by Regulus » November 3rd, 2016, 7:14 pm
1: Skyrim SE is free for those who have the game and the DLC on Steam. It's only a rip-off for for Xbox One and PS4 because consoles allow this kind of behavior from developers. Bethesta can get away with charging people for a full game to play an old one, just because... what other choice do you have? You don't; there's choice. An Xbox 360 copy of Skyrim won't work on Xbox One, and a PS3 copy won't work on PS4. If you're on PC it's different, in which case you can still buy the old Skyrim and play it just fine. #PCmasterrace
2. Most mods for Skyrim will not work with Skyrim SE, because SE is 64 bit and the vanilla Skyrim is 32 bit. Anything that relies on SKSE will not work, as that needs to be completely rewritten. How difficult a task that is and how long it will take, I have no idea. My estimate is that it will likely take months before we see a new SKSE for the new 64 bit Skyrim.
3. Trying to load your modded Skyrim saves with Skyrim SE isn't disastrous. Skyrim and Skyrim SE are treated as two different games, not as a patch for the same game. This means you can copy your Skyrim save to Skyrim SE, and still keep your modded vanilla Skyrim game intact. The lack of mods in Skyrim SE may cause bugs when loading the files, but I tried it with my modded savegame and it was still playable.
4. Skyrim SE doesn't actually look that much better than vanilla Skyrim with high-res textures and enhanced lighting mods installed. In fact, the only real difference that jumped straight out was that with Skyrim SE, I was able to crank the anti-aliasing up a notch. In fact, with TAA on instead of MSAA, I noticed things looked a little too blurry, and I didn't like that very much. 8x MSAA on vanilla Skyrim looks better, in my highly subjective opinion.