The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim Anniversary Edition (PS4)

All the new stuff and access to massive free mods, excelle

The additional Creation Club extras are certainly hugely impressive in quantity and scope, and introduce many new features and imagery. Some of the quests are staggering in their size and complexity, but a number of disappointments caused me to drop a star – I was even going to give it 3 stars but that’s really only for the extras – taken as a whole SKYRIM AE still deserves 4-5 stars.

My disappointments were primarily:

* Few if any of the long-standing bugs and glitches in the existing Skyrim (SE) seem to have been fixed. Surely this was a perfect opportunity to clean up many of the more obvious bugs for which Skyrim has been notorious? Most of these bugs have been known and discussed for years, and many should surely have been easy to fix. For example, the “still in crouch view even though not crouching after mining; quests items that end up stuck in the inventory after a quest has completed; broken quests (and even the main storyline) e.g. because a critical NPC isn’t flagged as essential and has been accidentally killed; the Legend of Red Eagle quest restarting every time you accidentally read another copy of the book; Falmer chests that need opening again after being unlocked; Poison Blooms that respawn but can’t be re-harvested; many spelling mistakes in subtitle text; and so on and so on and so on. The identical phrases spoken by different NPCs are also really immersion-breaking (and baffling when done by different voice actors), though I appreciate that’s much more difficult and/or costly to fix.

* Worse, additional bugs seem to have been introduced – for example, inappropriate comments by enemies were always an issue, but my impression is that that’s become much worse – bandits now ALWAYS stupidly say “oh, must’ve run off” or similar after they’ve just killed an enemy (or the player).

* The new content is impressive, as I said, and certainly “freshens up” Skyrim for those already very familiar with the original, but the new quests and locations often seem rather “shallow”. They’re much more “find this here, do that there, kill someone somewhere else, get a reward” and don’t seem anywhere near as sophisticated or integrated into the whole as the original quests were. Some of the new homes are nice, but again give that feeling of “let’s pack everything possible into a home so you don’t have to do any work to find it”.

* A similar criticism applies to the pets – they slowly trot off home when asked, yet can be instantly teleported to your location absolutely anywhere at any time (presumably even swimming to or from Solstheim!). Useful for carrying away junk when overburdened, but highly implausible and “immersion breaking”.

* Finally, much of the new content seems even more bug-ridden than the original (already infamously buggy) Skyrim, with quest items getting stuck, unique quest NPCs respawning, and so on. For example, the teleport spell for at least two of the pets (dwarven mud-crab and nix hound) just doesn’t work at all.

So overall, Skyrim AE is still great value and makes the already amazing Skyrim even more of a masterpiece, but it’s sadly an even more flawed masterpiece than it was before. Personally I would far rather have had a Skyrim with fewer extras but with most of the bugs fixed, and perhaps just some lighting and weather mods added, than this even more sprawling, disjointed, buggy and less immersive version.
Oh well, perhaps we’ll get a perfect Skyrim Silver Anniversary edition in 2036 … if I’m still alive to enjoy it!

Love Skyrim and it’s great getting to experience the dlc without needing WiFi. Great game, arrived fast. Works fine

Played Skyrim back in the day on Ps3, it’s been 10 Years since it first launched, so now playing on Ps4.

The Anniversary update adds all Creation Club content which adds just enough to make Skyrims world feel new again, with new weapons, armour, spells, horses, quests, NPC’s and more. This has a Free Upgrade for the Ps5, so if you have the console you get to play in glorious 4K Resolution at 60 Frames Per Second, also it comes with the Games Map just like it did on Ps3.

The only downside is that the Game Disc only consists of Skyrim Special Edition without any Creation Club content, I had to also Download a 16Gb Update so who knows how the game performs without it. Game comes with a Voucher Code to be redeemed by 11/11/31 and you need to use the Voucher to receive Creation Club content.

Overall I’d recommend this game to everyone who likes Open World games.