It might not matter to you, but if it does, there are other options. Skyrim Flora Overhaul SE can reduce performance a little, depending on your rig, and there are LOD issues when paired with Simply Bigger Trees.
Indeed, there are several flora mods available, some of which can be mixed and matched so you can create the perfect environment to hunt deer or stalk more dangerous prey. They were the first mods I looked for when I fired Skyrim up again, and this time I was in luck. This left entire areas barely recognisable and, more importantly, gorgeous. Since the nation of Skyrim is largely forest and wilderness, this pair of mods made some of the most noticeable changes, introducing new flora, jacking up their texture quality and increasing their size. Skyrim: Special Edition flora modsīack when I was doing the port review, I bemoaned the absence of two of my favourite mods: Skyrim Flora Overhaul and Bigger Trees.
Thank goodness, then, that mod creators have started to port over Skyrim’s best mods, the ones that leave a dramatic mark on the game.
But feel free to put it off – there’s plenty that you can do before then.Ī new life is great and all, but it can start to feel a little stale when everything else in Skyrim is pretty much the same as it was over five years ago, with the same quests, NPCs and areas that you’ve possibly seen a dozen times before. You can begin as a member of any of the guilds, a hunter camping out in the forest, a shipwreck survivor, or even a vampire or the thrall of a naughty warlock.Ĭonveniently, Alternate Start also gives you a quest to go and check out what’s going on in Helgen, letting you start the main quest at your leisure. Not only does it let you skip the Helgen intro, where you’re on your way to greet the executioner’s axe when a dragon appears and causes a ruckus, it lets you choose from a plethora of new origins. The first thing everyone planning a new character in Skyrim needs is the Alternate Start mod, and thankfully that’s been available for the Special Edition just after launch. Skyrim: Special Edition alternate start mod
At launch, Skyrim Special Edition already had a fair few mods, but it was missing important ones that have become as close to standard as a mod can get.
Looking at my mod list, I’ve had no problem with finding just about every kind of upgrade and addition I could think of, from small things like footprints to significant overhauls that fiddle with every texture.
It’s impressive, though not surprising, how vast the list of Special Edition mods has become in such a short time. But I’ve been at it again, obsessively going through Skyrim Nexus and Skyrim Special Edition Nexus, tweaking load orders and hunting down mods conflicts. I won’t even try to calculate it in hours or days because I’d undoubtedly go mad and wonder what I’d done with my life.
Once that’s done, the final product should truly shine - one might argue that this update represents the best of both words, with new support for 64-bit operating systems and an updated engine from Bethesda, combined with the formidable creativity of the mod community.Is it worth another look? It just might be.įar too much of my time has been spent cramming mods into Elder Scrolls games. While some mods may work out of the box, Bethesda has said that others will require some updating to function properly. But it’ll take some time for modders to really get their hands on the game and tweak updates to improve fidelity to best effect. Overall, Skyrim Special Edition will be a great update if you’ve never screwed around with mods but just want the game to look prettier. The difference between them was in the amount of work your GPU had to do to handle the improvements - the Bethesda updates were much kinder to video cards than the unofficial variants. While the new textures were unquestionably better than the old versions, the high resolution texture packs that modders had already created bested the versions from Bethesda in every scenario. We saw this when Bethesda released the High Resolution Texture Pack for original Skyrim. I can’t say I’m surprised at the situation, though, because Bethesda has never been as willing to push the graphics envelope as some modders were. Check their story for more details on this, and more comparison shots. And while the Special Edition is pretty sexy looking compared with original Skyrim, it doesn’t really hold a candle to what the modded version of vanilla Skyrim can do.
PCGamesN went a bit further than simply comparing vanilla versus SE - they also compared the vanilla game versus a modded version of Classic.