SkyrimSE what are your first thougths....

[YoungSmazny]

All the Special Edition does is give the game A LOT more potential to look and play amazing as time goes by. I don't understand why many people don't seem to understand this.

 

It's in the hands of the modders to make this version great. I would like to think that most modders are smart enough, or informed enough to realize the vast difference in what can be done with a 64 bit Skyrim vs 32bit.

 

To anyone defending the original Skyrim - maybe take the rose tinted glasses off. A base, unmodded Skyrim isn't nearly as good looking as this remaster, even with some design choices that I agree are questionable. Modders can change these things. .ini tweaks can change these things. This version has massively more potential than the original, and let's not forget how big a pita Skyrim is to work with. Mods to make mods work, mods to make the game work better etc. Many of these mods are due to limitations due to the game running on a 32bit engine.

 

I think it's time to set aside the bias that comes from tinkering with something for so long and accept a new platform that is vastly superior.

Edited October 28, 2016 by YoungSmazny

[Dracula420]

my first thought was "OH GOD THE UI. MY EYES!"

shorty after it was "Those godrays are beautiful and....wait, my graphics card has never made that particular sound before...."

Edited October 28, 2016 by Dracula420

[Elkatar]

So I'm figuring the vanilla Enderal mod looks better than vanilla SE.

[nobadeeftw]

First thought was:

 

2. There was a horse standing next to Hardvar in the opening scene. WTF?! I don't recall a horse ever being there before. Why ?? Am I getting some sort of bug or was that horse there for everyone?

 

Yep, I noticed that bug as well. Hadvar gets pushed out of his position in that scene by the horse, so he keeps walking around trying to get back; but, the horse is standing in the way. Then the character creation screen pops up with the horses head filling up half of the screen. It's actually kind of funny; but, it's definitely a bug.

Edited October 28, 2016 by nobadeeftw

[BlackRelic27]

I'm most impressed with the shadows. Before if you wanted halfway decent shadows, you needed ENB, period. Not even vanilla Ultra looked good. Now I can set my shadows as low as Medium quality and they still look better than they ever did with the original game maxed out. So that's definitely nice.

Edited October 28, 2016 by SacredKnight81

[draco1122]

All I really wanted was more stable and 64 bit so I am happy.

[mwpeck]

As someone who never went too mod heavy (1080p modded Skyrim on it's default engine with only a GTX 770 didn't not have much for performance, upgraded to a 1070 but haven't modded Skyrim heavily yet), I have Skyrim w/ the STEP baseline mods installed and Skyrim SE installed.

 

Taking screenshots between the two, the textures, character models, shadows and lighting are all better with Skryim + STEP than with Skyrim SE. However, I feel SE has more potential....I noticed a bunch of other shadows being cast in SE that were not present in Skyrim + STEP (shadows were more realistic looking in STEP but there were missing shadows when compared to SE).

 

I feel textures and character models were a moot point as it's something that could relatively easily be ported to SE. Shadows and lighting are a bit different, it appears that modders may have more to work with in regards to the upgraded engine to make lighting and shadows that could look way better with less performance cost than what we have in the old engine.

 

Best of all though, even compared to stock Skyrim, SE definitely feels smoother with fewer performance hitches (I didn't notice any, though I only tested it for a few minutes...even stock Skyrim in such a short time just felt less optimized).

 

I think for PC players, if you had performance issues before with a lightly modded Skyrim than SE will already be equal or better than your previous experience. If you modded heavily before with no performance issues, you may want to wait until the primary mods you use are ported over and keep an eye out for new and better mods.

[nobadeeftw]

I just played it for 4 hours, took a break in the middle. My impressions so far. It's what Skyrim should have been had they finished it. It looks absolutely beautiful with its out of the box lighting. The distant terrain looks great, the vegetation looks fantastic and one of the best things, the shadows look great. I actually just stood in the center of Riverwood for about 15 minutes real time, just staring at the scenery and observing the lighting as the sun came up over the mountains early in the morning. It looked stunning to say the least. One of the biggest changes that I can see just from wondering around for a few hours is how much volume was added to everything. Even the little rocks on the ground, although they can look a bit out of place in areas, when you add everything else together, it makes the world feel more full, rather than a bunching of empty space dotted with objects.

The lip sync bug that Bethesda left us with at the end of the original Skyrim's run has finally been eliminated; so, you can actually talk to people without that irritating issue. It just fascinates me how slight changes can make the game feel so different. I was impressed by how smooth the game ran. I only had a couple of mods installed, nothing that altered the game substantially, just minor little tweeks and fixes. When Fallout 4 launched it ran like total crap and it still does in certain areas of the game; so, that tells me that they corrected some short comings in the engine for Skyrim before releasing it.

I am really looking forward to modding my game up the way I had it before; but, found that many of the mods I had before are no longer necissary now, as I am fairly content with the base graphics in the game. Now, when it comes to characters, they still look horrible. There are many mods, such as armor, body, hair, skin and animation mods that I would love to port over; but, I am sure it will be a long while before that happens, so I probably won't be messing with the game until I can put most of that stuff back in, so the game is closer to how I had it before. I feel comfortable though, that I can now add a lot of those mods without causing any lag or fps loss as the new game seems like it can handle far more content than the original ever could. When I loaded up the launcher the first time and it adjusted the settings to ultra high I was like, "booya!" lol

From what I have read, with the new engine and CK, the modders will be able to do a lot more with the game than they could before; so, I am looking forward to some better content. I'm sure most of us at this point would be satisfied with seeing something other than follower mods on the front page every single week.

[Elkatar]

I noticed the textures are generally not that great but now many if not most of them are much better. I installed a high res texture mod like a poster mentioned earlier and now as he said it looks ok. Even looks good as far as textures.

 

It's the Skyrim HD 2k Textures mod by Nebula in the Skyrim Nexus mods. I installed it manually. Just dropped the 2.5gb "textures" folder in the Steam location .../Skyrim/Data/. There wasn't a "textures" folder in the vanilla SE install. So you would be adding the new "textures" folder.

 

Edit: Well after closer inspection it turns out textures don't line up on the ground in places and there are unnatural white specs in the snow. So I removed Skyrim HD. I'll try SMIM instead.

 

Next I need to find a mod to get rid of the "egg wash" effect. That may take longer that a day or two to locate or to wait for.

Edited October 29, 2016 by Elkatar

[Alithinos]

My very first impressions were ugly, because the game caused me a headacke the first minutes.

My headacke was caused by a number of factors that all did a bit. One of them was the DOF effect, the other TAA, and the last the way camera view is distorted at the edges of the screen to give kind of a "fish eye" effect.

 

The DOF effect was looking nice during the cart ride and provided quite nice depth feel at some moments, making the game feel like it was on a 3D monitor or something while it wasn't. I was amazed by it at first. But during the time that Alduin was attacking Helgen, the blur all over the screen was that much that I had to exit the game and find ways to turn off the bluriness, I couldn't handle it. It made me feel physically uncomfortable.

 

Regarding the "fish eye" thing, that's kind of weird. In all games you can get that if you crank up FOV way too high, but the thing is I remember getting it at original Skyrim at a FOV setting of about 110 and greater.

Last day in SSE it became noticable and annoying even at a FOV of 80 for some reason. In the original Skyrim I used a FOV sometimes 90 and sometimes 100, as a balance point between 'fish eye' and the effect of feeling that the eyes of the character float like a meter / yard in front of his / her face that you get from lower FOVs. For some reason it seemed to me yesterday that some amount of 'fish eye' is hard coded to the game for some reason.

 

Now aside from these, its just Skyrim with a number of things looking better, and others looking as they always did.

 

The most obvious change is there is much more color now, day sky actually looks blue like actual skies look instead of gray. Also a number of textures are now high quality, good enough as some of the textures found in high res texture packs. But not ALL textures. Some other textures are still left in old low resolution, blurry, like they are from a 10 year old game. Sun rays look gorgeous and they are considerably more performant than on Fallout 4. And one cannot not notice the much expanded draw distance and distant object detail, or the fact that everything now has shadows, and that shadows aren't blocky pixels floating and moving in spasms.

 

The performance of the game is OK. I played it on my PC which consists of a FX8320 oc to 4.2Ghz, 8gb RAM, and R7 370 4GB, and I didn't get unplayable frame rates. Certainly looks more lightweight than Fallout 4.

Overall it's a welcomed upgrade, with its positives outweighting the negatives.

 

 

But there is an artistic problem I noticed: Now that everything else (sky, fog, snow, trees, objects) looks better, the "living" beings of Skyrim (npcs, animals, monsters) look like fake plastic dolls. The art style neither the technical quality is balanced as the environment was upgraded to look more photorealistic, while animals, humanoids etc, only receieved minor texture changes if anything at all, and that causes a discrepancy that makes the animate stand out in a bad way. Some skin and hair / fur / scales shaders are really needed to make the animate catch up with the inanimate.

Edited October 29, 2016 by Alithinos