Bethesda has responded to the incidents of a fatal bug that was discovered by gamers when the Oblivion expansion pack, Shivering Isles, was played for an extended period of time. Bethesda’s Peter Hines told GamePro that the situation is under control and steps are being taken to fix the problem.
"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."
Reports of the bug on PCs indicate that the glitch occurs at about 50 hours of gameplay while the Xbox 360 seems to be effected at 150 hours into the game. Although Bethesda says it hasn’t been able to replicate the bug on the 360, it is issuing a warning to gamers to back up their save data until the problems have been thoroughly investigated and fixed.
The glitch that occurred in the Oblivion expansion pack is considered an obvious bug that should have been found during routine evaluation of the game. During the testing phase, test teams run a game continuously for very long periods of time to determine the stability of the title and to see if it will crash. The bug which occurred may indicate that Quality Assurance failed to follow through on this simple checklist item.
