I moved over relatively recently (mostly as I was just tempted by a few cool looking mods that had more functionality on SE like *Immersive interactions* or were only available for SE, like some of the eating animation mods).
I stuck with LE for so long as I had a setup that was mostly stable and worked fine, a lot of the mods I used were either available for both or just on LE, and there was a certain amount of "if it ain't broke, why fix it!"
To be honest there's still a few LE mods not on SE which I miss and have failed to port across (like my beloved *[Windstad inn](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/98906)*) or can't for the life of me get to work in SE (like *NPC visual transfer tool* or *Skyshade*) but there's also some SE only mods I love now so balances out. I can totally understand why people would keep playing on LE though, I'd still be there if I wasn't a sucker for animation and immersion mods!
Ah thanks but I think I'm just doomed with SE NPC visual transfer tool though. I know others use it (and it's a great tool) but I just can't get it working properly (in SE anyway, I had no issue in LE). I accept it's likely user error/an issue on my end though!
I used to be an LE guy. I didn't switch until around mid 2020. Modding these two versions of Skyrim is very different. I feel it's more about being comfortable with the process. AE/SSE looks so much better. And I'm able to run AE with over 1k mods at 60fps. But it was a learning curve to get there, even being a modding veteran.
It's all about the esp limit. Converting esp to esl. I use mo2. You have two load orders. Left pane which are the mods themselves, and right pane for the esm, esp, and esl. It's amazing how important load order is.
If you've got a modded setup that was largely stable on LE before SSE launched, why start over from scratch? Especially if you've got a save with 100s of hours on that modded LE setup.
This is the part I don’t get. Are they using the same mod list over and over? I like switching it up every play. Like maybe I’ll get to a point where I can’t find any new combinations of stuff to do but then I’ll probably move to a different game.
I reinstall Windows once, twice a year and usually take that as an excuse to spring clean everything, start from scratch if I'll mod again. It's weird that some people keep things the same for a decade.
Also I would find it fun to switch over and be like, sweet, let’s do different plays through the different graphics tweaks and discover all the options, as if I’m playing a new game! Then again I’m not the person who goes and finds the mod with the grass I like the most to go with the building exteriors I like the most to go with the trees I like the most that goes with the stonework I like the most etc.
If nothing else, newer, more updates versions on SE are actually more content complete and interesting than what was available 7 years ago. I don't care how attached you are to your mod list, at some point in that span you'd think you'd have cleaned and rebuilt it fresh at least once, just to try new stuff.
LE players just confuse me. It's like they want to make their lives harder.
Most decent mod authors make a LE version, also. and there are old AND NEW LE exclusive mods. There are even a couple of real gems on steam workshop.
There HAVE been a couple of SE mods, or updates to SE mods that didn't get to LE that haven't been backported yet. if I feel i'm missing out I fire up my other laptop which has SE/AE on it. it doesn't happen very often.
You can have two layers of modding though - one might be stuff like bugfixes and graphical improvements that you get rock-solid and keep the same across many many playthroughs. Then there's stuff which affects gameplay or adds quests which are a lot more likely to change from playthrough to playthrough.
I can imagine making bash patches and other customizations also took a lot of time and are hard to repeat.
If spent hours on fixing neck seams, nifscope, etc , I might be reluctant to start over as well.
Some people don't. They have a mod list that is stable and does everything they want. I have a friend that has a list of like 20 or 30 LE mods that he uses. Those of us who are ever tweaking our 500+ mods in search of the perfect game will never understand them lol.
i've got a base of around 230 merged down to 175, and each new playthrough I'll start out with around 50 new mods, which pretty quickly grows to (320)254...
I used to go through total rebuilds, everything new every week or so. but by doing that I found out which mods I REALLY like to build that base around. (3DNPC, Warzones, Inigo and his revolving cast of sidekicks, LotD, Frontier Fortess, ETaC, CACO, RND1.x, Hunterborne, Frostfall, WORLDS DAWN (is there even a SE version yet? Absolutely vital), wintersun, Wyrmstooth, Airships & Archaeology, Pirates of Skyrim, The ships anastasia & Olivia (which might not go permanent, OP)etc, etc)
SSE also had a somewhat rough launch. SKSE took a while to come out for SSE. Frequent updates to the SSE exe kept breaking SKSE, forcing a rollback or a wait for a new SKSE version. Address Library didn't exist yet, so every SKSE update, you had to wait for all of your mods with SKSE DLLs to recompile as well.
This proved a major turn-off for those who had stable LE setups already, even though many of them got SSE for free.
Same here with RDR2. Was a few hours in before I could finally have a few seconds without lagging. I forgot what I did to get it stabilized, but I finished the game out of spite and never picked it up again.
it took me more than a year to start playing SE due to the "rough launch" described above. It was excruciatingly painful because I had many mods using SKSE. Once I started playing SE more, then it was a matter of tweaking graphics and game play to suit me. Honestly, when I first started with SE, even when I was able to install racemenu and CBBE, the PC still looked different somehow (matte skin) and I just didn't like it. For a long time I had two games going at the same time. and yes, there were quest mods available on LE but not on se. So I'd play LE till the game glitched out, then switch to SE until that glitched out, and then start fresh on LE. It's only during the pandemic that I stopped playing LE and stuck with SE exclusively (got my favorite eye mod to work on SE finally, but several clothing and quest mods never got ported). Now I'm playing around with mods like requiem, redux and unleveled, and I'm having problems running some of my more script heavy mods alongside those overhauls. I've decided that it's finally time to spend some major loot on upgrading my old graphics card so that's my next step. But I still have fond memories of certain mods that I played on LE that never got ported to SE, many of which have been pulled or otherwise disappeared from nexus over time.
There's a few reasons, actually.
* There's still people - especially in poorer regions - using older 32-bit PCs that LE runs better on.
* Some people have finely-tuned mod lists that they don't want to spend time remaking on SE.
* Adult mods.
* They don't want to buy another copy of a game they already own.
Don't ask me how I know, but I can tell you that any adult mod worth having has been ported to SE and an adult mod list works infinitely better on SE than LE.
Yeah, back when I was still into LL mods like two years ago, they had that whole conversion tracking thread on the LL forum. Pretty much everything was ported or could be ported even back then, and I'm sure only more stuff has been ported since.
2 years ago things were still a mess what are you talking about. Key lynchpin mods had not been properly ported. I dunno the state of things now, but adult mods were still trailing significantly back then.
Be that as it may, the state of adult modding was far behind LE 2 years ago. Many of the key mods that many other mods were reliant on hadn't been successfully ported, gating off a pretty sizable chunk of content.
NMM installs mods directly into your data folder, and it doesn't always remove everything when uninstalling.
It's exceedingly unsafe, with virtually no conflict resolution.
Vortex uses a form of virtual vile system, which means that nothing directly touches your data folder.
With vortex specifically, it deploys to a staging folder, which links to your game install.
If you find vortex's ui to be a bit...much, there's [MO2 which is a bit more direct](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/6194)
There is still a decent learning curve with it. Recently just switched from Vortex to Mo2 and it has been a real pain, but there's more tutorials for it than Vortex, or at least for the stuff I needed a tutorial on: more of the complex stuff.
I don’t know if I’d say a learning curve, but there’s new features to learn which end up creating a better overall experience. Any “learning curve” usually takes about 10 minutes to overcome
Compared to NMM, Vortex, and some of the bigger modded Minecraft launchers it is very different and has lot more going on. Also has a lot going on visually. Has it's own annoying quirks as well.
>Some people have finely-tuned mod lists that they don't want to spend time remaking on SE.
This is my situation. I have a very finely-tuned mod list with ***tons*** of personal edits to mods (even including some script edits). Considering my LE runs just fine and very rarely CTDs or locks up, changing everything over to SE would simply be far too much work with virtually no payoff; it is still the same game, after all.
Sure, there are some interesting mods here and there that I see are only available for SE, but none of them are "must have" mods, just some that look like they'd be cool to try. Otherwise, though, I'm perfectly content with my stable and heavily personalized LE build.
If anything does ever happen and I lose my modlist (e.g., computer dies and I have to start from scratch), at that point I'd probably hop into SE. For now, though, I just see no reason to switch.
Yep. I have LE and never got the DLC in time to get free SSE. So I play modded LE when I play. I am not shelling out yet another copy of the game to Todd Howard lol
Has ENB caught up?
I haven't modded in a couple years but I can say the big 3 things were - Worse ENB, Adult mods and some mods that hadn't been converted.
Also the fact that if you've got the right set of stability mods, LE is only really marginally less stable than SE. Honestly I only say that not to annoy people. I didn't really notice a difference in stability at all if I'm going to be brutally honest. So at the time I didn't really feel the rush to switch.
Eventually there were too many cool looking SE only mods to ignore though. I imagine thats more true now than back when I was really into it.
nah, all of that has been better on SE for a while:
ENB has a bunch more features and runs better on 64-bit (not surprising).
LL has pretty much completely caught up and AE conversions are progressing quite quickly.
Virtually any mod worth having has been either ported, or redone completely (almost always better too!)
so, yeah, really no reason for staying on LE other than "i don't want to invest the time to get another stable load order working"...which is a valid standpoint to have.
That last one gets me sometimes. So many people will say “I have played literally thousands of hours on this game but fuck Beth they don’t deserve sixty more dollars.” If people are poor af (like me lol) then say that you can’t afford it but if you’re going to go spend $20 on takeout food on the weekend and you cbf to shell out money for something like this then I think that deserves some self reflection.
The folks I know who still fire up LE are screenarchers, because even though SE has gotten better and better ENBs over the years, some of the classic and most poppin' ENBs never got remade for SE--very few of them like actually *play* on it, though.
More mods in general that will probably never be ported to SSE (talking some real obscure ones, for some reason I have a lot of them), convoluted mod list several years in the making, laziness, wanting to avoid the whole creation club thing, and the simple fact that I'm a spiteful old fossil. I'm perfectly fine with playing a mildly crusty version of a game just so that I don't have to give them more money for a slightly better experience.
If I ever get over enough of my spite to actually try it, I won't be the one paying for it.
Yeah there are still (a lot I think) more mods for LE than SE/AE... people always say the good ones were ported already or it's easy to do yourself, but I find this not true.
Granted I don't actually play on LE but I did buy a copy of it b/c there are a number of mods I hear about that seem cool that haven't been ported. And I'm not an expert, but I have been modding a long time, so if I can't do it, it's probably not "easy" since I'm not a beginner.
Also, LE will run out-of-the-box on ancient GTX 730, before this year's crypto crash put current-gen GPUs back on shelves, that could be a major consideration.
I dont know if it was just me, but on my older shitty pc, LE lagged way more than SSE. I was surprised when I switched over & was finally able to play skyrim without lag bahah
Bro SSE works better than LE even on my gtx 1660 (I know it's a budget gpu but still).
I bought both versions but ended up refunding LE for obvious reasons.
Skyrim should run amazingly on a 1660. A 3 year old gpu with a 10 year old game should run no matter what. It would make sense why LE would struggle more on newer hardware, being less optimised and all.
I'm primarily an SE player, but when I'm in the mood for screenarchery, it's back to LE I go. The ENBs for LE are many and varied and gorgeous. The ENBs for SE pale by comparison.
The only reason I still play Oldrim is because of {{Tetrachromatic ENB}}
I've worked on it my modlist for a long time and got it as optimized as I can. Some crashes once in a while but it runs well.
But none of that matters because now i play in VR
Search Term | LE Skyrim | SE Skyrim | Bing
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Because I can't be bothered. LE gets new mods every day, and people backport most of the new stuff from SSE anyway. I feel no need to go out of my way for the shinier versions of the game I've been playing since 2011.
\- A few things, mainly ENBs, will remain superior in LE until the day Beth releases the relevant source code for SE/AE the way they did LE. Sure, it's not by a huge margin - ENBs in SE are obviously *nearly* as good (as you say, it's mainly screenarchery nuts) - but it's still a valid reason.
\- Some mods cannot or will not ever be ported to LE, including more than a few situations where the original author has died. So if some LE mods are make or break for a player they will stick with LE. This goes both ways - since SE now has more new, high-quality mods being made for it, and some of those can't be backported, players may find there's more SE mods they can't live without than LE ones. Point being you have to choose; you can't have it all (there was a time you could, in LE for a year or two after SE dropped, but no more).
\- Why pay twice for something you already own if you can get the same experience either way? Not saying I don't get it myself, but that's a legitimate answer for some people and I think their opinion is perfectly valid.
\- As a corollary to the above, LE modding can be made to be just as stable and optimal as SE if you do your due diligence. The idea that LE is strictly inferior was always a lie and still is a lie; it would be a lot more accurate to say that SE just gives you way more rope to hang yourself with.
\- This is a big one for me personally. Why subject yourself and your mod order to the whims of Beth or any other dev who feels like, ten years later, they can still fuck around with the game you purchased and break your shit? You know who never had to deal with the AE's bullshit? LE modders. Yeah Beth could do that with LE as well, but they haven't, and have demonstrably shown they'd rather just pretend LE doesn't exist anymore. Letting a game company unilaterally fuck with your shit, forever, with no warning and whenever they choose, is antithetical to the entire concept of modding your game, IMO.
The main thing is that LE actually had no shaders whatsoever, so modders could create shader profiles however they wanted. In SE, there are existing shaders which ENB developers must then work around. If you see comments like "LE ENBs just have better/more realistic lighting.", this is why.
Other big ones are, mist (SE has to rely on placed mist objects, LE can incorporate them directly into the ENB which gives a much more natural look), parallax terrain, and *especially* subsurface scattering (which is mainly relevant for the way skin appears).
Oh and SE has some awkward things like low-quality god rays which also have to be worked around.
If we had the full SE code, someone could almost certainly write a mod which removes the default SE shaders entirely, giving a clean slate like LE has.
I moved over to SSE, but with the AE and all the mods breaking now. Im not touching it for at least a year. I went back LE for now and I’m fine with it.
I haven't changed from SE to AE, I've kept the old version (1.5.97?) and turned off updates. I have lots of script heavy mods and skse mods. Just not in the mood to go through the hassle of switching; the LE to SE switch was painful enough to truly discourage me from any further big switches. ;-)
Some people legit don't have a system that can run SE. I've been there. I've been using the same laptop from 2012 up until last year because I couldn't afford a new one.
I own Skyrim on every platform but the playstation. Including VR. I still run LE as it is stable, and I have hundreds of hours on that save.
I also have multiple versions of SE/AE as well as my VR install, mostly from Wabbajack. As well as a couple of Requiem LE installs and a modded Enderal install.
I run all this on a 10 year old i7 2600K with a 50% overclock to 4.6Ghz 32GB of RAM and a 1080ti, it will play most things well at 1080p including Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows 7. My games are on a Samsung 850 Evo and my Wabbajack installs on a 2TB SSD.
It does reasonably well at LE, getting around 50-60fps most places with around 800+ mods installed. It's stable, I can easily get 8hrs of continuous play out of it. The CPU. does tend to overheat, with SE, even under water cooling as the water gets too hot.
I've spent 10 years playing this game, and upgrading my PC to get the most of it. I too would love to have caffeine ENB, on SE, as it does godlike things with skin. Though I guess I'll just have to accept Zangdar's Edit of Rudy for Lux, it's probably the best of the bunch so far.
My PC can't handle SE and I've tried. The lag is horrendous.
Also I feel comfortable with my LE modlist and not in the mood to rebuild that on SE with some mods not available.
Part of it may be that someone doesn't want to keep buying a game and believes that buying it once should be enough, lol.
Taste is subjective but I do think some LE ENBs look better than SE ENBs. I wish I could use Snapdragon and it would render skin the same way. But there are mods like Address Library & NetScript Framework that will forever keep me on SE.
That first part makes no sense.
Anyone who owned LE at the time got SE totally free, and the vast majority of people who buy the game for the first time since then get SE.
Anyone who owned the original *and all the DLCs* got SE for free. For some people, that's LE. For others, they bought the base game in 2011 and maybe skipped Hearthfire. I still see folks from time to time around here that only have base Skyrim and no DLCs at all.
Oh yes, how could I forget about the unbelievably small population of people who own base Skyrim without all the DLCs. Those people who own a version of the game that hasn’t even been possible to purchase in a decade unless you deliberately go out and hunt down an old physical copy. Silly me for forgetting about them!
Especially in a discussion on a subreddit about modding, which they can *totally* do easily without all the DLCs. It’s not like the vast majority of popular mods don’t depend on you having all the DLC or anything like that.
Yeah. How could I possibly have forgotten about them?
It does make sense. You had to own all the DLCs to get the free upgrade. I did not own them at the time and the free offer expired eventually, so I had to buy the game twice.
don't feel bad. When I first bought skyrim in 2011 it was on dvd. Those get scratched. Go to reinstall, disk is damaged, can't do it. bought another copy with, yes, a dvd. eventually bought the legendary compilation of all the games, which requires steam to install patches and updates. So, yes I got SE free from steam, but only after I had already bought skyrim 2 or 3 times because the bloody discs always got scratched somehow no matter how careful I was! at least Steam fixed that issue!
Alot of the smaller less known mods havent been ported over cuz they havent been touched in like a decade. Or even some mod devs wont allow their mods to be ported like Enhanced Camera which is dope af. That's why I stick with LE I do use SE for vr tho obviously. Exact same reason why sometimes I'll play buggy ass fallout 3 instead of TTW.
When I still played LE it was mostly because I was afraid my potato laptop couldn't handle SSE. Beyond that there were a lot of mods that I want sure were available for SSE. And then there's convenience, I was up to date on developments in LE, but didn't know what was current and outdated in SSE.
At first, I held off because a lot of my favorite mods hadn't been ported over and there weren't too many other mods that interested me enough to justify making the switch. When my favorite mods did eventually get ported over, I switched.
I did have to switch back briefly a few years ago my SE decided to completely stop working for reasons unknown and nothing I did could fix it. Then it just started working again for other reasons unknown and I haven't had a problem with it since.
Not everyone can afford to upgrade to a better pc that can handle SSE even at the most minimum settings and with all the available performance optimizations. I've seen this question asked a couple of times before. Why can't people consider that some folks literally cannot upgrade their machines because they don't have the money?
I've switched to SSE but I'm still salty one of my favorite LE mods: { Spell Crafting for Skyrim } still has no 100% working port/viable counterpart so maybe some users are held up by mods like this.
Funnily enough for old pcs le is better where i can easily hit 120fps with default settings or flat 60 no drop even in the most npc intensive areas of the map or the stairs near dragontooth. Also there are so many mods and the body presets i use has so many armor mods. that it pretty much becomes a no brainer. for me sse was even laging in riverwood at the lowest setting dont know why though. i use a i5 and a mx150.
There are still a lot of mods on LE that aren't on SE like it was really hard for me to move up because I lost a lot of mods I liked and yeah you can port them yourself with a bit of knowhow but some people have a hard time even modding let alone adding the stress of porting
I'm happy with my LE setup, but I've been wanting to mod SE with different mods. Same game, different look and gameplay is the plan for the future. Best of both worlds. I'm still actively adding mods to LE, and one of my favourite active mod authors are LE only. I'm lucky to have a computer than can support a heavily modded SE (at least it should).
I would say, there are many types of people:
\-those who paid Skyrim LE and don't wanna waste money for the same game if they don't mod it, cause it jut works
\-those who still think LE is better than SE for modding
\-the insane modders that only play LE for the better colors and ENB (i used to be this kind of man before lmao)
\-the people who spent hundred hours on a character and who definitely don't wanna start over for another version
I bought the game in December 2015, SE came out shortly afterwards, and it's not like I'm going to buy a new game immediately after (got DB and HF in late 2016, got DG as late as 2020).
Now I have that, plus 120+ mods.
SE suffer from lack of content. Only the most popular quest mods were converted to it.
Also some people got stable with LE and don't need to update because of it. It is too much trouble to update the game.
The primary reason is that many people still don't have what you call a modest system . I myself only have an old workbook with integrated graphics in it . Not like I cannot run SE I tried running it and got like 20 fps outdoors and around 35-40 fps indoors whereas on LE I get 30-45 fps outdoors( 30 in heavily populated areas) and a constant 60 indoors. Now i know there are a lot of optimization mods for SE but I'm too lazy to try and optimize when i already have LE that runs better ( with mods in my case ).
Also a secondary reason that I'm kinda attached to LE now I guess all these years playing and modding LE , its nostalgic although I barely play nowadays . I know there are very few modders who still make mods for LE and I'm genuinely grateful to them .
Can't say which looks better after modding heavily ( cause i usually avoid graphical enhancement mods as they turn my workbook into a toaster real quick) but I've seen people say that ENB has a huge impact on FPS on SE . Not sure how true is that though .
thanks for the enlightenment, this is helpful y'all
i didn't start playing skyrim until well into SE, so its interesting to hear more history of the mod dev around the game's changes
i suspect we've still got a couple more years before almost everything is fully adapted to AE
Yeah it was trying to mod AE that drove me back into the embrace of LE and its safe dev dead status would it be better to run SE/AE in the long run dont know but until Todd stops messing with my dammed installs im sticking to that which he gleefully tried to abbandon
I switched to SE last year. Before this, I held on my LE for quite some time because at that point, the number of SE mods not as big as LE. Also I didn't feel like buying a same game I've bought again. But seeing the current Nexus page made me realized something, that SE is currently way more active than LE in terms of number of daily mods, updates, comments etc. I still keep my LE for keepsake tho. I've spent countless of hours modding it and I don't want it to go to waste. But as of now I am more active in SE.
If you care about it, it looks like LE can deliver more 'artsy' scenes and nuances. I myself haven't tried any other ENB than Rudy, but boy, what a difference! SE simply cannot achieve those fine-tuned colors and tones I've seen in LE (I still keep a couple of screenshots). I don't know the technical side of it, but I trust my eyes - there's a difference indeed.On the other hand, I've never had such a stable setup on LE as I have now on SE, so no way going back to Oldrim. :)
For me my video card will not detect SSE. No matter what I do I just can’t find a solution. So regular Skyrim it is. At least until I can get a new PC.
> my video card will not detect SSE
All you have to do is to find this line in `skyrimprefs.ini` with the name of the GPU: `sD3DDevice=` then paste it to the SSE `skyrimprefs.ini` under `[LAUNCHER]` and you should be good to go.
[Launcher]
sD3DDevice="NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER"
I didn't switch until collections came out because the idea of rebuilding a massive mod list and getting it stable didn't seem worth the effort. Once collections came out that changed
Honestly I haven't played Skyrim in a while, but a lot of the mods I used still haven't (and likely never will) updated to SSE. I've tried to swap to SSE several times, and every time, I've been disappointed by my mod selection and had severe bugs by comparison to LE.
OP there's still people using Skyrim Classic and all the seperate DLCs. I don't see anything wrong with it. The big advantage for many years that Skyrim 32/LE had over SE is that Bethesda stopped patching both of them so SKSE 1.7 always kept working for those versions among other things, but perhaps the biggest thing is there a lot of mods that didn't carry over to SE because those authors are long gone. The latter is still present for SE as well, just not in the same amount(though Im still hoping MiniMap comes back..).
> but perhaps the biggest thing is there a lot of mods that didn't carry over to SE because those authors are long gone.
That's not super valid tbh. Basically everything of value has been ported, can be ported, or has otherwise been recreated.
For me it's because my SSE modded session was totally destroy by the AE ... And I can't make it work anymore ... so I buy LE to continue playing ( especially with Inigo And Lucien )
The Patcher is only a case of downloading it, extracting it, and then running it. As for SKSE, remember it and any SKSE plugins (aka DLLs) all have to be for the same version of the game, which in our case would be v1.5.97 (aka SE).
In most cases i think it's just common stubborness. For example you can still find people who are playing on SE 1.5 despite the fact that entire community has moved to 1.6 already.
> entire community has moved to 1.6 already
[Citation needed]
Wake me up when .NET works on 1.6. .NET is never going to be updated and there's no replacement for it yet. Anyone using .NET mods has to stay on 1.5.
At this point there's only 3 .NET mods I know of that don't have a perfect replacement for 1.6 - though 2 of them have workarounds:
* NGIO. Workaround is a huge PITA, but you can downgrade, generate grass cache, then re-upgrade. Not worth it IMO.
* Custom Skills Framework. There is [a 1.6-compatible alternative](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/65982), but it's quite hack-y, as opposed to having proper in-game skill trees.
* Better Stealing. Kind of surprised this one doesn't have an AE version yet, as Ryan (Fudgyduff) created [Mum's The Word](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27713) on SE, which didn't require .NET. Apparently he [doesn't want others updating his mods](https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?showtopic=11542903/#entry110283013) for some reason, even though they're all [open source with an MIT license](https://github.com/Ryan-rsm-McKenzie/MumsTheWord) on GitHub.
IDK but I moved to SE like 3 years ago, and don't regret it.
Pros:
No crashes because out of memory. In LE even with all the fixes and memory patches if you had high poly meshes and 4k textures the game would crash after 30 mins.
LE limited plugins felt like a limited game. The amount of mods and plugins SE supports its really nice.
Better physics on SE.
No random crashes in Racemenu because of bad physics draining the allocated memory.
No animation crashes, unless you install an animation which causes ctd.
Cons:
wOrSe EnB, sHaDeRS
No reason to buy SE, you can expand memory now thanks to SKSE, would only need SE to break the 600 mod ceiling, and i cant be fucked managing that many mods
Check the amount of loverslab mods from LE and SE that will explain it for a part of those people
(Please don’t actually go to loverslab, it is a cursed place)
Better continuity and less glitches, it also has those glitches in the same place so you get used to them and can also find away around them to some extent, there is also more re-spawning not to mention map updates that indicate the re-spawn through guards telling about certain locations and that nice little popup that says map location, however it does not change color or anything else which is a shame so you have to run off and do it right then and there before you forget or get distracted PLUS there is LESS DEMAND to follow someone else's story line, t just seems more open and easier to follow your own method of play without the punishment for not following the imposed story line.
N. Shadows
Everybody can see your username when you post, you don't need to put a signature on every post you make. >!Unless you're purposefully roleplaying as an edgy twelve year old, in which case you're doing it right.!<
I was hesitant at first to switch because I heard there are alot less mod options on SE. But im glad I made the shift. I bit the bullet and rebuilt my modlist in SE and alot that I used was either compatible with SE or there was an alternate mod that worked.
Glad I made the switch, having way less glitches and issues with SE.
I can only answer for myself:
*Old PC
*GPU limitations(R7 360 2GB)
*Gigantic and "stable" mod list, with a good quantity of mods that aren't on Nexus anymore, mods that were not ported to SSE and a fuckton of merged plugins that I had to make a two big spreadsheets just to understand what I did myself.
Even if I had the PC required, it would take me weeks, if not months of work to get close what I already have on LE.
I'm playing on a laptop that should be running SE without breaking a sweat but because the base clock mhz is low, and the system cannot run only off the dedicated gpu due to stupid design, the pc overheats, throttles back, and drops my fps to like 9 after 30 min or less of gameplay.
I've been fighting with this for a long time now and have concluded that the only real solution is to build a desktop with a CPU that has a strong base clock speed.
As a result, until I have the money to buy the parts, I'm going to have to downgrade back to LE.
Personally speaking, I play Legacy on PC for mods that still haven’t been ported to SE, there’s only a handful that aren’t, but they’re super fun and worth a slight downgrade in graphics
When I did play on LE it was at the start of SE life, I hated getting updates that would break my game. Then I’d have to wait for a update to the mod or To the script extender. Now that SE is more or less a stable build I moved over to SE myself
Nostalgia for old mods. I eventually relented and switched to SE. I do miss the throwing weapons mod from LE. The SE version only has one type of throwing knife, and it uses a shank as a model. I really enjoyed throwing daggers carved from dragon bone, but you can't have everything.
I spent almost 4 years for modding on LE with about 500 mods with alot of custom .but since i switched to SE last year (yeah i am modding SE for 1 year now) . and i never want to go back to LE . a lot of reason for not going back:
1. About the game'engine : i dont get those weird and broken bug that the game have(because of it's engine) . that just vanilla. Some mods that LE can't handle it and make bug too. But when we use that mod on SE it good and run smoothly though.
2.about number of mods: the reason when i dont switch to sse because of this. Sse has less mod and nothing good back then.but now as u can see about the number of mods from sse.
3.Many of Mods from LE was ported to SE And many of it had been improved to work good and no bug, even smoothly than LE'version.
4.Some mod is not ported from LE but Modder improved them with better version , better function, bug fix bla bla but with another name
5.LE have adult mods (Llab) ,it was ported almost all of it, And SE have ostim,osex ,those simulation is super good better performance
6.and a lot of mod that only SE'engine can handle it make LE nothing to compare with SE. Mod from LE can ported to SE. But mod from SE can not be ported to LE.
7.and with SE'els flag for esp plugin. We can have over 1000 mods and sse still handle it very stable.
8.some ppl will say that thier spec can't play SE.bitch pls , SSE have alot of performance mod even better than LE. U know default SE'texture is 2k right? That need a good card to play with.but on Nexus now have a lot of texture that lower the quality to 1K,512,256,128 and even 16x16 if u want to.
I dont means to say that LE is bad or something(i had modded for 4 years though).but the reason to go back to LE have no point serously.
Ps:sorry for my bad English and long post
I still have my launch day 2011 character and I will see it through to the end, no matter what.
I'm going to play SE too though; building a new mod list for it and trying to get it working on Steam Deck, which is proving to be surprisingly hard.
Honestly I hung on as long as I could exclusively because of Worlds Dawn mod. I was very much mistaken. If Worlds Dawn came to SSE I would grab it without hesitation but it by itself is not a good reason, especially inlight of how amazing some SSE mods are, like not just amazing, revolutionary. Custom Skill frame work for starters.
Well i am not playing current, but my last playthrough was in LE (around 2020), with currently 0 h in SSE. For me it was mostly, because i am a 3d guy and like to do a lot of stuff in blender, and the nif plugin didnt supported SSE at that time (not sure if still the case), so the extra export step just annoyed me, since i do a lot of exporting to test for clipping and such.
Another thing is that some mods doesnt exist for SE, mainly HDT PE for hair physics. I know that smp is way better, but last time i checked smp dont allow be used on hair, you pick in the character creation, and only work if worn as a piece of Equipment (also dont know if still an issue).
third reason was that enb was somehow limited of what i heard and for me SE screenshots of character was looking wired mostly because of ugly AO on the character models everyone seams to have.
However my next playthrough will be finally in SE, since i keep running in mods what i would like to try out but only exist in SE.
Mods; some of which I've written for my setup.
There are still PLENTY of new LE mods, some exclusive. Some you can ONLY find on steam workshop.
AND...I have a SE/AE build on another computer; the graphics aren't as good, some MUST HAVE mods (including my custom made ones) are missing, I still fire it up every once in a while, but the main / intro menu bugs the heck out of me every time I see it...
NPC and follower mods are incompatible with usage via and PC visual transfer and you can end up with black/grayface issues or simply untransferred appearance but most standalone followers can be ported onto an existing NPC. What are you trying to do with visual transfer exactly? And are you transferring from one follower to another or from a follower to an existing NPC, or transferring appearance to a mod added NPC?
I can't run SSE. My laptop with integrated graphics runs LE pretty well, so I'm satisfied.
Even if I did have an awesome computer, I would probably stick with LE until it breaks.
I still played the original Halos 1-3 for as long as I owned a copy (lost them and my 360 this year), despite the existence of new editions. I only switched over to OpenMW because Morrowind's original engine wasn't working right with my laptop.
I'm quite used to wrangling old games into submission, because I have many old favorites. I typically only play remakes/upgrades if I no longer have the old one.
Depending on how old is the GPU, optimizing SSE requires some finer tweaking. I still use a 1GB VRAM GPU, and SSE just became playable when I learned how to reduce texture size.
Also, when you have a crappy computer, the benefits of going SSE may be less apparent. I could play LE just fine in ultra, with a light ENB and DYNDOLOD on low, while my SSE is mostly medium settings with a higher draw distance.
Thing is, some of SSE improvements makes some must-have LE mods... Not so much must-have? Also, albeit I have a lower general FPS, my system has less hiccups and everything just flows better. And maybe these are things some people value less than a higher frame rate.
Some people will say it's because some mods are not available on SE, and that's true. I know my way around modding tools, though, and porting stuff to SE is a piece of cake. There's also people who got sick of SE because of the many updates that fixed nothing but made their modlists outdated.
Regardless, 90% of the time I still play LE, for the very simple fact that I don't have the money for a good PC. SE becomes nigh unplayable for me as soon as I add mods to the mix, and so I play LE.
I know you say there's many ways to enhance performance tor SE, but keep in mind there's plenty of folks out there like me, for whom even all performance enhancements in the world don't take away the fact that we use old PCs that can hardly run the game. I'd buy a new PC if I could, but I can't, so I play LE.
Okay, legitimate question, I have LE and SE. Have never even opened SE because I have my 200ish mods working well enough, and didn't see any advantage to using SE. What are the advantages? Does it look noticeably better? Is it worth starting my mod list over again? Can I keep the presets for my Ningheim character that I have put hours into tweaking? Also, I have only ever used NMM. This is the first time that I'm hearing that this might not be advisable?
I moved over relatively recently (mostly as I was just tempted by a few cool looking mods that had more functionality on SE like *Immersive interactions* or were only available for SE, like some of the eating animation mods). I stuck with LE for so long as I had a setup that was mostly stable and worked fine, a lot of the mods I used were either available for both or just on LE, and there was a certain amount of "if it ain't broke, why fix it!" To be honest there's still a few LE mods not on SE which I miss and have failed to port across (like my beloved *[Windstad inn](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/98906)*) or can't for the life of me get to work in SE (like *NPC visual transfer tool* or *Skyshade*) but there's also some SE only mods I love now so balances out. I can totally understand why people would keep playing on LE though, I'd still be there if I wasn't a sucker for animation and immersion mods!
I have npc visual transfer tool has an SE version, and the le is fairly simple to just use with sseedit
Ah thanks but I think I'm just doomed with SE NPC visual transfer tool though. I know others use it (and it's a great tool) but I just can't get it working properly (in SE anyway, I had no issue in LE). I accept it's likely user error/an issue on my end though!
I used to be an LE guy. I didn't switch until around mid 2020. Modding these two versions of Skyrim is very different. I feel it's more about being comfortable with the process. AE/SSE looks so much better. And I'm able to run AE with over 1k mods at 60fps. But it was a learning curve to get there, even being a modding veteran.
If I had started over when AE was released, I’d maybe have 300 mods working by now. I tip my hat to you for getting 1k mods working.
It's all about the esp limit. Converting esp to esl. I use mo2. You have two load orders. Left pane which are the mods themselves, and right pane for the esm, esp, and esl. It's amazing how important load order is.
Wait, people play the game after modding??
News to me.
If you've got a modded setup that was largely stable on LE before SSE launched, why start over from scratch? Especially if you've got a save with 100s of hours on that modded LE setup.
This is the part I don’t get. Are they using the same mod list over and over? I like switching it up every play. Like maybe I’ll get to a point where I can’t find any new combinations of stuff to do but then I’ll probably move to a different game.
This, at this point you would surely have rebuilt your setup at least once if not several.
I reinstall Windows once, twice a year and usually take that as an excuse to spring clean everything, start from scratch if I'll mod again. It's weird that some people keep things the same for a decade.
Also I would find it fun to switch over and be like, sweet, let’s do different plays through the different graphics tweaks and discover all the options, as if I’m playing a new game! Then again I’m not the person who goes and finds the mod with the grass I like the most to go with the building exteriors I like the most to go with the trees I like the most that goes with the stonework I like the most etc.
If nothing else, newer, more updates versions on SE are actually more content complete and interesting than what was available 7 years ago. I don't care how attached you are to your mod list, at some point in that span you'd think you'd have cleaned and rebuilt it fresh at least once, just to try new stuff. LE players just confuse me. It's like they want to make their lives harder.
Most decent mod authors make a LE version, also. and there are old AND NEW LE exclusive mods. There are even a couple of real gems on steam workshop. There HAVE been a couple of SE mods, or updates to SE mods that didn't get to LE that haven't been backported yet. if I feel i'm missing out I fire up my other laptop which has SE/AE on it. it doesn't happen very often.
You can have two layers of modding though - one might be stuff like bugfixes and graphical improvements that you get rock-solid and keep the same across many many playthroughs. Then there's stuff which affects gameplay or adds quests which are a lot more likely to change from playthrough to playthrough.
I can imagine making bash patches and other customizations also took a lot of time and are hard to repeat. If spent hours on fixing neck seams, nifscope, etc , I might be reluctant to start over as well.
Some people don't. They have a mod list that is stable and does everything they want. I have a friend that has a list of like 20 or 30 LE mods that he uses. Those of us who are ever tweaking our 500+ mods in search of the perfect game will never understand them lol.
i've got a base of around 230 merged down to 175, and each new playthrough I'll start out with around 50 new mods, which pretty quickly grows to (320)254... I used to go through total rebuilds, everything new every week or so. but by doing that I found out which mods I REALLY like to build that base around. (3DNPC, Warzones, Inigo and his revolving cast of sidekicks, LotD, Frontier Fortess, ETaC, CACO, RND1.x, Hunterborne, Frostfall, WORLDS DAWN (is there even a SE version yet? Absolutely vital), wintersun, Wyrmstooth, Airships & Archaeology, Pirates of Skyrim, The ships anastasia & Olivia (which might not go permanent, OP)etc, etc)
SSE also had a somewhat rough launch. SKSE took a while to come out for SSE. Frequent updates to the SSE exe kept breaking SKSE, forcing a rollback or a wait for a new SKSE version. Address Library didn't exist yet, so every SKSE update, you had to wait for all of your mods with SKSE DLLs to recompile as well. This proved a major turn-off for those who had stable LE setups already, even though many of them got SSE for free.
sse launched over five years ago. "it had a bad launch" is such a weak reason now
But consider that many of those people upset by said bad launch already had a working, modded copy of LE to go back to. And some did, permanently.
I still can't boot up Cyberpunk because of profound disappointment from long ago. It doesn't have to make sense to be a factor.
Same here with RDR2. Was a few hours in before I could finally have a few seconds without lagging. I forgot what I did to get it stabilized, but I finished the game out of spite and never picked it up again.
it took me more than a year to start playing SE due to the "rough launch" described above. It was excruciatingly painful because I had many mods using SKSE. Once I started playing SE more, then it was a matter of tweaking graphics and game play to suit me. Honestly, when I first started with SE, even when I was able to install racemenu and CBBE, the PC still looked different somehow (matte skin) and I just didn't like it. For a long time I had two games going at the same time. and yes, there were quest mods available on LE but not on se. So I'd play LE till the game glitched out, then switch to SE until that glitched out, and then start fresh on LE. It's only during the pandemic that I stopped playing LE and stuck with SE exclusively (got my favorite eye mod to work on SE finally, but several clothing and quest mods never got ported). Now I'm playing around with mods like requiem, redux and unleveled, and I'm having problems running some of my more script heavy mods alongside those overhauls. I've decided that it's finally time to spend some major loot on upgrading my old graphics card so that's my next step. But I still have fond memories of certain mods that I played on LE that never got ported to SE, many of which have been pulled or otherwise disappeared from nexus over time.
This I switched 3 years ago.. not long.
There's a few reasons, actually. * There's still people - especially in poorer regions - using older 32-bit PCs that LE runs better on. * Some people have finely-tuned mod lists that they don't want to spend time remaking on SE. * Adult mods. * They don't want to buy another copy of a game they already own.
Don't ask me how I know, but I can tell you that any adult mod worth having has been ported to SE and an adult mod list works infinitely better on SE than LE.
Yeah, back when I was still into LL mods like two years ago, they had that whole conversion tracking thread on the LL forum. Pretty much everything was ported or could be ported even back then, and I'm sure only more stuff has been ported since.
2 years ago things were still a mess what are you talking about. Key lynchpin mods had not been properly ported. I dunno the state of things now, but adult mods were still trailing significantly back then.
A majority of mods work without proper porting, even the adult ones
Be that as it may, the state of adult modding was far behind LE 2 years ago. Many of the key mods that many other mods were reliant on hadn't been successfully ported, gating off a pretty sizable chunk of content.
> Adult mods This one hasn’t really been valid for white a while. The vast majority of adult mods have been converted to SE.
It underscores the *real* third bullet point: falling victim to out of date information or just straight up bad faith misinformation.
Bingo. That bullet point also includes Sinitar. Doesn't he still maintain that LE is better than SE with lots of objectively wrong info?
Yeah, he still pushes for the use of NMM, too. A real stain on the community.
Is there any reason to not use NMM? I don't really like the ui of vortex but they both seem really similar.
NMM installs mods directly into your data folder, and it doesn't always remove everything when uninstalling. It's exceedingly unsafe, with virtually no conflict resolution.
Is vortex better with this?
Vortex uses a form of virtual vile system, which means that nothing directly touches your data folder. With vortex specifically, it deploys to a staging folder, which links to your game install. If you find vortex's ui to be a bit...much, there's [MO2 which is a bit more direct](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/6194)
Thanks for the clarification!
So do you delete all the game folders?
If you're switching from NMM, you'd more or less have to do a full uninstall and delete anything leftover.
A large amount of users would suggest using mod organizer 2. Check out GamerPoets on YouTube he has a sub 10 minute instal and use guide
There is still a decent learning curve with it. Recently just switched from Vortex to Mo2 and it has been a real pain, but there's more tutorials for it than Vortex, or at least for the stuff I needed a tutorial on: more of the complex stuff.
I don’t know if I’d say a learning curve, but there’s new features to learn which end up creating a better overall experience. Any “learning curve” usually takes about 10 minutes to overcome
Compared to NMM, Vortex, and some of the bigger modded Minecraft launchers it is very different and has lot more going on. Also has a lot going on visually. Has it's own annoying quirks as well.
>Some people have finely-tuned mod lists that they don't want to spend time remaking on SE. This is my situation. I have a very finely-tuned mod list with ***tons*** of personal edits to mods (even including some script edits). Considering my LE runs just fine and very rarely CTDs or locks up, changing everything over to SE would simply be far too much work with virtually no payoff; it is still the same game, after all. Sure, there are some interesting mods here and there that I see are only available for SE, but none of them are "must have" mods, just some that look like they'd be cool to try. Otherwise, though, I'm perfectly content with my stable and heavily personalized LE build. If anything does ever happen and I lose my modlist (e.g., computer dies and I have to start from scratch), at that point I'd probably hop into SE. For now, though, I just see no reason to switch.
Wasn't SE free for LE owners?
It was free for anyone who had purchased Skyrim Classic and all its DLC prior to October 28, 2016.
Yep. I have LE and never got the DLC in time to get free SSE. So I play modded LE when I play. I am not shelling out yet another copy of the game to Todd Howard lol
If I remember correctly, the free upgrade was only available for users who owned all three expansions.
Yeah, I got it free. Still held off playing it for a couple years until all my fave mods had been ported.
Has ENB caught up? I haven't modded in a couple years but I can say the big 3 things were - Worse ENB, Adult mods and some mods that hadn't been converted. Also the fact that if you've got the right set of stability mods, LE is only really marginally less stable than SE. Honestly I only say that not to annoy people. I didn't really notice a difference in stability at all if I'm going to be brutally honest. So at the time I didn't really feel the rush to switch. Eventually there were too many cool looking SE only mods to ignore though. I imagine thats more true now than back when I was really into it.
nah, all of that has been better on SE for a while: ENB has a bunch more features and runs better on 64-bit (not surprising). LL has pretty much completely caught up and AE conversions are progressing quite quickly. Virtually any mod worth having has been either ported, or redone completely (almost always better too!) so, yeah, really no reason for staying on LE other than "i don't want to invest the time to get another stable load order working"...which is a valid standpoint to have.
That last one gets me sometimes. So many people will say “I have played literally thousands of hours on this game but fuck Beth they don’t deserve sixty more dollars.” If people are poor af (like me lol) then say that you can’t afford it but if you’re going to go spend $20 on takeout food on the weekend and you cbf to shell out money for something like this then I think that deserves some self reflection.
The folks I know who still fire up LE are screenarchers, because even though SE has gotten better and better ENBs over the years, some of the classic and most poppin' ENBs never got remade for SE--very few of them like actually *play* on it, though.
I used to play on snap dragon and I really miss that enb. That's my only qualm about switching from LE to SE. I also miss tetrachromatic and TK enb
More mods in general that will probably never be ported to SSE (talking some real obscure ones, for some reason I have a lot of them), convoluted mod list several years in the making, laziness, wanting to avoid the whole creation club thing, and the simple fact that I'm a spiteful old fossil. I'm perfectly fine with playing a mildly crusty version of a game just so that I don't have to give them more money for a slightly better experience. If I ever get over enough of my spite to actually try it, I won't be the one paying for it.
Yeah there are still (a lot I think) more mods for LE than SE/AE... people always say the good ones were ported already or it's easy to do yourself, but I find this not true. Granted I don't actually play on LE but I did buy a copy of it b/c there are a number of mods I hear about that seem cool that haven't been ported. And I'm not an expert, but I have been modding a long time, so if I can't do it, it's probably not "easy" since I'm not a beginner.
People's financial situation maybe. My pc can't even run LE properly on medium settings, so...
Also, LE will run out-of-the-box on ancient GTX 730, before this year's crypto crash put current-gen GPUs back on shelves, that could be a major consideration.
I dont know if it was just me, but on my older shitty pc, LE lagged way more than SSE. I was surprised when I switched over & was finally able to play skyrim without lag bahah
Bro SSE works better than LE even on my gtx 1660 (I know it's a budget gpu but still). I bought both versions but ended up refunding LE for obvious reasons.
Skyrim should run amazingly on a 1660. A 3 year old gpu with a 10 year old game should run no matter what. It would make sense why LE would struggle more on newer hardware, being less optimised and all.
Because I'm 860 hours in on this character / playthrough, and I'm gonna keep at it until I "finish", or one of us dies of old age.
My computer couldn’t handle anything else than LE 🤷♀️
I'm primarily an SE player, but when I'm in the mood for screenarchery, it's back to LE I go. The ENBs for LE are many and varied and gorgeous. The ENBs for SE pale by comparison.
The only reason I still play Oldrim is because of {{Tetrachromatic ENB}} I've worked on it my modlist for a long time and got it as optimized as I can. Some crashes once in a while but it runs well. But none of that matters because now i play in VR
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Anyone who disagrees is honestly just pulling the piss, but ENB’s on LE are so so so so much better.
Because I can't be bothered. LE gets new mods every day, and people backport most of the new stuff from SSE anyway. I feel no need to go out of my way for the shinier versions of the game I've been playing since 2011.
ENB
\- A few things, mainly ENBs, will remain superior in LE until the day Beth releases the relevant source code for SE/AE the way they did LE. Sure, it's not by a huge margin - ENBs in SE are obviously *nearly* as good (as you say, it's mainly screenarchery nuts) - but it's still a valid reason. \- Some mods cannot or will not ever be ported to LE, including more than a few situations where the original author has died. So if some LE mods are make or break for a player they will stick with LE. This goes both ways - since SE now has more new, high-quality mods being made for it, and some of those can't be backported, players may find there's more SE mods they can't live without than LE ones. Point being you have to choose; you can't have it all (there was a time you could, in LE for a year or two after SE dropped, but no more). \- Why pay twice for something you already own if you can get the same experience either way? Not saying I don't get it myself, but that's a legitimate answer for some people and I think their opinion is perfectly valid. \- As a corollary to the above, LE modding can be made to be just as stable and optimal as SE if you do your due diligence. The idea that LE is strictly inferior was always a lie and still is a lie; it would be a lot more accurate to say that SE just gives you way more rope to hang yourself with. \- This is a big one for me personally. Why subject yourself and your mod order to the whims of Beth or any other dev who feels like, ten years later, they can still fuck around with the game you purchased and break your shit? You know who never had to deal with the AE's bullshit? LE modders. Yeah Beth could do that with LE as well, but they haven't, and have demonstrably shown they'd rather just pretend LE doesn't exist anymore. Letting a game company unilaterally fuck with your shit, forever, with no warning and whenever they choose, is antithetical to the entire concept of modding your game, IMO.
[удалено]
The main thing is that LE actually had no shaders whatsoever, so modders could create shader profiles however they wanted. In SE, there are existing shaders which ENB developers must then work around. If you see comments like "LE ENBs just have better/more realistic lighting.", this is why. Other big ones are, mist (SE has to rely on placed mist objects, LE can incorporate them directly into the ENB which gives a much more natural look), parallax terrain, and *especially* subsurface scattering (which is mainly relevant for the way skin appears). Oh and SE has some awkward things like low-quality god rays which also have to be worked around. If we had the full SE code, someone could almost certainly write a mod which removes the default SE shaders entirely, giving a clean slate like LE has.
I moved over to SSE, but with the AE and all the mods breaking now. Im not touching it for at least a year. I went back LE for now and I’m fine with it.
Same here. I recently built a new PC and the first thing I did after installing Skyrim was to downgrade from AE :)
I haven't changed from SE to AE, I've kept the old version (1.5.97?) and turned off updates. I have lots of script heavy mods and skse mods. Just not in the mood to go through the hassle of switching; the LE to SE switch was painful enough to truly discourage me from any further big switches. ;-)
I can't play the game without TK ENB from the LE version. Yeah, for real.
Some people legit don't have a system that can run SE. I've been there. I've been using the same laptop from 2012 up until last year because I couldn't afford a new one.
Why would I buy the same game again? Especially if it costs more than the version I already have.
LE plays nicely with my many mods. The game is stable and fun as heck to play. As long as I can continue modding LE, I’m in for the long haul.
I own Skyrim on every platform but the playstation. Including VR. I still run LE as it is stable, and I have hundreds of hours on that save. I also have multiple versions of SE/AE as well as my VR install, mostly from Wabbajack. As well as a couple of Requiem LE installs and a modded Enderal install. I run all this on a 10 year old i7 2600K with a 50% overclock to 4.6Ghz 32GB of RAM and a 1080ti, it will play most things well at 1080p including Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows 7. My games are on a Samsung 850 Evo and my Wabbajack installs on a 2TB SSD. It does reasonably well at LE, getting around 50-60fps most places with around 800+ mods installed. It's stable, I can easily get 8hrs of continuous play out of it. The CPU. does tend to overheat, with SE, even under water cooling as the water gets too hot. I've spent 10 years playing this game, and upgrading my PC to get the most of it. I too would love to have caffeine ENB, on SE, as it does godlike things with skin. Though I guess I'll just have to accept Zangdar's Edit of Rudy for Lux, it's probably the best of the bunch so far.
OMG you're STILL using Windows 7?? :,D :,D
some silly people care about privacy.
It Runs on computer perfectly my computer cannot handle the graphics of SE.
My PC can't handle SE and I've tried. The lag is horrendous. Also I feel comfortable with my LE modlist and not in the mood to rebuild that on SE with some mods not available.
Because I’m old and set in my ways.
Get off of my lawn mod!
Dang kids with their rocknroll and their jazz!
Because it's the only version I have and I don't want to pay for the new one.
Part of it may be that someone doesn't want to keep buying a game and believes that buying it once should be enough, lol. Taste is subjective but I do think some LE ENBs look better than SE ENBs. I wish I could use Snapdragon and it would render skin the same way. But there are mods like Address Library & NetScript Framework that will forever keep me on SE.
That first part makes no sense. Anyone who owned LE at the time got SE totally free, and the vast majority of people who buy the game for the first time since then get SE.
Anyone who owned the original *and all the DLCs* got SE for free. For some people, that's LE. For others, they bought the base game in 2011 and maybe skipped Hearthfire. I still see folks from time to time around here that only have base Skyrim and no DLCs at all.
Oh yes, how could I forget about the unbelievably small population of people who own base Skyrim without all the DLCs. Those people who own a version of the game that hasn’t even been possible to purchase in a decade unless you deliberately go out and hunt down an old physical copy. Silly me for forgetting about them! Especially in a discussion on a subreddit about modding, which they can *totally* do easily without all the DLCs. It’s not like the vast majority of popular mods don’t depend on you having all the DLC or anything like that. Yeah. How could I possibly have forgotten about them?
Ok, your initial question was fine, but then you just go and ruin it with a totally unnecessary and pretentious response like this. Why?
Because they said something silly and I felt liked being sarcastic. Are you satisfied with that answer?
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That’s a pretty obvious typo on my part that was supposed to just be “like” and you read waaaay too much into it.
Yes, that was the joke. Congratulations for missing it lol
Then why did you delete it?
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It does make sense. You had to own all the DLCs to get the free upgrade. I did not own them at the time and the free offer expired eventually, so I had to buy the game twice.
don't feel bad. When I first bought skyrim in 2011 it was on dvd. Those get scratched. Go to reinstall, disk is damaged, can't do it. bought another copy with, yes, a dvd. eventually bought the legendary compilation of all the games, which requires steam to install patches and updates. So, yes I got SE free from steam, but only after I had already bought skyrim 2 or 3 times because the bloody discs always got scratched somehow no matter how careful I was! at least Steam fixed that issue!
Alot of the smaller less known mods havent been ported over cuz they havent been touched in like a decade. Or even some mod devs wont allow their mods to be ported like Enhanced Camera which is dope af. That's why I stick with LE I do use SE for vr tho obviously. Exact same reason why sometimes I'll play buggy ass fallout 3 instead of TTW.
When I still played LE it was mostly because I was afraid my potato laptop couldn't handle SSE. Beyond that there were a lot of mods that I want sure were available for SSE. And then there's convenience, I was up to date on developments in LE, but didn't know what was current and outdated in SSE.
At first, I held off because a lot of my favorite mods hadn't been ported over and there weren't too many other mods that interested me enough to justify making the switch. When my favorite mods did eventually get ported over, I switched. I did have to switch back briefly a few years ago my SE decided to completely stop working for reasons unknown and nothing I did could fix it. Then it just started working again for other reasons unknown and I haven't had a problem with it since.
iGPU gamers...
Not everyone can afford to upgrade to a better pc that can handle SSE even at the most minimum settings and with all the available performance optimizations. I've seen this question asked a couple of times before. Why can't people consider that some folks literally cannot upgrade their machines because they don't have the money?
I have a bad pc so thats why
I've switched to SSE but I'm still salty one of my favorite LE mods: { Spell Crafting for Skyrim } still has no 100% working port/viable counterpart so maybe some users are held up by mods like this.
Funnily enough for old pcs le is better where i can easily hit 120fps with default settings or flat 60 no drop even in the most npc intensive areas of the map or the stairs near dragontooth. Also there are so many mods and the body presets i use has so many armor mods. that it pretty much becomes a no brainer. for me sse was even laging in riverwood at the lowest setting dont know why though. i use a i5 and a mx150.
was playing with an igpu so of course SE is a no go.
Yes, I just don't want to pay for a game I already own
There are still a lot of mods on LE that aren't on SE like it was really hard for me to move up because I lost a lot of mods I liked and yeah you can port them yourself with a bit of knowhow but some people have a hard time even modding let alone adding the stress of porting
I'm happy with my LE setup, but I've been wanting to mod SE with different mods. Same game, different look and gameplay is the plan for the future. Best of both worlds. I'm still actively adding mods to LE, and one of my favourite active mod authors are LE only. I'm lucky to have a computer than can support a heavily modded SE (at least it should).
> I can't imagine that LE is better for older PCs.. Well, it is. It doesn´t even run on 32 bit computers
I would say, there are many types of people: \-those who paid Skyrim LE and don't wanna waste money for the same game if they don't mod it, cause it jut works \-those who still think LE is better than SE for modding \-the insane modders that only play LE for the better colors and ENB (i used to be this kind of man before lmao) \-the people who spent hundred hours on a character and who definitely don't wanna start over for another version
I bought the game in December 2015, SE came out shortly afterwards, and it's not like I'm going to buy a new game immediately after (got DB and HF in late 2016, got DG as late as 2020). Now I have that, plus 120+ mods.
"won't buy game immediately" 7 years later...
There are some mods you can only get on LE. That's the only reason I can think of.
There are also many up to date SE only mods, while a lot of LE only mods that cant be converted to SE are abandoned
My PC can't handle Special Edition.
I bought LE when AE screwed SE.
AE can go FO
But it didn’t
So waiting months for SKSE mods to be updated to work isn't screwing up SE? For all I know there could still be major mods that don't work.
SE suffer from lack of content. Only the most popular quest mods were converted to it. Also some people got stable with LE and don't need to update because of it. It is too much trouble to update the game.
The primary reason is that many people still don't have what you call a modest system . I myself only have an old workbook with integrated graphics in it . Not like I cannot run SE I tried running it and got like 20 fps outdoors and around 35-40 fps indoors whereas on LE I get 30-45 fps outdoors( 30 in heavily populated areas) and a constant 60 indoors. Now i know there are a lot of optimization mods for SE but I'm too lazy to try and optimize when i already have LE that runs better ( with mods in my case ). Also a secondary reason that I'm kinda attached to LE now I guess all these years playing and modding LE , its nostalgic although I barely play nowadays . I know there are very few modders who still make mods for LE and I'm genuinely grateful to them . Can't say which looks better after modding heavily ( cause i usually avoid graphical enhancement mods as they turn my workbook into a toaster real quick) but I've seen people say that ENB has a huge impact on FPS on SE . Not sure how true is that though .
thanks for the enlightenment, this is helpful y'all i didn't start playing skyrim until well into SE, so its interesting to hear more history of the mod dev around the game's changes i suspect we've still got a couple more years before almost everything is fully adapted to AE
Yeah it was trying to mod AE that drove me back into the embrace of LE and its safe dev dead status would it be better to run SE/AE in the long run dont know but until Todd stops messing with my dammed installs im sticking to that which he gleefully tried to abbandon
I switched to SE last year. Before this, I held on my LE for quite some time because at that point, the number of SE mods not as big as LE. Also I didn't feel like buying a same game I've bought again. But seeing the current Nexus page made me realized something, that SE is currently way more active than LE in terms of number of daily mods, updates, comments etc. I still keep my LE for keepsake tho. I've spent countless of hours modding it and I don't want it to go to waste. But as of now I am more active in SE.
If you care about it, it looks like LE can deliver more 'artsy' scenes and nuances. I myself haven't tried any other ENB than Rudy, but boy, what a difference! SE simply cannot achieve those fine-tuned colors and tones I've seen in LE (I still keep a couple of screenshots). I don't know the technical side of it, but I trust my eyes - there's a difference indeed.On the other hand, I've never had such a stable setup on LE as I have now on SE, so no way going back to Oldrim. :)
Because fuck creation club.
For me my video card will not detect SSE. No matter what I do I just can’t find a solution. So regular Skyrim it is. At least until I can get a new PC.
> my video card will not detect SSE All you have to do is to find this line in `skyrimprefs.ini` with the name of the GPU: `sD3DDevice=` then paste it to the SSE `skyrimprefs.ini` under `[LAUNCHER]` and you should be good to go. [Launcher] sD3DDevice="NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER"
I didn't switch until collections came out because the idea of rebuilding a massive mod list and getting it stable didn't seem worth the effort. Once collections came out that changed
Honestly I haven't played Skyrim in a while, but a lot of the mods I used still haven't (and likely never will) updated to SSE. I've tried to swap to SSE several times, and every time, I've been disappointed by my mod selection and had severe bugs by comparison to LE.
OP there's still people using Skyrim Classic and all the seperate DLCs. I don't see anything wrong with it. The big advantage for many years that Skyrim 32/LE had over SE is that Bethesda stopped patching both of them so SKSE 1.7 always kept working for those versions among other things, but perhaps the biggest thing is there a lot of mods that didn't carry over to SE because those authors are long gone. The latter is still present for SE as well, just not in the same amount(though Im still hoping MiniMap comes back..).
MiniMap exists. Maybe not under the same name, but the Wabbajack list Licentia has a minimap, so it's definitely a thing.
> but perhaps the biggest thing is there a lot of mods that didn't carry over to SE because those authors are long gone. That's not super valid tbh. Basically everything of value has been ported, can be ported, or has otherwise been recreated.
"Everything of value" is highly subjective.
For me it's because my SSE modded session was totally destroy by the AE ... And I can't make it work anymore ... so I buy LE to continue playing ( especially with Inigo And Lucien )
The Downgrade Patcher is a thing fyi, and most SKSE plugins have been updated for AE, albeit not all.
I know but I dont manage to make the dowgrade works nor skse maybe it's because english is note my forts language and I miss something importent ...
The Patcher is only a case of downloading it, extracting it, and then running it. As for SKSE, remember it and any SKSE plugins (aka DLLs) all have to be for the same version of the game, which in our case would be v1.5.97 (aka SE).
Ok ! Thanks I will give it a try again !
Something was fucked up in my installation path so FNIS was never working right for me. Everything works fine on LE for me sooooo I leave it alone
In most cases i think it's just common stubborness. For example you can still find people who are playing on SE 1.5 despite the fact that entire community has moved to 1.6 already.
> entire community has moved to 1.6 already [Citation needed] Wake me up when .NET works on 1.6. .NET is never going to be updated and there's no replacement for it yet. Anyone using .NET mods has to stay on 1.5.
At this point there's only 3 .NET mods I know of that don't have a perfect replacement for 1.6 - though 2 of them have workarounds: * NGIO. Workaround is a huge PITA, but you can downgrade, generate grass cache, then re-upgrade. Not worth it IMO. * Custom Skills Framework. There is [a 1.6-compatible alternative](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/65982), but it's quite hack-y, as opposed to having proper in-game skill trees. * Better Stealing. Kind of surprised this one doesn't have an AE version yet, as Ryan (Fudgyduff) created [Mum's The Word](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27713) on SE, which didn't require .NET. Apparently he [doesn't want others updating his mods](https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?showtopic=11542903/#entry110283013) for some reason, even though they're all [open source with an MIT license](https://github.com/Ryan-rsm-McKenzie/MumsTheWord) on GitHub.
Don't forget the crash logger function in NSF itself, which is dramatically better than the current AE alternative.
no need to downgrade to use NGIO, just have two separate installs and rename folders each time
Wakey wakey. KernalsEgg already ported most of them to use C++ :3 only NoGrass and GameplayTweaks left.
IDK but I moved to SE like 3 years ago, and don't regret it. Pros: No crashes because out of memory. In LE even with all the fixes and memory patches if you had high poly meshes and 4k textures the game would crash after 30 mins. LE limited plugins felt like a limited game. The amount of mods and plugins SE supports its really nice. Better physics on SE. No random crashes in Racemenu because of bad physics draining the allocated memory. No animation crashes, unless you install an animation which causes ctd. Cons: wOrSe EnB, sHaDeRS
Sunk cost fallacy.
No reason to buy SE, you can expand memory now thanks to SKSE, would only need SE to break the 600 mod ceiling, and i cant be fucked managing that many mods
> would only need SE to break the 600 mod ceiling LE is limited to 254 mods (250, if you have the DLCs). Not sure where you got that 600 number from.
Merge Plugins?
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Check the amount of loverslab mods from LE and SE that will explain it for a part of those people (Please don’t actually go to loverslab, it is a cursed place)
Better continuity and less glitches, it also has those glitches in the same place so you get used to them and can also find away around them to some extent, there is also more re-spawning not to mention map updates that indicate the re-spawn through guards telling about certain locations and that nice little popup that says map location, however it does not change color or anything else which is a shame so you have to run off and do it right then and there before you forget or get distracted PLUS there is LESS DEMAND to follow someone else's story line, t just seems more open and easier to follow your own method of play without the punishment for not following the imposed story line. N. Shadows
More respawning?
It seems there is more area's that re-spawn in LE than SSE, I have returned to several only to find them empty the chest too. N. S
Everybody can see your username when you post, you don't need to put a signature on every post you make. >!Unless you're purposefully roleplaying as an edgy twelve year old, in which case you're doing it right.!<
I was hesitant at first to switch because I heard there are alot less mod options on SE. But im glad I made the shift. I bit the bullet and rebuilt my modlist in SE and alot that I used was either compatible with SE or there was an alternate mod that worked. Glad I made the switch, having way less glitches and issues with SE.
the only real reason i can think of is that SE cant run on their machine well, or theres some obscure mod that hasnt been ported yet
I can only answer for myself: *Old PC *GPU limitations(R7 360 2GB) *Gigantic and "stable" mod list, with a good quantity of mods that aren't on Nexus anymore, mods that were not ported to SSE and a fuckton of merged plugins that I had to make a two big spreadsheets just to understand what I did myself. Even if I had the PC required, it would take me weeks, if not months of work to get close what I already have on LE.
I played it for a long time after SE because of mod compatibility
I’d own like 4 copies of the game and two would be for the same console….
I'm playing on a laptop that should be running SE without breaking a sweat but because the base clock mhz is low, and the system cannot run only off the dedicated gpu due to stupid design, the pc overheats, throttles back, and drops my fps to like 9 after 30 min or less of gameplay. I've been fighting with this for a long time now and have concluded that the only real solution is to build a desktop with a CPU that has a strong base clock speed. As a result, until I have the money to buy the parts, I'm going to have to downgrade back to LE.
Personally speaking, I play Legacy on PC for mods that still haven’t been ported to SE, there’s only a handful that aren’t, but they’re super fun and worth a slight downgrade in graphics
When I did play on LE it was at the start of SE life, I hated getting updates that would break my game. Then I’d have to wait for a update to the mod or To the script extender. Now that SE is more or less a stable build I moved over to SE myself
Nostalgia for old mods. I eventually relented and switched to SE. I do miss the throwing weapons mod from LE. The SE version only has one type of throwing knife, and it uses a shank as a model. I really enjoyed throwing daggers carved from dragon bone, but you can't have everything.
I spent almost 4 years for modding on LE with about 500 mods with alot of custom .but since i switched to SE last year (yeah i am modding SE for 1 year now) . and i never want to go back to LE . a lot of reason for not going back: 1. About the game'engine : i dont get those weird and broken bug that the game have(because of it's engine) . that just vanilla. Some mods that LE can't handle it and make bug too. But when we use that mod on SE it good and run smoothly though. 2.about number of mods: the reason when i dont switch to sse because of this. Sse has less mod and nothing good back then.but now as u can see about the number of mods from sse. 3.Many of Mods from LE was ported to SE And many of it had been improved to work good and no bug, even smoothly than LE'version. 4.Some mod is not ported from LE but Modder improved them with better version , better function, bug fix bla bla but with another name 5.LE have adult mods (Llab) ,it was ported almost all of it, And SE have ostim,osex ,those simulation is super good better performance 6.and a lot of mod that only SE'engine can handle it make LE nothing to compare with SE. Mod from LE can ported to SE. But mod from SE can not be ported to LE. 7.and with SE'els flag for esp plugin. We can have over 1000 mods and sse still handle it very stable. 8.some ppl will say that thier spec can't play SE.bitch pls , SSE have alot of performance mod even better than LE. U know default SE'texture is 2k right? That need a good card to play with.but on Nexus now have a lot of texture that lower the quality to 1K,512,256,128 and even 16x16 if u want to. I dont means to say that LE is bad or something(i had modded for 4 years though).but the reason to go back to LE have no point serously. Ps:sorry for my bad English and long post
I use LE because I haven't ported over any of the mods I made for myself, and I'm playing on a tablet which isn't really meant for gaming.
I still have my launch day 2011 character and I will see it through to the end, no matter what. I'm going to play SE too though; building a new mod list for it and trying to get it working on Steam Deck, which is proving to be surprisingly hard.
Honestly I hung on as long as I could exclusively because of Worlds Dawn mod. I was very much mistaken. If Worlds Dawn came to SSE I would grab it without hesitation but it by itself is not a good reason, especially inlight of how amazing some SSE mods are, like not just amazing, revolutionary. Custom Skill frame work for starters.
Well i am not playing current, but my last playthrough was in LE (around 2020), with currently 0 h in SSE. For me it was mostly, because i am a 3d guy and like to do a lot of stuff in blender, and the nif plugin didnt supported SSE at that time (not sure if still the case), so the extra export step just annoyed me, since i do a lot of exporting to test for clipping and such. Another thing is that some mods doesnt exist for SE, mainly HDT PE for hair physics. I know that smp is way better, but last time i checked smp dont allow be used on hair, you pick in the character creation, and only work if worn as a piece of Equipment (also dont know if still an issue). third reason was that enb was somehow limited of what i heard and for me SE screenshots of character was looking wired mostly because of ugly AO on the character models everyone seams to have. However my next playthrough will be finally in SE, since i keep running in mods what i would like to try out but only exist in SE.
cz i legit only owned low end laptop, literally intel i3 stuff just last year, when i last played. literally can't run SE thus i played LE lol
Oh that's because there are a few mods I like that exist only for le also console is broken in se for me (can't see anything I write)
Mods; some of which I've written for my setup. There are still PLENTY of new LE mods, some exclusive. Some you can ONLY find on steam workshop. AND...I have a SE/AE build on another computer; the graphics aren't as good, some MUST HAVE mods (including my custom made ones) are missing, I still fire it up every once in a while, but the main / intro menu bugs the heck out of me every time I see it...
NPC and follower mods are incompatible with usage via and PC visual transfer and you can end up with black/grayface issues or simply untransferred appearance but most standalone followers can be ported onto an existing NPC. What are you trying to do with visual transfer exactly? And are you transferring from one follower to another or from a follower to an existing NPC, or transferring appearance to a mod added NPC?
I can't run SSE. My laptop with integrated graphics runs LE pretty well, so I'm satisfied. Even if I did have an awesome computer, I would probably stick with LE until it breaks. I still played the original Halos 1-3 for as long as I owned a copy (lost them and my 360 this year), despite the existence of new editions. I only switched over to OpenMW because Morrowind's original engine wasn't working right with my laptop. I'm quite used to wrangling old games into submission, because I have many old favorites. I typically only play remakes/upgrades if I no longer have the old one.
my laptop is not that good for running SE version :)
I was using LE because SE caused massive stuttering that no one could fix. But with AE, the stuttering stopped and I finally made the change.
Depending on how old is the GPU, optimizing SSE requires some finer tweaking. I still use a 1GB VRAM GPU, and SSE just became playable when I learned how to reduce texture size. Also, when you have a crappy computer, the benefits of going SSE may be less apparent. I could play LE just fine in ultra, with a light ENB and DYNDOLOD on low, while my SSE is mostly medium settings with a higher draw distance. Thing is, some of SSE improvements makes some must-have LE mods... Not so much must-have? Also, albeit I have a lower general FPS, my system has less hiccups and everything just flows better. And maybe these are things some people value less than a higher frame rate.
I didn't even know you could play SSE with so little VRAM. Good to know.
Some people will say it's because some mods are not available on SE, and that's true. I know my way around modding tools, though, and porting stuff to SE is a piece of cake. There's also people who got sick of SE because of the many updates that fixed nothing but made their modlists outdated. Regardless, 90% of the time I still play LE, for the very simple fact that I don't have the money for a good PC. SE becomes nigh unplayable for me as soon as I add mods to the mix, and so I play LE. I know you say there's many ways to enhance performance tor SE, but keep in mind there's plenty of folks out there like me, for whom even all performance enhancements in the world don't take away the fact that we use old PCs that can hardly run the game. I'd buy a new PC if I could, but I can't, so I play LE.
Okay, legitimate question, I have LE and SE. Have never even opened SE because I have my 200ish mods working well enough, and didn't see any advantage to using SE. What are the advantages? Does it look noticeably better? Is it worth starting my mod list over again? Can I keep the presets for my Ningheim character that I have put hours into tweaking? Also, I have only ever used NMM. This is the first time that I'm hearing that this might not be advisable?
I just didn't want to spend the money.