There's nothing too crazy about this special edition. It is mostly the Skyrim you love and remember, with a few welcome improvements.

First off, all of the DLC from Skyrim is included which is always a bonus. Dawnguard and Dragonborn will add quite a lot of playtime to your file with new questlines and such, while Hearthfire is a pretty modest DLC focused on house-building and the like (there are only a few different houses).

The second cool thing included with this is modding support, which was present on the PC version of Skyrim for years but is just now making its way to consoles. Always nice!

The most obvious change however is the graphical update. You will notice that most of the characters look the same as before, more or less, but the lighting has received a lot of attention. You'll now notice volumetric lighting, more prominent depth of field effects, higher resolution textures, better anti-aliasing, more accurate shadows, water improvements, more characters/vegetation/objects on-screen and a few more details that I'm failing to recall. PC players will be pleased to hear that this version of Skyrim also utilizes 64-bit support when available which of course means drastic performance improvements.



A couple small details that could annoy some: the audio on PS4 and XB1 versions does seem compressed compared to before, and some textures were simply upscaled from standard resolution rather than using the original (undoubtedly HD) source textures.



Overall, if you've already beaten the heck out of OG Skyrim like me, this won't really have too much new stuff for ya. But if you love it as much as I do you won't care and will appreciate the refresh. Anyone new to Skyrim that is interested should absolutely jump in.