Here's Why 'Skyrim Special Edition' Should Both Upset And Excite You

Over the last decade, the game industry has fallen in love with repackaging games we’ve already played. Then they try to pull one over on us by telling us they’re something new and special.

Granted, sometimes they are.

The latest DOOM, for instance, is a prime example of all the good things a remake SHOULD be. The fine people over at id took everything that made the original great (e.g. gratuitous violence, campy machismo and really, really big guns) and gave it a modern retooling with gorgeous visuals and smoother mechanics so a new generation of gamers could experience a title that helped define the first-person-shooter.

For every DOOM-quality re-make though, there are 8920834349008495 soulless re-skins and uninspired franchise revamps saturating the market every holiday season, that are nothing more than calculated cash-grabs

Too often, we gamers buy an HD remake and it feels like this.

Which brings me, at last, to Bethesda’s newly announced ‘Skyrim Special Edition.’ The masterminds behind Fallout 3 and 4 and the Elder Scrolls franchise are jumping on the ‘HD Remake’ bandwagon where there’s plenty of room for excitement and skepticism. 

Excitement: It’s fucking gorgeous. 

Us console plebs who’ve been stuck rendering Skyrim’s breathtaking vistas in the limited fidelity of yester-year are finally getting the graphical update we deserve. Thought smashing dragon skulls and fus-ro-dah-ing your foes off cliffs was a blast before? Now you’ll get to do it all over again in sparkling detail. 

Bethesda has promised “completely remastered art and effects.” 

A graphical update is expected of any remastered release, but it means a lot more for a game like Skyrim where so much of the player’s experience revolves around exploring the game’s massive sandbox world, to which they’re adding new water and snow shaders, volumetric god rays, and improved depth of field and reflective lighting. 

Skepticism: Why Skyrim? 

C’mon, you can’t tell me that Skyrim stands to gain more from an HD remake than ‘The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.’ The graphics may have been groundbreaking at the time, but now it looks like someone who forgot their glasses squinting at an early build of Runescape.

Excitement: Long-awaited console modding

The PC gaming master race may scoff at console players’ excitement at finally getting access to mods, but the addition of Fallout 4 mods to the Xbox One and PS4 was pretty freakin’ momentous. I always wanted to cut down irradiated baddies with a lightsaber like my PC compadres, and now I can. 

Naturally, Bethesda has confirmed the same modding interface will be included in ‘Skyrim Special Edition.’ 

Skepticism: Why Now? 

Bethesda is still fresh off the heels of 2015’s Fallout 4 release, and it looks like they’ve got plenty of DLC in the pipeline for 2016. 

That begs the question, who was asking for this? Most of the Bethesda fans I know devote themselves maniacally to their games, logging several hundreds of hours. I myself, have lost 600+ hours of my life to my Skyrim addiction, and have barely even scratched the surface of what Fallout 4 has to offer. 

What do you think? Check out the full announcement vid below.

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Here"s Why "Skyrim Special Edition" Should Both Upset And Excite You