Skyrim SE - First impressions

[alt3rn1ty]

Well whats the verdict so far :

 

For me the game feels less clunky ( playing without mods and just cleaned the masters so far ), it works a treat on my new laptop on Ultra settings

 

Although I thought the extra bits of foliage were trivial fluff when I was reading about the changes they had made, actually I think the game looks a bit more lush as a result and was worth the effort they put in.

 

The water flow and shaders are just tickling all the right buttons for me, it was the one thing that really got me down about Skyrim Original

 

And the new Snow textures and shaders look very much improved over the original, the addition of a bit more random ice sparkle on the surface with the added effects such as god rays, lighting and environmental improvements just makes the first visit back to Bleak Falls Barrow just after riverwood a little bit more special in the atmospherics there. Looking forward to many more places which are memorable in the same way but with added atmospheric detail.

 

 

Early days but I think this is going to be my favourite out of all the Elder Scrolls games, and now that the water is not getting up my nose it will be a long term stay on my SSD too.

 

I cant see me wanting to mod it much either, USSEP plus an updated SMIM, Inigo 3 when its ready someday, I'm going to Kill The Orchestra again .. and that will probably be me happy with the game for a long time.

[Leonardo]

I envy you, because I couldn't play SSE last night due to some stupid Summer time dll file that Windows couldn't find or something.

[kawaksallas]

The point of a remaster is graphics, and the graphics looks good. It's not a HUGE difference from the original, but it does looks better, and it's good enough to be called a remaster.

 

Loading screens are fast, and it hit me as a surprise, since fallout 4 takes ages to load. Another good surprise, some .ini settings are not being reseted (namely vsync - I always turn off in-game and use a external framerate limiter/vsync tool)

 

Sadly, mouse acceleration is present, hopefully someone will find a way to turn it off.

[Leonardo]

There is one thing that's a lot better in SSE than in Skyrim LE or when it came out 11.11.11 is the Unbound quest.  Everything in that quest has been polished quite a bit and I think the reason for that is the console platforms.

[Tanker1985]

Quick impressions...

The body textures are still horrible, but the hair seems to look better. I have discovered that XCE works as-is, other textures probably do too.

I love the lush grass. Thick enough to hide skeevers, who actually made me jump. It seemed to me that the pop in was occurring farther away. I didn't see any obvious "misplaced thickets," but then I never did.

I am not sure I like the dusk/dawn light change. That was my favorite light. The new is pretty, but doesn't have the same warm quality that I liked. Nights, on the other hand, are lovely. Actually brighter, as they should be with those giant moons.

Water still looks pretty fake, but at least flows more correctly. I'm happy with it.

Launcher put me on High, and I got solid 60 fps. I put it on Ultra and still got 60, with occasional dips to 52 or so. I will try to resist the temptation to switch my texture mods to 4k. The temporal AA is very nice.

Not one single microstutter. 32-bit Skyrim is dead to me. Well, not quite, but soon.

[fireundubh]

I don't know if the performance really is better, or if the performance improvement I'm seeing is wholly due to my GTX 1080.

 

Shadows are super dark now though.

[Kesta]

Cross posting what I shared on STEP last night :

 

1) Shadows --> Gud gud, though you can still see the "close HD shadows" being drawn as you walk in certain area. Not as obvious as SKGE though.

2) No mountain flickering. Just the best thing ever, quite a pleasant and unexpected surprise.

3) Water flow/shaders -> Flow is cool. Aside from that, we're seriously under the usual modded quality.

4) More grass and shrubs -> Well... it's rather well done, but still somehow look like an additional layer of paint to a pre-existing wall to me. Maybe because I was so used to the original.

5) x64 / new bsa -> Super cool load time. My HDD is by far the bottleneck of my system, and load times have always been a nightmare with Skyrim. Even a vanilla setup could take several seconds, enough to switch to a second text. Now it's super fast =D

6) Colors/Lighting : Better than vanilla. Now if you're used to high-quality weather/enb setup, don't expect miracles. Interiors still look very bad though, only exteriors/weathers got actual improvements.

7) Antialiasing -> I really liked FO4's TAA, and they put the same in SSE. <3

8) For some reason, all of the NPCs look slightly different... I know they changed something about facegen, but I'm not sure what yet, but I really didn't expect this to be perceivable.

9) Lip sync bugfix... cool, but they really went the cheap way with this.

 

 

 

I hadn't seen rain occlusion yet back then. It's also awesome. I'm not convinced by the new snow however. Also the two big issues brumbek linked in the other thread, audio downgrade and cheap texture upscale are pretty bad.

And the godrays can be pretty glitchy (It look completely unnatural when a Dragon get off from the ground). They're still pretty good in most situations though, so that's still an improvement.

[Arthmoor]

My take:

 

64bit/DX11 finally brought this game out of the stone age. Should have been done in 2011, but, well, consoles. Everything is so much smoother.

 

Shadows: Holy crap, they actually fixed them and they look BETTER than FO4 shadows too because they don't have the 5 second crawl anymore.

 

Mountains: I hadn't noticed, but hell yes, the z-fighting is gone. I think. Honestly I never noticed it much before.....

 

Water: I really like the new flow mechanics. It all actually looks pretty good and makes sense now instead of trying to flow up the side of the bank. It's not the world's best actual shader, but still. It's way better than the original one.

 

God Rays: Love em. Although there are instances when they're pretty in your face too.

 

Rain Occlusion: 2016. Finally getting something the Gothic series had in 1999. Better late than never, and it's actually a quite good implementation of it. Maybe even better than the one in FO4.

 

Antialiasing: Yeah, I wasn't really sure I'd care but holy cow, it works. That was one of the single best improvements they could have made because in Classic Skyrim the AA doesn't seem to work at all.

 

Snow: Not overly impressed. It doesn't seem to have the oomph even the marketing videos gave us. It's marginally better than what we had before but not much.

 

Lip sync being fixed is good stuff though

 

The random assortment of little bugs they fixed in Update.esm was amusing too. A typo, some floating objects, and one quest that Dawnguard blew out the properties on.

[BlackPete]

So many new plants. I knew there were going to be more but I didn't expect quite this many. Hopefully there aren't too many new ones that need placement fixes.

 

Overall though the graphics look like a big improvement.

[zilav]

My first impression - it's free! Everything else doesn't matter. Can't understand all the complaints about textures and sounds. That's what modding is for.

[Kelsenellenelvian]

I found the torturers hood that was previously not grabable.

[Leonardo]

So many new plants. I knew there were going to be more but I didn't expect quite this many. Hopefully there aren't too many new ones that need placement fixes.

 

Overall though the graphics look like a big improvement.

Yeah, just take a closer look at the forge in Whiterun and in SSE you'll may think it is more like a garden than a city forge in comparison how it look like in SLE or in the original Skyrim.

 

There is also some *wild* plants here and there in the streets in Whiterun, but I haven't been in the other cities or in the other towns/villages yet aside for Riverwood.

[Tanker1985]

The plants in Whiterun reminded me of a toned-down JK's Whiterun. I like having some alchemy ingredient plants right there in town. I need to take the cart to all the holds and check things out.  I haven't loaded any mods yet, although I'm going to continue experimenting with my texture replacers. 

 

I honestly didn't notice any issue with the sound, except that the music seemed quieter at the default settings. My hearing is damaged enough that I can't hear fine differences very much, although Lucidity does make a difference in my headphones (clearer treble). 

 

Edited to add a few things.

 

Running around various places, the textures basically look fine to me (exceptions include top of Whiterun walls and similar things, which have always looked horrible). I switched back to High settings but didn't really see much difference. This game really does look better than the old one. However, I'm playing at 1360x768. It might look worse at higher resolutions.

 

Underwater is completely clear. Not sure if it's supposed to be, but it sure makes fishing easier.

 

The water flow in Lake Honrich and the Treva River is backwards. It should be away from Riften, not toward. It stays that way even around Ivarstead, until the rapids, where it suddenly changes direction. In Lake Geir, the flow changes on the north side of Geirmund's Hall toward the big waterfalls, so that's correct. And it's subtle enough that I couldn't see a hard direction change. Now I have to go check all other rivers and lakes.

[alt3rn1ty]

So many new plants. I knew there were going to be more but I didn't expect quite this many. Hopefully there aren't too many new ones that need placement fixes.

 

Overall though the graphics look like a big improvement.

 

Heh, I went down one of the country roads beyond Markarth, to a place where the road forks, the left hand road takes you down the other side of a river ( i think its somewhere near Old Holdran ), and you end up on a sort of peninsula with an occasional mud crab or Wolf ( depending on what level you are at ) ..

 

.. Anyway long story short .. If you go to the end of where you can go without getting your feet wet, and come back the way you went ( sorry its Halloween in the UK and I have been out with missus Alt3rn1ty dancing with zombies etc etc .. So not the best at describing things right now ) - There is a rock that you can see underneath which needs lowering ( previously done in USKP and USLEEP ) which Bethesda have added more foliage to the edge of ... But eventhough they have added more greenery to the same area they have not lowered the rock

 

 

I love all what they have done, but by christ I wish they would have looked at least at 'some' of the simpler changes to the game that the Unofficial patch does.

 

Now the team are burdened with checking all that has gone before is still valid, which is most arse ( I have started wandering about sans USSEP, in hopes that I can point out ( when a bit more sober ) where they have still missed placement issues .. I know, good luck with that idea )

 

 

Edit : Oh yeah, I noticed earlier that there is a bunch of new textures we never had before, water flow textures ..

Textures \ Water \ Skyrim.esm \ flow.*.*.*.dds

 

.. But somehow there are less than 32000 textures overall ??? ( or maybe I am missing a few not so obvious from other BSAs .. ah well I need sleep for now )

[alt3rn1ty]

After taking the piss a bit ..

 

My take:

 

64bit/DX11 finally brought this game out of the stone age. Should have been done in 2011, but, well, consoles. Everything is so much smoother.

 

Shadows: Holy crap, they actually fixed them and they look BETTER than FO4 shadows too because they don't have the 5 second crawl anymore.

 

My Bold : Oh yes, and everything I have ever wanted ENBoost for is now redundant, the new shadows in particular are brilliant.

[Leonardo]

In case no one have read this, but someone did a mod review about USSEP here, so Darkelfguy's modding showcase video series concept had spread to Skyrim.

[Kesta]

Re: Performances & Stability

 

With 15 hours of actual gameplay (not testing mods & new features) in, playing in session of 1 to 4 hours, on pure vanilla (no third party, no cleaning, no USSEP, not anything) :

 - Once, after fast travelling to Whiterun from somewhere else in Tamriel, de game decided that LODs (all three of them) should remain enabled. Moving elsewhere didn't help. Maybe I should have tried pcb or going in interior and waiting for reset... dunno. Quitting and going back in game fixed it.

 - I had a "dead freeze" once, upon exiting Dragonsreach (no CTD, the game don't "stop responding", the music still play, but even after 15minutes, nothing move).

 - I had one crash that I didn't provoke myself. Dumb as I am, I can't remember where it was or what happen, just that it was very sudden and unexpected, so probably a corrupted mesh laying around somewhere.

 

 

That's on a 4 years old laptop with specs slightly under the official minimum, and all settings on Ultra but the shadow resolution (tuned down from 4096 to 2048).

Average FPS on exterior is 35-45 (depending on where I'm looking at, grass is a big offender), interiors are at a constant 60. No stuttering. Minor freezes on expected situations (anims+particles+sounds+special effect all firing at once, like when a Dragon die). I already mentioned above the near-instantaneous loading screens.

 

However I noticed the AI seem to be a bit more... slow. Could be navmeshes problem though (how many were fixed by USLEEP ? )

 

 

Considering my specs and the resulting stability/performances, I'll say it for once : Good job Bethesda.

 

However, playing without USSEP make me realise how much is fixed... I can't believe the number of odd thins happening every now and then (I killed a dragon at Mt.Anchor... it gave "return to Esbern" objective, while I never took any quest from him... and I can't even return to him because Voice-daddy-dragon is still alive).

[alt3rn1ty]

@ Kesta the lod thing I have seen a couple of times too, the game is still vanilla no mods for me aswell

 

On three occasions I have fast travelled from somewhere else .. To Honningbrew meadery

 

On two of those occasions looking at the meadery building the walls were just a blurry mess, and some of the landscape / rocks in the vicinity plus the walls of Whiterun had z fighting going on with blurry textures

 

I have the game auto configured to Ultra settings on this machine which is above recommended spec, so I dont think that problem is anything to do with your machine.

[Kesta]

Ah, good to know and interesting... though kinda worrying. If this happen again I'll take some screenshot and report to Beth.Not convinced they'll do anything, but that still the best course of action. Did you get the bug after a long session or just randomly ? (iirc, it was after several hours that it showed up in my game).

[alt3rn1ty]

Kesta - See a couple of posts by Sheson talking rocket science as usual .. But I believe this post and the follow up post describes the cause of what we have seen

[scbfromnc]

I've now seen two posts about cleaning Skyrim SE masters.  Can you use the current version of TES5Edit for that?  Just rename to SkyrimSEEdit?

[BlackPete]

I've now seen two posts about cleaning Skyrim SE masters.  Can you use the current version of TES5Edit for that?  Just rename to SkyrimSEEdit?

 

The authors made a version specifically for SSE: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/164/?

 

I'd strongly suspect that using TES5Edit would result in some bad things happening. Also from what I've heard, it is recommended that you wait a little longer before cleaning the SSE master files because SSEEdit is still receiving frequent updates and the authors are still working out some things. Waiting could potentially save you the trouble of having to re-download the masters from Steam if by some chance SkyrimSSEEdit isn't entirely ready for cleaning the master files yet.

 

This thread is updated frequently by the authors:  http://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/3750-wipz-tes5edit/

[scbfromnc]

@BlackPete - thanks for the info!  I'll take your advice and wait on the masters.

[alt3rn1ty]

I made a post in the Manual Cleaning master files topic http://www.afkmods.com/index.php?/topic/4110-manual-cleaning-skyrim-master-files/page-4#entry163352

 

I still need to do a new Skyrim SE topic really, but the procedure ( and manual edits ) is pretty much the same, a few differences between the ITM and UDR results, but SSEEdit I think now has all the records it needed decoding done, there wasnt much to add for SE.

[Relight]

Warning: don't play Skyrim SE - you'll get sucked in

Been a long time since I played, but I figured I might as well finally check it out as a break from playing Fallout 4. Thought I'd take a look around and suddenly I'm in the middle of a handful of quests after many hours had passed

I wasn't as impressed as I hoped to be, but given that Bethesda is always dated graphically to varying degrees, as usual it didn't matter. For me, this game is still as entertaining as when it was first released, and I'm more than happy to see it get a spit and shine so that it's prettier whenever I revisit it. Very pleased that they left the original Skyrim intact in Steam so that the full nostalgic experience is still an option.

Maybe while they're making Elder Scrolls VI - I can't wait, I just couldn't get into ESO - they can revisit Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Well, I can dream, can't I?