I'm going to be a little bit more "colorful" of my assessment of why there is a "special edition". I suspect that Bethesda has been doing work to improve their engine for future titles. If you play fallout 4 like I have, and Skyrim, you can see there is a dramatic divergence in the quality and functionality of the engine for these titles. You can see that they're based off of the same basic technology, but fallout 4 achieved much better 3D graphic fidelity much more efficiently than Skyrim. It's more than textures and whatnot, it's that the features of rendering 3D graphics in fallout 4 are newer and better. Skyrim SE has emerged, and from it, we can see some improvements to the rendering quality and most aspects of the engine. It's 64 bit which means there's deeper precision of decimal numbers which doesn't mean anything to most people, but suffice it to say that this enables higher mathematical accuracy when rendering 3D objects, light, shadows, etc... We can see the engine has been improved upon, which theoretically should result in higher fidelity graphics and interaction with the 3D world. From a business perspective, I can see why Bethesda is doing this engine upgrade work with Skyrim as the basis for this new engineering. Skyrim provides a conceptual proving ground for engine enhancements without having to develop an entirely new game; but seeing that they have to pay the bills to keep the lights on, they need to put this new engine in the market, somehow, to pay for all that new engineering. So now you have Skyrim SE which essentially is a new SKU that Bethesda is selling to pay for all that extra work they have done to upgrade the engine. What is curious to me, is that this seems to be a further divergence in engineering between the engine behind fallout 4 and the engine behind Skyrim. It seems that the fallout 4 engine is not the basis for the Skyrim SE engine. I'm sure they've used the lessons from engineering the fallout 4 engine and brought those into the Skyrim SE engine, however, Skyrim SE doesn't appear to be built on the same engine as fallout 4 which is confusing. I can only assume this is because the engines for each respective game are customized for the gameplay of two entirely different games. If you've played fallout 4, you will probably agree that the similarities between both games are very superficial. I'm curious why Bethesda is diverging the engines for both games rather than piggybacking them off of each other. Perhaps future elder scrolls titles will be built on fallout 4's engine and the work in SSE is just a proving ground for concepts, but if that's the case I wonder why they would not make the fallout engine the proving ground for such concepts, and deliver a Fo4 SE? From what I can see, I can only surmise that Bethesda is accepting that both of these games are different animals and is diverging the engines so that they can be less abstract and more customized for the particulars of each respective title.
