The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

What works

Installer.

Playing Game for several hours so far.

Installed (manually) the Oblivion Unofficial Patch, the Shivering Isles unofficial patch, and the DLC unofficial patch manually.

What does not

Workarounds

What was not tested

Playing entire game. (Hardly possible without taking months given the size and scope.)

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

MP3 might not play if gstreamer-plugins-good for i686 (32-bit) is not installed. I'm rating this Platinum as this is not technically a bug in Wine itself, but may be common among distributions of Wine. 

Make sure that 32-bit gstreamer1-plugins-good package is installed if the MP3 music doesn't play and you encounter the ulimit crash. Report the packaging issue to your distribution's bug tracking system.

The unofficial DLC patches can cause the game to randomly lockup and crash. The solution is to run BOSS, a tool that changes the load order so that patch files cannot load after the content they are patching. This also exposed "dirty edits" that someone (probably Bethesda) left in the DLCs. I used TES4Edit with the -autoclean switch to automatically scrub these files, as they can cause random crashing, especially on exit. But this affects Windows too.

If you're willing to live without the relatively minor fixes to the DLC instead of fixing the load order and cleaning out the DLC dirty edits, you could also skip the community patches for that, and just load the community patches to fix the many thousands of large and small mistakes that Bethesda left in the main game and Shivering Isles. The community patches are highly recommended since some of the problems can crash the game on Windows or in Wine.

The game did not play music at first. It turned out that Wine's packaging in Fedora does not depend on gstreamer1-plugins-good.i686 (32-bit), thus the game engine had no way of playing MP3s, which triggered the ulimit crash and made it impossible to play the game for more than a few minutes at a time. Solution was installing this package manually and reporting the packaging bug to Fedora.

On the Intel iris 540 graphics on my laptop, overriding the Classic Mesa driver on the command line with the experimental Gallium3d "Iris" driver yielded considerable improvements to the game's performance. Prefix the command to start the game with MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=iris to improve performance.

Additionally, disabling Wine's output to the terminal improves performance, so also add WINEDEBUG=fixme-all,err-all,warn-all,trace-all to the command line.

The game runs somewhat better on the GNOME on Xorg session than under Wayland, but it's a relatively small difference.