What is this game?

[NanakoMagojiro]

Im a longtime skyrim player, easily 2000 hours in it. Eventually stopped playing, haven't touched it for about a year.

 

The recent release of the special edition was interesting to me, but also confusing. what IS skyrim special edition? More specifically;

 

Why is there a seperate nexusmods directory for the special edition. Are mods not compatible with both? Is this splitting and harming the mod community?

 

What is special edition all about? What has actually changed, or been added. And what do veteran modders think of it?

 

How is it under the hood? Technical issues are something im worried about. I had poor framerates, constant crashing and memory issues with the base game, which were no doubt related to the 200 ish mods i had at the time.

 

Really what im asking for is a general update. Whats the state of things here, how healthy is the skyrim community since this. Is Special edition good, or harmful? Throw all your thoughts and rants at me

[Tanisanco]

I have not put nearly as many hours into skyrim total as you have however I have put about 200+ into the special edition and heres what I can say. Main benefits are as follows:

 

-better graphics especially concerned with light and shadow everything else is basically the same for the base game.

 

However with that said the main benefit to the special edition is the new life breathed into mods it has brought about. I was never able to run the old skyrim on mods through steam with SSE I have about 20-30 running smoothly and when it doesn't I have been able to fix it. Also when SKSE is finally done there will be even more mods available to use I hope this overview helps.

[NanakoMagojiro]

does that mean the special edition can't run mods that require the script extender?

 

Thats a LOT of mods, including pretty much all the good ones and everything new i wanted to try

[AceGoober]

Yes, that is correct. SKSE for SE is required for any mod that uses SKSE to be ported from original Skyrim to SE. Currently, SKSE for SE (SKSE64) is in progress and the team has updated their SKSE page to provide a status for SKSE64.

 

SKSE64 for SE Update

[Ratsel13]

There are plenty of good mods that don't require SKSE ;) anyways, there is also the 64bit stability,

250+hrs, many many mods & zero CTD's or hangs.

[strawbqwerty]

Being 64 bit there is no 4 gig limit on memory . Got more than 4 gig on your graphics card all the better and same for your ram. As I posted in fun, to dam stable now. Play for ages with out saving and then finally die or the game does stop. There are a number of mods that did require SKSE that have been worked over to run with out SKSE, now you use a lesser power to access a menu. Some until the new SKSE will have less options but will give you the core functions of the mod. Realistic needs and disease and a combat mod is another is one that come to mind. Sky ui is available in a limited format. I personally don`t use it as it still looks for SKSE when it runs. There is a new Nexus mod manager for the new Skyrim or there is a mostly working Mod organizer, just a couple of options don`t work. Ini editor and Configurator other than that it works fine.

[OutLaw666]

The main advantages of Skyrim SE are stability and speed and the lack of needing to install fixes for pretty much everything. This goes for the game itself (no need for memory allocation patch ect.) as well as for many visual aspects (for example things like the distance overhaul are not needed any more). In addition it features neat enhancements like rain occlusion (rain doesn't clip trough roofs any more) and a water flow system.

 

-Instead of fixing the game you can now simple focus on the things that you want to change with mods and that makes it incredible fun. In comparison Oldrim was a pain in the ass. Seriously!

[gravityparade]

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.

Edited February 23, 2017 by gravityparade

[DarkWolfModding]

Special edition also is essentially a more stable version of original skyrim with all the dlc. plus the 64bit Engine is a big positive

[cdcooley]

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.

You have the actual timeline of development backwards. They upgraded the Skyrim engine to 64 bits before they created Fallout 4. It was an internal project to experiment with the new technologies. Then they used the lessons learned to make the Fallout 4 engine. Later they realized that with just a little more work they could release a 64 bit Skyrim. But to maintain any sort of mod compatibility they couldn't just use the new Fallout 4 engine. (You still need to upgrade mods from the original game to work with the special edition, but it's mostly an automatic conversion performed by the Creation Kit.) Using the new Fallout 4 engine would have required recreating all of the game content and made converting old mods a very difficult process.