Thanks to owning Skyrim on PC with all of the DLC, I now own the PC copy of Skyrim: Special Edition, so of course I had to boot it up and turn on all the goodies to Ultra! How did it look? It looked like the first time I booted up Skyrim an gazed upon its rich vistas. That is the problem with all old games. We remember them differently than they are. I mean playing Knights of the Old Republic now is heartbreaking. It looks sooooo bad.
After creating a new character in Skyrim: SE and walking around a bit, I then booted up just standard Skyrim and was amazed at how poorly it faired compared to how I remembered it. That is not to say it looks bad. It just looks old. It showed me how far things have come, so when people say that graphics now don’t look that much better than they did five years ago, I can just laugh at them and tell them to boot up Skyrim again.
Skyrim: Special Edition’s new lighting, water, and weather effects really add to the game’s fantastic ambience, and the updated textures and draw distance make the game look great. Unfortunately the character models didn’t get the same love. They still look janky. Their textures obviously look better, but they still look off. They didn’t even get the models up to Fallout 4’s mediocre standard, and there is something not quite right about the sound, which I was not expecting. Though Bethesda says they are working on it.
All in all, if you can’t get enough Skyrim, and you want a more stable better looking version of the game, that is what Skyrim: Special Edition is. That, and now mods are a built in feature. Since I have played so much Skyrim, I don’t think I will be spending much more time with SE, but if I do, it is good to know that it will look like how I remember it.