system memory, corrupting data and failing to register objects when you save your progress.

For a more exhaustive rundown of what happens, check out the game's unofficial Wiki.

Anyway, the good news is that a patch is due on Monday, 30th April. "This will include the final update for PC, as well as the update for the 360 available through Xbox Live. This is a worldwide patch," Bethesda's community manager said on the developer's official forum. "Again, this is our target date, so hopefully all will go well in preparation for uploading these."

In the meantime, PC owners can make use of several unofficial tools listed on the unofficial Wiki, or grab Bethesda's official beta patch, providing you're okay with the consequences.

Or, you could read our Shivering Isles review to see what we make of the bits of the game that work. Which, to be fair, is most of it. Keep an eye on the Bethesda forums for updates on the patch's progress.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (11) Latest comment 5 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • espadachin #1 5 years ago

    ah, that will explain why my merhunes razor disappeared....the fuckers

  • lennon #2 5 years ago

    Thank the lord. I was only an hour into shivering Isles when this news hit. I have been in fear of playing again since. Still its given me time to get the high score on my friends list for GH2.

    My wrists ache so much :(

  • gizmo #3 5 years ago

    Poor form this, it's taken a long time to fix. A refund or good-will gesture should be in order. It's basically been unusable for weeks.

  • repairmanjack #4 5 years ago

    Thank Christ for that. I've been itching to get into Shivering Isles, but I've been too afraid of playing the game since news of the glitch broke.

    And, yeah, exactly as gizmo says...

  • TheSnotGoblin #5 5 years ago

    I'd gotten quite bored of it and stopped playing about a day or two before news of this bug hit the web; don't expect to go back to it any time soon either now LotR:o is keeping me company.

  • Darren #6 5 years ago

    While I'm dsappointed in Bethesda for releasing the expansion knowing full well about this FormID bug, Oblivion is so amazingly, fantastically awesome that I can forgive them for it... this time. Few developers make games as good as Oblivion so for that we should be thankful. A bit more QA would be nice next time though...

    Speaking of QA, what's the betting that this patch will get held up by Microsoft and won't come out for a week? The bets start here...

  • kangarootoo #7 5 years ago

    @gizmo

    "Poor form this, it's taken a long time to fix. A refund or good-will gesture should be in order. It's basically been unusable for weeks."

    Its not just fix time, but testing and QA. Its a pain in the butt, but its not like you couldn't find something else to do in the mean time right?

  • IAmBatman #8 5 years ago

    > It's basically been unusable for weeks

    Stop being such a drama queen. 'Basically unusable' indeed.

  • lennon #9 5 years ago

    @greggywocky - Damn you and your bringing of bad news!! :) Do you know if I went back to a save game from prior to the shivering Isles I would be ok or is it something that is now a problem generally? I have around 80 saves (call me paranoid) so I could back track a bit as I havent done that much since.

    @IAmBatman - To be honest the way the bug has been made to sound is that if you have clocked up a large amount of time (which lets face it most SI owners are likely to have done) its only an amount of time before this problem hits therefore making the balance between playing and waiting for a patch a gamble. Having put upwards of 60 hours into the game so far I would be more than mildly cheesed off to have the bug affect my save. So I think your being a little harsh! ;)

  • lennon #10 5 years ago

    Phew!! :)

  • gizmo #11 5 years ago

    ^

    /checks comments, laughs.

    /didn't know batman was a testing monkey.

    Hehe. I didn't even buy the expansion, it's just a very poor show for those who did.