Bethesda is making TESV Skyrim Special Edition – Mods on consoles!

The other day, Bethesda announced, alongside their new Fallout 4 DLCs and their Fallout Shelter mobile game coming to PC, TESV Skyrim Special Edition. There had been rumours of it drifting around before E3, but the official announcement was pretty neat. It’s no Oblivion/Morrowind remake, but it looks like this version of Skyrim will be the bee’s knees, or at least something pretty to look at while we wait for The Elder Scrolls VI.

Normally I don’t really take much interest in E3, even though I really should, but I always glance at what Bethesda has coming up and it’s always something somewhat interesting.

Of course, Skyrim itself is barely five years old, so it seems unusual to be making a remaster, especially when the HUGE modding community can make Skyrim look almost lifelike, even if it involves hacking around with ENBs and the like. But the rumours, if they are to be believed, suggest that this new Skyrim will actually make use of 64bit systems, rendering things like the SKSE memory patch and ENBoost obsolete. On top of that, it means modders can get more creative as they don’t have to remain under the 4gb limit – great news for the people behind Skywind and gigantic projects like that. Also, people with consoles have been asking for Skyrim to be backwards compatible for ages, but this is one step better. Fingers crossed it fixes a lot of the problems the old versions had, like long-running characters taking longer and longer to save.

The biggest thing though is that consoles can finally mod Skyrim. Fallout 4 has mods for consoles, but, what with it being a newer game, the mod library is a bit smaller. Assuming the process to remaster Skyrim goes smoothly, there could be hundreds, if not thousands of mods springing up on day one for console players to use, something they have been missing out on big time.

Of course, things might not be all bright and shiny. On the one hand, Skyrim Special Edition looks awesome, but there are already plenty of ways to get your game to look as good and definitely better than what was shown in the E3 trailer. Still, the new features mean that Skyrim modders have even more fancy visual effects to play with, so they can make Skyrim look even better. There’s also the problem of complicated mods and how they will work with the new Skyrim, and how much work will be required to update everything, but with the idea that new Skyrim will be using the same engine as Fallout, chances are a lot of current tools will be easily transferable or update-able, since modders are already converting things for Fallout.

Luckily, this is not a gigantic update, it’s a separate game. That means a whole separate download, so there’s no fears that Skyrim Special Edition will break all your mods and ruin everything when it’s released.

The best thing about this though is that anyone who owns Skyrim, its DLCs or the Legendary edition on Steam will get Skyrim: Special Edition for free. That is bloody awesome. Unfortunately people who own the console versions will have to buy the new version, but they’re getting mods, which essentially triples their content.

So yes, good news, mostly.

Oh and Dishonored 2 looks awesome as well. Can’t wait for that.