The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition

Winner of more than 200 Game of the Year Awards, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition brings the epic fantasy to life in stunning detail. The Special Edition includes the critically acclaimed game and add-ons with all-new features.

Verdict

Verdict coming soon: the jury is still reading

Buy, Wait, and Skip land in the next pass. Nothing on this card can be bought.

Player sentiment

Player sentiment is from Steam (PC) reviews.

All time

92.2%

378,489 reviews

12 months

93.4%

26,709 reviews

90 days

88.3%

7,435 reviews

30 days

89.5%

1,740 reviews

Stable-0.4 pts versus the previous 90 days

Review history

Bars are review volume. The line is the positive percentage. Periods under 10 reviews are faded.

What players are saying

Positive

I first played Skyrim when I was maybe 9-10 years old. I'm now in my mid-twenties, and I only just got every Steam achievement, as of the time of writing this, 9/7/2026, 9:03 PM. The next Elder Scrolls is game is (presumably) on the horizon and rumored to be called "Sentinel". i know people have their gripes with Bethesda, but at the end of the day, this game is timeless. There's nothing else quite like it. Mods or no mods, there is fun to be had in the land of Skyrim, and I wouldn't trade my memories of this game for anything. I'm looking forward to the next game in the series, no matter how long it takes!
409h 40m played at review · 8 Sept 2026
There is a reason Skyrim has remained in the top 100 games actively played on Steam for 15 years running. Its a masterpiece in open-world role-playing, a game that still feels expansive, alive, and endlessly inviting. From the moment you step out of that cart into the snow-swept wilds of Skyrim, the game hands you near-total freedom: climb any mountain, join any faction, become a stealthy assassin, a righteous warrior, a powerful mage, or something far stranger, all while the world reacts with dragons roaring overhead and radiant quests pulling you into unexpected stories. Its atmosphere is unmatched—the haunting soundtrack, the way light filters through pine forests, the sense that every cave or Nordic ruin might hide something wondrous or deadly—and the sheer scale of its systems for crafting, magic, and character progression lets players lose hundreds of hours simply existing in Tamriel. The Shouts and Magic system work really well in Skyrim, and the dragon lore, combined with some very well written characters you meet along the way, complete the entire experience. My top ten characters in game: 1. Serana 2. Aela the Huntress 3. Cicero 4. Brynjolf 5. Paarthurnax 6. Ulfric Stormcloak 7. M'aiq the Liar 8. Sheogorath 9. Astrid 10. Balgruuf the Greater For me, Skyrim is the absolute GOAT, all genres, all time. It is the perfect storm of mechanical freedom, narrative density, and cultural longevity that few games have ever matched. It popularized a pure “go anywhere, do anything” fantasy that still defines the genre, while its deep faction stories, and emergent moments created a living world that felt personal. The legendary modding community transformed it into something even greater, extending its life far beyond any official support and turning it into a platform for endless creativity. The game has an influence that echoes through every major open-world RPG that follows, Skyrim became the definitive modern fantasy experience, a game that continues to feel like home no matter how many times you return. "Fus Ro Dah!" 10/10
749h 7m played at review · 12 Sept 2026
A typical Skyrim playthru includes a couple hundred tabs of Nexus mods open in the web browser, a few hours of trying to get the game to work with those mods, lying to yourself about "Not being a stealth archer this time", and then Todd updating the game and breaking half your mods. The cycle repeats indefinitely on a yearly basis (at least).
214h 57m played at review · 10 Sept 2026
What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
111h 6m played at review · 8 Sept 2026

Negative

Stop pushing your slop and trying to paywall mods. Be grateful that there are actually people putting in effort to keep your game afloat for free.
429h 52m played at review · 18 Sept 2026
TL;DR: Bethesda shipped a patch almost nobody on PC asked for, and it took a sledgehammer to my six months of modding work. The ecosystem is still picking up the pieces. What happened On August 27th, Bethesda released the "Additional Hotfix" on top of this month's Creations update, the first game update in two and a half years. For console players and the Creations storefront, it's polish. For the PC modding ecosystem, it was a runtime bump (1.6.1170 → 1.7.99 → 1.7.104) that broke the dependency chain the whole scene is built on: - SKSE, the Skyrim Script Extender, is the foundation under thousands of mods. It went incompatible the moment the patch hit, and every mod depending on it stayed dead until it got rebuilt. - Address Library, the translation layer plugins use to find game internals, shipped in a new binary format (v5). Older plugins don't politely refuse to load; they fatal-error on boot with dialogs you can't click away. - PapyrusUtil, Papyrus Extender, editor ID fixes, media key fixes: broken, all of them, waiting on maintainers to rebuild against tools that had to be updated first. - Custom setups like ours (a six-month AI-driven SkyNet build with voice, world simulation, Dynamic Economy and companion services) didn't lose data, but the runtime backbone went dark in one patch cycle. Every launch is a wall of "incompatible / needs recompile" dialogs. Six months of building, silenced by one patch, with zero communication about the damage done to the people who keep this game alive fifteen years after release. What we got instead Here's the list of "essential" fixes that justified breaking the ecosystem: - A crash when opening the on-screen keyboard on the PS5 main menu - A crash when opening the map multiple times on Xbox - A PS4 storage display fix ("14 of 15 GB used" message) - Console mod storage raised to 15 GB - Box art in "stunning" 3640×900 to bring the store "to parity with Starfield" - A "Most Popular" sort button for the Creations store - Creations bundling, WIP bookmarks, and instructions on how to report mods - Updated credits - A pile of Creations storefront bug fixes: sale pricing, version numbers, title formatting, text clipping Console crash fixes, storefront cosmetics, a sort button. None of it touches gameplay. All of it breaks the free modding scene. And the part that really stings PapyrusUtil alone is required by thousands of mods and has been maintained for free for years. Its update has been sitting under review for over a month. In the same patch, the pipeline for paid Verified Creations got achievement-friendly status, new file formats, and Creation Kit quality-of-life updates. Free modders wait in line for a month to ship a fix the community needs right now. Paid content gets the red carpet. Am I supposed to believe that's a coincidence? Gates and review queues for the free side, a wider door for the paid store — at some point that stops being luck and starts being the business model. Where we stand The base is already rebuilt on our side: SKSE 2.3.1, Address Library for 1.7.104, updated Tweaks and Papyrus Extender are in. The work continues, because we still care about this game. Fifteen years of free labor built this ecosystem. It deserves better than being treated as collateral damage for a storefront refresh.
171h 51m played at review · 18 Sept 2026
Bethesda is on a destructive path to destroy all modding support and replace it with monetization
99h 21m played at review · 26 Sept 2026
can't sex the dragon
50h 35m played at review · 12 Sept 2026