(Photo: Bethesda)
Skyrim. Just the word will conjure up dozens or hundreds of hours of memories for players who have lived in the world sometime in the past five years. It’s one of the greatest RPGs ever made, and is considered one of the gold standards of the genre to this day. It’s a game that has aged surprisingly well, so a fully-fledged remaster seemed like a no-brainer, and that’s what Bethesda has just given us in the form of this “Special Edition.”
However, for those fans hoping that in the past five years, Bethesda has improved upon the original in any significant way, you may be disappointed. Skyrim is still Skyrim, and contains all the goodness of the original. But other than giving the game a sweeping visual refresh, Bethesda does not seem to have fixed even ancient bugs with the game, nor added new features, new gear or new content at all, making the entire thing a reskin. A solid reskin of a great game, maybe, but a reskin all the same, and for many, that might not be enough.
The lack of “new material” here is supposed to be supplemented by mods, but depending on your platform of choice, that can be lackluster as well. On PS4 specifically, Sony’s own rules about mod file size and type have made selections rather paltry, and as ever, you are probably better off on PC.
It was a little tough to know what was “enough” of this game to put out a full review. Reading this here and now, knowing that review copies only went out a few hours before launch on Friday, you might imagine that I have not completed every quest in the game. This is true. However, given that this is 99.9% the same game that I’ve already played for 500 hours, giving the remaster 20-25 new hours to explore its new visuals, its old bugs and its mod collection is more than enough in my opinion. I’m the master of at least three guilds at this point, and am well on my way to murdering all the dragons in the land like this is a Game of Thrones prequel, and I’m comfortable sharing my thoughts.
(Photo: Bethesda)
As I said, Skyrim ages well, but the visual aspect of this update is a little weird. As I mentioned in my first impressions piece, Skyrim has this effect where you were so blown away by the game originally, that you’ve sort of nostaglized the graphics in your own mind. As such, when this remastered version shows up, it’s easy to think “well, it looked great then, and it looks great now!” It has improved quite a bit from the original, if you’re looking at them side by side, but it’s easy not to notice as most will have always thought this game was pretty, not to mention PC players have been able to mod the game to look this good or better (much better) for eons now.
But the game’s age is there, of course. As a remaster, it will obviously not compare to The Witcher 3 or Dragon Age: Inquisition or even Bethesda’s own Fallout 4. Terrain can be blocky, foliage is improved, but still less than what we see in most games today, and Bethesda’s character models are as icky as they’ve ever been. So while things like fog effects or bonus plant life are nice, this is kind of an odd remaster of a game that already looked pretty great to start with, but because of the tech, it’s obviously not going to reach present day standards.
And, past how it looks, for many, this is a game that people have played quite a lot of over the last five years, and I’m not sure merely the jump to new consoles is enough for many to pick it up again. I was excited to start another playthrough, but once I got going, I realized just how much I’d played this game, and how I’d memorized so many of these quests by now. After slogging through the Companions’ storyline, I tried to go way off course and start doing more obscure questlines, because I’ve done all this a half dozen times before. That speaks to the quality of the game, of course, that I’d played it this much to begin with, but once I got deeper into this remaster, I found my attention wavering. There’s so much else out right now that I wanted to get back to Titanfall 2 or Battlefield 1 or even The Division’s new update. I may return to this newest playthrough eventually, but I have played Skyrim at least a little bit every year since its release, and even as a big fan, it’s getting a somewhat tiresome. I’m just not sure I have another 50-100 hours in me for one more round of stuff I’ve done so many times already.
This is some of the disappointment with the update, that it just does not add anything new. It has all the DLC, which is nice, but if you’ve played it, the same problem remains. Most remasters do not really go overboard in trying to add much new content, as that’s not really the point of remasters, but boy, does it not really feel like Bethesda put much effort into any positive changes other than the visuals. Maybe the idea is that it all just works already, but there’s a lot of quality of life stuff that could have been improved. And I have to believe that sometime in the past five years, some of the people working on this project couldn’t have added a bit more to the game. Take some ideas from some of the more popular mods. Add in some new armor sets or mini-questlines. Anything like that would have been nice, rather than everything being exactly the same to the letter.
(Photo: Bethesda)
Yes, this is what mods are for. Mods do all this stuff. They fix quality of life issues, they add in new gear, companions and quests. Well, they’re supposed to anyway, and that’s definitely not the case on PlayStation 4.
This is definitely Sony’s fault, not Bethesda’s. They don’t allow PS4 mods to be larger than 1 GB, or contain external assets like new dialogue files. Xbox One, meanwhile, has a 5 GB limit and less restrictions, and of course on PC you can go absolutely crazy.
Right now, what that means is the selection of PS4 mods for Skyrim Special Edition is pretty abysmal. I didn’t want to totally ruin my playthrough by granting myself super-powered spells or gear or a giant castle I could have at my disposal, so I tried to focus on more basic needs. The only mods I used were ones that created a few additional weather effects (which I no longer really even noticed after an hour) and ones that did things like give all vendors 10,000 gold so you can actually sell all the crap you have without them running out of money. Again, this seems like something Bethesda themselves could have figured out in the last five years, but nope. Even then, I’m not sure using these mods was worth losing the ability to collect PS4 trophies, which you will give up for having a “tainted” save profile.
Other mods are just pointless and uninteresting. They range from the strange, like having a Hagraven as a companion, to the incredibly minor, like having the spell Magelight get a tiny health regeneration effect. Like, why even bother? I know there are some brilliant mods out there for Skyrim on PC, but because of the limits on PS4, I have my doubts we’ll ever see most of them.
I didn’t experience any technical issues related to mods in general, and the process of adding them to the game was pretty streamlined, even though no one bothers to explain things like “load order” to a console player who has almost assuredly never used mods. However, through the course of normal play, even before using mods, I did experience a few crashes and freezes and typical Bethesda nonsense like having the name of a location I was about to enter stuck in my vision for hours, or watching an NPC’s foot spaz out as we held a conversation. I’ve seen some YouTube videos that show the cart your ride in on during the intro start to break off its relationship with gravity, and start rolling about. You know, Bethesda stuff. Even though this is a game that’s had five years to refine itself, bugs typical of the studio still remain.
(Photo: Bethesda)
This is Skyrim, visually refreshed, but almost completely the same, warts and all. That may be good enough for some, but it may disappoint others hoping for a bit more, and if you have any interest in mods, for the love of god, don’t pick up the PS4 version.
I don’t even know how to score something like this, so I’m just not going to. Skyrim when it was released in 2011 was probably a 9.5-10. The same game in 2016 with all the advancements in the genre is probably an 8.5-9. The scope and quality of the remaster is probably more like a 7.5, while mod quality on PS4 is a 4/10 if I’m being generous. Want to average all those, giving them the weight you think is important? Go for it, but I’m not going to distill them into one final score this time.
Skyrim is a great game, but one where I finally might have reached my limit, as I discovered in this latest playthrough. If you’ve never played it, this is definitely the version to get, and if you’re a superfan, you’ve probably already bought it before reading this review. It’s kind of exactly what you’d expect from such a project, but it certainly makes me dream about where this series can go for Elder Scrolls VI. For now, Skyrim Special Edition will have to serve. And serve it does, I suppose.
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Special Edition
Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Developer: Bethesda
Publisher: Bethesda
Released: October 28th, 2016
Price: $59.99
Score: No Score
A review copy and figurines were provided for the purposes of this review.
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