So Bethesda’s remastered version of Skyrim has officially been out for over a week now. Since I owned the Legendary Edition on Steam, I got Special Edition(SE) completely free. For PS4 and Xbox One users, the game cost $60. Before I go into how I personally feel about Special Edition, I must say this:

If you have never played Skyrim, buy Special Edition. You’re getting a great game that does look better than the original game. If you want to play Skyrim on new gen consoles, but Special Edition. The main reason this game was remastered, was for it to be ported over to newer consoles.

Now, I was just about as excited as anyone else when I realized I would be able to play SE for free on Day one. I decided to stay up a little bit later that night and install game, only to be met with a game that wouldn’t boot up properly. After messing with the settings a bit, I finally got the game to run and was excited for the better graphics. 10 minutes after I created my character, the game crashed. I expected this of course, because it is a Bethesda game. There would be bugs and it would crash every once in a while. But I reloaded the game and it crashed again about 10 minutes later. This happened about 4 times and I decided to give it a rest.

I found out that there was an unofficial patch to fix some bugs, so I downloaded that and started the game back. However, I was welcomed with a message that said something along the lines of “When you use mods, achievements will be unavailable.” In other words, I can’t use the patch to fix the bugs and manage my progress in the game at the same time. This sucked.

I thought about just giving up that night, but I wanted to play Skyrim again. I was late to the Bethesda party, only starting this game for the very first time in late December of 2015. I played a good bit through January of 2016 and then stopped playing for a while, because I got really busy and there were other games I wanted to play.

When I booted up SE, I realized why I like this game so much. For starters, Skyrim is a game about immersion. You can practically do anything you want in the game, in whatever order you want. The atmosphere is nearly perfect, except for the occasionally bugs. As a composer, I absolutely love the music, so much in fact, that I recently bought a signed CD set of the soundtrack. You can truly get lost in this game and I love it.

So when I couldn’t get SE to run, I decided to start up the original 2011 Skyrim. I updated a few mods, got a few others that I didn’t have before and started a new character. I’m extremely excited that I’m playing this game once again and I’m even more excited to be able to complete the main story for once and explore tons of quests that I’ve never even touched. But I’m not going back to Special Edition.

At least for now.

Special Edition isn’t exactly a remaster, as much as it is a port. It was designed to allow Xbox One and PS4 gamers to play the game on a new gen console. PC gamers can run 2011 Skyrim with mods and make it look even better than SE. The Skyrim mod community is joining forces to ensure that there are a significant amount of mods available for SE, but as for now the amount is fairly small. I’m not really mad that this game isn’t as great as the hype was, mainly because I’m not the type of gamer to prioritize graphics, but I am a bit disappointed. Other than that, I can’t complain too much. Plus, I don’t have time to complain, when I’ve gotta go be the Dragonborn and kill a bunch of dragons.