You should have played it on PS3 or Xbox 360 then. The difference is night and day at times. The textures were blurry messes on the OG console version, now we basically have what PC gamers got 5 years ago. Shame us PS4 users got shafted with mod support. But I guess a punch to the knee is better than a kick in the balls. There's been more than one occasion with Skyrim SE where I've just sat and stared at the beautiful scenery. I'm doing something I've not done on this game for like 4 years, taking my time and exploring thoroughly. And I'm loving it. One of the biggest improvements by far for console owners is the reduced load times. My god it's a breath of fresh air to not actually dread leaving a building cave for fear of another long loading screen. They were a joke back then, now I barely have time to read the lore based loading excerpts I downloaded a mod for lol. As a huge Skyrim fan, and a console gamer, I'm thoroughly satisfied with my purchase. I still don't know why some PC gamers are considering buying it though.
I don't think many PC gamers are actually buying it though. You get it free if you bought all of the DLC or the Legendary version on Steam. The Legendary version has been <$10 during various Steam sales and Skyrim is still very popular on Steam 5 years on, so a lot of people are getting it free on Steam only to discover it basically looks the same as the vanilla PC version running on ultra settings. Also, many PC gamers like myself were using SSDs in 2011 and 2012, and never experienced long load times. In conclusion, the SE is probably huge for console gamers, but PC gamers will be underwhelmed.
Yeah, exactly. I've seen people on the Skyrim subreddit asking if it's worth them buying the Legendary Edition on Steam just to then get the free Special Edition. As far as I know the only benefit to that upgrade for PC gamers is the Special Edition is 64bit whereas the old version was 32bit. Unsurprisingly I have no idea what benefits the increase in bits offers. Fewer memory leaks or something? I dunno. The Special Edition on console is 100% worth it if you love Skyrim and don't game on PC. Using mods is great fun, although it seems to have greatly increased the amount of bugs and crashes I've experienced. I'm still loving it. The upgraded textures and lighting are very beautiful at times. I see a lot of people claiming it doesn't look any different to the OG Skyrim, but those people either never played it on console back in the day or simply don't remember how fucking awful the textures were. Seriously, get close to anything on the PS3/360 version of Skyrim and you'll see it's blurry as shit. Skyrim Special Edition is essentially the PC version from 5 years ago, now on console. anyone expecting anything different simply didn't do the research.
I've added some texture, foliage, face, and lighting mods and I think it's made a pretty good improvement.
Does anyone actually use dragon shouts in combat? They're like a major part of the game narrative but I find them to be mostly useless. Bend Will is the only one I used in my last play through and that was to pacify dragons so I could skip the fight altogether.
I finally beat the main story! Five years after buying the game! Most of the game, I only used Dragonrend to keep dragons grounded. Although at the very end, when they didn't let you take your companion to the Hall of Valor part, I did end up using the Push shout just to keep the draugers off me. I went the sneaky archer route, and my companion was a guy with a two handed weapon that I stacked with heavy dragon armor and used him as a meat shield for most of the game, so not having him with me at the end made it a bit more difficult.
I'm pretty sure there is an ongoing joke that no matter what build you start with you'll end with a sneaky archer. Here is the latest video of the Skywind mod which is Morrowind build on the Skyrim engine. I wasn't a big fan of Morrowind so I'm not super interested.