Special Edition doesn’t offer anything in the way of ‘new stuff’, unless you missed out on all the DLC first time round. Chances are you’ve played it more recently, and you’ve already modded the hell out of it. In fact, if you’re a PC player unrestricted by the console cycle, then this game most definitely isn’t for you. Does it look better than the PC version with any of the high-end visual mods in play? No. The visual overhaul for this Special Edition is good enough to let the game pass in 2016, and it probably makes the experience appear ‘as good as you remember it being in 2011’, even with the rosiest-tinted of spectacles on your nose. Even The Witcher 3’s magnificent landscape - which is certainly better looking - can’t match that sense of magic you get from Skyrim. That inviting otherworldliness, which is at once fantastical and familiar, has been often imitated yet never bettered.
Is this game worth buying if you played the game for 200 hours back in 2011? Yes, it really is, because the sheer joy of existing within Skyrim’s world remains unsurpassed.
