Skyrim Special Edition: Your Thoughts and Impressions?

[Guest]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onFm-7_wTyA

Video by Shilly McShillerton

 

Look at those "unfixable" shadows. Anyone know of a mod because I could never find one? The video has some great footage, but it should also give you a smirk or two. It sounds like he is reading from a script written by Todd Howard himself.

 

I'll come back soon and read any thoughts because it will be interesting to hear them about the upgrades and how good/bad you deem them (now and after release). Looks a bit weird in some areas, (that non-matching water LOD) but it seems like an improvement overall. So yeah, please post after release too because I won't be playing for a while.

 

 

Cheers everyone! 

 

 

[WilliamImm]

I've gotten early access to it. Apparently, Bethesda thought that it's important to get EBQO fit and ready for there.

 

Playing it so far seems to show it as, well, Skyrim, just with what appears to be the high-resolution DLC included and a slightly more refined engine. What did I expect? Some people were apparently wowed at the graphics, but really, It looks like Skyrim usually looks like to me.

 

Still, that and official console mods. Might not be a bad idea to plan guides for the consoles when we can.

[TechAngel85]

That's pretty cool! I've heard of a few modders gaining access to it.

[hishutup]

I think its funny how people out right refused to use the HDDLC because they claim it caused problems.
 
Snip from LotD

- Official HD Texture packs part 1, 2 and 3
STOP using these packs unless you have personally run them through DDSopt again, because they are memory hogging, poorly optimized textures which will EAT your memory faster than anything. These were designed to improve visual appearance of a VANILLA non modded game only. using them with a heavy mod order is foolish and use with this mod will almost certainly cause you to crash when you are in or near the museum because you will run out of memory. I don't care if you have a state of the art high end system, Skyrim's engine only uses a base amount of memory and 2 processors, even with ENBoost, these texture packs are still crap.

Wow, I don't understand the shear hostility because ENBoost is a thing.

I guess they have no way of avoiding it now.

[Guest]

My topic was first by TWO whole minutes... Booooooo! Mod abuse! 

 

 

Edit: Merged!

Edited October 25, 2016 by Guest

[Kelmych]

That comments in that quote about the HDDLC are certainly not consistent with what we have observed and measured over the past few years. This includes comparison benchmark results posted by many STEP participants including me. These show a useful performance and VRAM usage improvement when the vanilla HDDLC are optimized, but it is nowhere as significant as the quote implies.

[TechAngel85]

The ground cover is interesting. It seems they redid those textures to add in more textures per tile just like the grass mods do. It'll be interesting to see what the INI grass settings are set to.

 

ENB water still looks better than the default water here, from what I can see, but it is better than old vanilla. Take a good look at the water flow on the scene around 10:15...that is...impressive.  It'll be interesting to see what they're doing there with those flows.

 

Apparently view distance and LODs has been redone. It looks like they took a book from DynDOLOD here, though it doesn't look like it comes close to replacing DynDOLOD.

 

Sunsets and Sunrises have gotten a good upgrade along with the lighting effects we were already expecting. They're not that bad, but the weather mods we have now are still better.

 

"Fixed shadows"...guess he's never ran an ENB? The are VERY much improved from old vanilla, but have too much blur by default, imo.

 

I agree with him that it does look like as if they're done some re-texturing and fixing some of the old ugly blurs they called "textures" in old vanilla. I also see a noticeable increase in parallax use.

 

 

All-in-all, it's impressive as a default product, however, there is still plenty of room for improvement, especially in the realm of meshes and textures. I think as he said in the video, this game looks very good visually from the start, but mods are going to take it to a whole new level and once they're mostly moved over...we'll never need to play the old Skyrim again.

[Rebel47]

In comparison to the base vanilla Skyrim it does look so much better and for a baseline it's a good starting point, but I wasn't quite as blown away as he suggested I should be, for a remastered version the roads look horribly blocky to me, and those plants oh my god they're so 2D it's hurting my eyes, but the Ivy and snow both look good to me even in that video.

I mean don't get me wrong it's an improvement but only in certain areas or lighting scenes, I will reserve heavy judgement until I actually play it on pc with Maximum settings just to compare, since I have Skyrim legendary edition in Vanilla to I could compare the 2 for posterity.

 

Anyway thanks for the laughs, the guy in the video almost sounds like he's on rails with his commentary.

Edited October 25, 2016 by Rebel47

[hishutup]

That comments in that quote about the HDDLC are certainly not consistent with what we have observed and measured over the past few years. This includes comparison benchmark results posted by many STEP participants including me. These show a useful performance and VRAM usage improvement when the vanilla HDDLC are optimized, but it is nowhere as significant as the quote implies.

Thats what I'm getting at, its blown way out of proportion and doesn't really apply with modern systems with certain fixes being used.

 

Merged Topics

 

The ground cover is interesting. It seems they redid those textures to add in more textures per tile just like the grass mods do. It'll be interesting to see what the INI grass settings are set to.

 

ENB water still looks better than the default water here, from what I can see, but it is better than old vanilla. Take a good look at the water flow on the scene around 10:15...that is...impressive.    It'll be interesting to see what they're doing there with those flows.

 

Apparently view distance and LODs has been redone. It looks like they took a book from DynDOLOD here, though it doesn't look like it comes close to replacing DynDOLOD.

 

Sunsets and Sunrises have gotten a good upgrade along with the lighting effects we were already expecting. They're not that bad, but the weather mods we have now are still better.

 

"Fixed shadows"...guess he's never ran an ENB?   The are VERY much improved from old vanilla, but have too much blur by default, imo.

 

I agree with him that it does look like as if they're done some re-texturing and fixing some of the old ugly blurs they called "textures" in old vanilla. I also see a noticeable increase in parallax use.

 

 

All-in-all, it's impressive as a default product, however, there is still plenty of room for improvement, especially in the realm of meshes and textures. I think as he said in the video, this game looks very good visually from the start, but mods are going to take it to a whole new level and once they're mostly moved over...we'll never need to play the old Skyrim again.

Really, it looks the same as the original. The only thing that I guess they did was to increase the ground cover to hide the hard landscape transitions if they reduced the number of landscape textures per quad like they did with FO4

 

As for "fixed" shadows, if it falls in line with FO4, it going to still be terrible but with a different set of problems.

If I remember correctly FO4 did still have shadow striping in the distance and had a horrific transition line near the player where it toggled to higher resolution, similar to that of what Skyrim Reloaded does.

 

I swear the water looks identical to the original. It feels like its a scrolling textures that lacks depth.

 

After using DDL, this is a step back.

 

Im probably cynical but its a re-release and I expect it to be visually more impressive and be more stable.

[Guest]

Tech straight in there with those hawk eyes! I'm spoiled lately with shadows: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/RayTracedDistanceFieldShadowing/

 

The video footage looks too professional to me. Like the door footage where he opens the door looks at odds with the rest. I'll guess he recorded some of the footage and maybe filled it in with PR stock? Who knows. Just be wary is all.

Edited October 25, 2016 by Guest

[generalmx]

Considering that:

- Skyrim: Special Edition is coming out not only for PC but also Xbox One and PS4

- Fallout 4 came out for the same consoles

- Both use the Creation Engine and Kit

 

I'm guessing this is mainly Skyrim ported to FO4's updated engine. I wonder why Bethesda doesn't just say that, though? It isn't exactly explained what's so "special" about this edition at all on their official site for it, though Xbox One and PS4 users will of course think it's mighty special and given how beautiful Skyrim CAN look on a more modern console that's reason enough to release this. Just seems like the PC version may or may not be very useful...however, if Skyrim Special Edition shares similar enough of an engine with FO4 then that may make modding between them easier in the few cases that makes sense.

Edited October 26, 2016 by generalmx

[zilav]

No, it is not Skyrim ported on FO4's engine. It has nothing to do with FO4 at all.

It is an ordinary Skyrim with better DX11 shaders and x64 executable, with precipitation occlusion and other sweet features. But definitely not a remastered version which a lot of people expected initially.

[TechAngel85]

It also has mod support coming for Xbox users, new water shaders, snow shaders, and lighting effects.

 

PS4 users will not get mod support, though, due to Bethesda and Sony not being able to come to an agreement.

[Omolong]

It also has mod support coming for Xbox users, new water shaders, snow shaders, and lighting effects.

 

PS4 users will not get mod support, though, due to Bethesda and Sony not being able to come to an agreement.

No, PS4 users are getting mods. Bethesda recently announced that PS4 is getting mods, but they won't be able to use any external assets.

[TechAngel85]

No, PS4 users are getting mods. Bethesda recently announced that PS4 is getting mods, but they won't be able to use any external assets.

Thank you for that! I entirely missed that announcement! Good news!