Today we take a look at some of the massive content on its way to Skyrim via Creation Club. This will be a major new Skyrim update from Bethesda. The official site for The Elder Scrolls series, including The Elder Scrolls: Blades, coming fall 2018. Winner of more than 200 Game of the Year Awards, Skyrim Special Edition brings the epic fantasy to life in stunning detail. The Special Edition includes the critically acclaimed game and add-ons with all-new features like remastered art and effects, volumetric god rays, dynamic depth of field, screen-space reflections, and more.
Now that Skyrim: Enhanced Edition has hit shelves, plenty of people are going to be checking to see whether a five-year-old game is worth playing for the first time or generally good enough to justify a second playthrough. Special Edition is free if you own all of the Skyrim DLC and $39.99 if you don’t (the new game contains all previous DLC). If you already own the game, you can grab a pretty sweet upgrade for free. If you don’t, the $39.99 price tag isn’t terrible, but it’s a good idea to know what you’re getting when you buy a new version of a five-year-old title.
As we expected, the upgrades here only upgrade the lighting model and create some additional ground clutter. Texture models aren’t updated at all, and the extent of the lighting modifications varies on the scene. In some cases, the two versions of the game look nearly identical; in others there’s a substantial difference. In the slideshow below we’ve included screenshots from both PCGamer and PCGamesN.
PCGamesN went a bit further than simply comparing vanilla versus SE — they also compared the vanilla game versus a modded version of Classic. And while the Special Edition is pretty sexy looking compared with original Skyrim, it doesn’t really hold a candle to what the modded version of vanilla Skyrim can do. Check their story for more details on this, and more comparison shots. I can’t say I’m surprised at the situation, though, because Bethesda has never been as willing to push the graphics envelope as some modders were.
We saw this when Bethesda released the High Resolution Texture Pack for original Skyrim. While the new textures were unquestionably better than the old versions, the high resolution texture packs that modders had already created bested the versions from Bethesda in every scenario. The difference between them was in the amount of work your GPU had to do to handle the improvements — the Bethesda updates were much kinder to video cards than the unofficial variants.
Skyrim What Is Unp
Overall, Skyrim Special Edition will be a great update if you’ve never screwed around with mods but just want the game to look prettier. But it’ll take some time for modders to really get their hands on the game and tweak updates to improve fidelity to best effect. While some mods may work out of the box, Bethesda has said that others will require some updating to function properly. Once that’s done, the final product should truly shine — one might argue that this update represents the best of both words, with new support for 64-bit operating systems and an updated engine from Bethesda, combined with the formidable creativity of the mod community.
The new 1.9 beta patch for Skyrim adds an odd, and interesting new feature called Legendary Skills. The simple gist of it is that the new feature allows players who've maxed out their skills at 100 and reset it back to 15, and thus allow their characters to earn even more options for perks and levels.
All the perks invested in that skill were returned just as if they had been reset with the Book of Waking Dreams. If you level up with it, the skill you're proficient in will have an imperial dragon symbol just below it. You can level it up as many times as you like and keep accumulating levels.
Keep in mind that you'll get your perk points back as soon as you make the skill Legendary, and do the whole thing again.
In theory, you'll be able to earn more perk points and a larger pool of health, magicka and stamina through the system without having to spend much time grinding on skills you don't care to use. So if you're playing a thief character and see little reason to want to level up your Heavy Armor skill, you won't have to.
Skyrim What's New Moon
The patch also sees the addition of a new Legendary difficulty setting which makes the game a lot harder than it already is, so you'll need a beefy character to tackle the challenge.
Further details on the 1.9 patch can be found here.
Picture is courtesy of SleepWithTwoEyesOpen