One of the finest RPGs ever made gets most of the upgrade it deserves.
Rigid and coarse, Ralof's hair looks like a piece of dust-caked banana Laffy Taffy I once found under my couch. It's the first thing I saw in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition as we rode in the cart toward our execution, and it didn't leave the best first impression. But soon after I'd spy rich foliage carpeting the floors of dark fir forests and light bouncing off choppy waters on Lake Ilinalta, and these sights would kindle a homesickness for this made-up world I explored for months five years ago, but the inconsistency of the graphics upgrade leaves Skyrim in a strange place. The Nordic homeland looks better here, no doubt, but never quite good enough to let it pass for a modern game, and it lacks any new content or behind-the-scenes features to make it feel fresh for a returning adventurer. Much as the prophets over at Bethesda Game Studios foretold, the Dragonborn has returned to us, but it's certainly not the second coming. Skyrim's Special Edition recaptures and beautifies the original game, but leaves a lot of room for an even-more-special edition down the road.
I spent the vast majority of my time with the PS4 version of Skyrim Special Edition, because who could forget how the PS3’s 2011 version suffered from muddy graphics, load times so long I could write and shoot off important emails before the next map appeared, and major frame rate issues that became worse as the size of your save increased? For any other PS3 owner who lived through that, this version is special indeed: load times while fast-traveling now breeze by in about the time it takes to recite the infamous line about taking an arrow to the knee, and for all my sourness over Ralof's taffy hair, it's never looked better on consoles. It's also complete, in that it includes the substantial Dawnguard, Heathfire, and Dragonborn DLC expansions.
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The Special Edition doesn't make sweeping character model and animation overhauls.
I struggled with this realization at first: in my memory, it always looked much like this, with the woods around Riften alive with detailed vegetation. (I've also spent almost all of my roughly 400 hours with Skyrim on PC, where naturally I stuffed it with graphical enhancements.) But a side-by-side comparison with the original version quickly unmasks the considerable differences. The Special Edition doesn't go for sweeping character model and animation overhauls like I and many other players had hoped, but it does enhance the world’s occasionally meaningful details. The star in this regard is the volumetric lighting, which managed to leave me in awe all these years later as I stalked through Falkreath forests where moonlight dropped in ghostly shafts through the trees. Then there are the new dynamic depth-of-field options, which add some subtle focus to conversations (and which the Special Edition introduces with over-the-top intensity in the opening dragon attack). Textures are improved as well, with generally sharper detail everywhere you look.
I personally never had much of a problem with 2011 Skyrim's grim color palette — I found it well-suited to the northern setting and story — but I can't deny that I admire the way the improved color saturation adds a striking intensity to sunny days around Whiterun, which is further improved by greater draw distances. PC mods have allowed these kinds of things for years, of course, but the enhancements here deliver the version of Skyrim the PlayStation and Xbox always deserved. They're certainly not significant enough to warrant a second purchase for the graphics alone, but they're enough to elevate this into the best entry point for new console players.
What’s disappointing is that Bethesda chose to use to the power of the current consoles to make Skyrim look prettier at the expense of making it run better. Special Edition maintains a fairly smooth frame rate around the 30-per-second mark with occasional dips, but never approaches the 60 frames per second you’d hope for in a remastering of a previous-generation game.
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Some of the simplest improvements bring the most convenience.
The Special Edition’s best improvements, though, deal with the little things — mitigating the myriad annoyances that sometimes made the original a chore to play. You'll see those faster load times, for one, but there's also a handy new quicksave. These features combine to move the story and action along at a faster pace than we saw at the beginning of the decade. Plus, you no longer have to sift through each save file to figure out which one belongs to each character, as the Special Edition takes a welcome cue from Fallout 4 and sorts them by character. Some of the simplest improvements bring the most convenience, such as the ability to auto-run across the tundra with a single tap.
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And yes, mods are great!
And yes, there are mods for consoles now. And yes, mods are great! They've helped keep the PC version high on Steam's most-played list for years now, whether through wacky ones that turn dragons into Randy Savage or others that cobble together entirely new areas and even new games based on Skyrim’s frame. You can get a fair taste of that bottomless pit of content with the Xbox One version – not all of it, by any means, but a fair smattering – but the PS4 is more limited. Sony finally allowed Bethesda to implement mods after long negotiations, but only on the condition that they take up minimal space and use only in-game assets, as opposed to doing things like replacing dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine (who, sadly, is not in the default game files). The end result of all this is that, at the time of this writing, the PS4 has a mere 103 mods compared to the 254 available for the Xbox One. They're also simpler, with some of the more exciting ones amounting to little more than streetlamps and additional signs along roads. At least some still let PS4 players partake in the grand modder's tradition of cheating if you wish, as in the case of a ring that grants almost unlimited carrying power or a chest stuffed with all the available crafting components.
And underneath all of these improvements is a game that remains one of the finest RPGs ever made. (Go back in time and read our review of the original version of Skyrim here.) True, Skyrim's combat remains relatively simplistic and AI interactions are prone to unintentional comedy when NPCs end up making you listen to a cleaning lady sigh about her problems in one ear while gruff jarls shout out history-making pronouncements in the other. Some bugs remain (and likely always will) although many of them can produce bizarre and unexpected behavior that be dismissed as part of a Bethesda game's charm. The number of bugs of the actual game-breaking variety has been much diminished from what we first saw in 2011. To this day, few other RPGs so perfectly capture the experience of trotting out to the wilderness to carve out adventures with any approach you want to take. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt may have better stories and better character models, but you're always Geralt. In Skyrim, it's myself I remember going into the forests and into crumbling keeps to forge my destiny.
(Now, where’s the Morrowind remaster?)
The Verdict
If you’ve never experienced Skyrim, the Special Edition is certainly an adventure you can’t afford to miss. It still includes many of the original version’s bugs, ugly character models, and weak combat animations, but the memorable world benefits hugely from improved lighting and effects. There's also some appeal here if you've played before and want to relive Skyrim with the current generation systems, but you'll be best served by picking up the Xbox One version over the PS4 because of superior mod support. However, there’s no new content on the disc to entice you back if you’ve already played all the DLC, only a new coat of paint.
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