At its worst, it looks like Thomas Kinkade's vision of Tamriel. If you're not fond of the overly pink and orange sunsets that spring from the intense new color saturation, you might even find the Special Edition a bit of a step back from the original version. Sure, I admire the richer foliage, but then I see the wooden hair of someone like Aela and wonder why this update didn't get a bit more love.

I love that there's lusher foliage now in the woods around Riften and Falkreath, but on the whole it doesn't look terribly different from the high-resolution texture pack, and certainly doesn’t compare favorably to the mods I had installed. There's definitely been some fresh texture work here, but it's uneven.

It looks nice, but not the nicest I've seen Skyrim look on PC.The kind of thing wouldn't sting so badly if the Special Edition version looked significantly better. It's also a shame that there's literally no new content here, as even a couple of new shouts or a few surprise new enemy types would have served as agreeable lures for veterans. Thus, any saves you have that used gameplay-altering mods won’t work with the new version. This is a bummer in of itself, but the jump to 64-bit also means many of the mountains of old mods won't work without an update from the modders themselves, thus crushing any dreams of switching immediately to this version with all the old mods blazing. This boost, unfortunately, also appears to mean it doesn't work as well on older graphics cards that could confidently handle the 2011 version. It also incorporates many of the other features made to Bethesda’s engine for Fallout 4, such as improved lighting and depth-of-field effects, plus some general beautification of the environments. It's 64-bit now instead of the old 32-bit version, which means it technically should better handle stuffing Breezehome with thousands of sweet rolls than it could in the past.

There are, in fact, some key differences.

Skyrim special edition character models