Skyrim Anniversary Edition: BUY or PASS? - Review of the NEW DLC CONTENT in Skyrim after 20 Hours

In this video, I’m going to review Skyrim Anniversary Edition and answer the question - is it worth your time and money? I’ve spent about 20 hours playing through the new content, including all of the new quests, survival mode and of course fishing.

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0:00 Introduction
0:54 What Do You Get in Skyrim Anniversary Edition?
2:06 Ghosts of the Tribunal
2:48 The Cause
3:48 Saints and Seducers
4:07 Smaller Quests and Farming
5:01 Fishing
5:21 Survival Mode
6:31 Is Skyrim Anniversary Edition Worth It?
7:34 Quick Note About Mods

So you’re thinking about getting Skyrim Anniversary Edition? Todd Howard has roped us in to buy another upgrade, eh? But what’s actually included in Skyrim Anniversary Edition, you might be asking?

Well there are actually two versions of Anniversary Edition - one is a free update that was released to everyone who already owns Skyrim Special Edition. This includes the brand new survival mode, fishing, as well as the Saints & Seducers and Rare Curios expansion packs. Again, this update is completely free for everyone who already has a copy of Skyrim Special Edition.

But the full version of Anniversary Edition includes even more content; you just gotta pay for it. If you already own Skyrim Special Edition, then the full upgrade costs $20 USD. If you don’t own Special Edition and are buying the entire game then it is $50 USD.

The paid version of Anniversary Edition includes all the content I mentioned earlier in addition to bundling all creation club content for Skyrim, and two brand new questlines - Ghosts of the Tribunal and The Cause. So with the full version you’ll get access to a bunch of new gear, some small side quests, and two full questlines focusing on story elements that tie into Morrowind and Oblivion.

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[TheWelshGeth]

I've heard the fishing rods damage NPC's, I can't wait to become a serial killing Argonian who's weapon of choice is a fishing rod.

[Arijit_Das_]

Anniversary edition has arrived and I'm still playing the OG Legendary edition.

[neilprice]

Note: You can turn survival mode on and off whenever you want. So you can switch it off to fast travel.
Mods that use Dll files are completely broken, so are mods that change the games mechanics too much. General mods that alter things slightly still work (for the most part)

[stratospherica]

I paid for the upgrade since the Elder Scrolls is my favourite series, and I don't regret it. I've had Survival Mode for a while (got it while it was free back when Creation Club was new) and I've been using it consistently. The Cause was good, I really like Ayleid stuff so I was excited to revisit that at least a little. The Ayleid ruin tileset ported from Blades looks really good. I didn't know Ghosts of the Tribunal had new voice acting, so I'm excited to try that out!

Honestly, I'd recommend it to people who have SSE already, or as a definitive edition for people who still haven't played it, but if you've already played Skyrim and would have to buy the whole Anniversary Edition for full price, you could probably give it a miss.

[jackpfefferkorn]

Lack of fast travel would be so much less of an issue with just a few additions to the transportation systems. All there is in the base game are carriages that can go from major hold capitols to other hold capitols, and ships that connect Solitude, Dawnstar and Windhelm. Carriages at Hearthfire homes have can go to smaller towns as well. I hope there's at least a mod that adds Hearthfire homes to the destination options of any carriage. Options to get to and from Fort Dawnguard and Castle Volkihar would also be nice, as that are so remote. Yes, you can get boats to Castle Volkihar but it's 500 gold and it's a one way trip. I don't believe magical teleportation like in Morrowind is lore friendly at this point, but it would be cool to be able to teleport between the various court wizards and the College of Winderhold.

[Narutalia]

Great review as per usual, Dan! But just stick to using mods, y'all. They've got free mods for WAY more things than what these "add-ons" can do.

Honestly tired of them reselling Skyrim like this, but there will always be a huge group of people to by what basically amounts to Tod seeing some popular mods and going "yeah, uh... Slap some fish and make it cold. They'll love it. They like mods."

[deviantknight]

Does anniversary edition add actual new enemies and enemies with the new weapons and armors as spawning enemies?

[al]

Ive only done 1 100% run of Skyrim and that was at release i always find myself bored after an hour of modding but this dlc for some reason has me immersed as i know its vanilla and a little bit to mix it up but not too much like mods which make you want something new to appear every corner of the game. Great review as per usual but i think the £15 is worth it to play this one more time before ES 6.

[ImperialAgent-uskn]

Those new content specially the armor can be modded, im already working on lord mail.

[noahwolff]

I enjoy survival mode.
It adds a very tolkein ish feel with all the walking.

[MikefromTexas]

Any graphics or fps improvements?

At all???

[luisemoralesfalcon]

On one side they included MODS while Bioware uses modders as free workers with barely a mention in their blogs but on the other side Bethesda made it harder for new mods to be made.

[vanyadolly]

Thanks for this. I've been looking forward to the reviews starting to come in.

Personally I'm having a blast with the update and I'm a big fan of survival mode. Fast travel ruins the game imo.

[waelse]

I'd avoid updates on pc if you use mods, supposedly it breaks a lot of them. Xbox seems mostly ok.
I played survivor mode once, it was fun but I'd turn it off to go up the mountain, and added mods to add more carriages.

[mrrrbanks]

Did they patch the bugs they didn't fix or do we still need too use unofficial patch?

[mochaman]

I liken the survival mode as a difficulty setting. No fast travel is a monumental pain, especially for college of winterhold quests, cause the carriages you use to fast travel are present near every capital city with the hearthfire dlc except for winterhold. Its also impossible not to lose hp to the cold even with the warmest armor and nord race which provides the strongest anti freezing racial buff (every race has some sort of survival mode buff in the game, couple are terrible, 4 are OK, and nord/khajit/orc/dark elf are the best) meaning you need to rely on flame cloak spells which is a mid game spell or the once per day power that dark elf's get. Not a great design choice. Especially when the mechanic they provide to get around it requires vast sums of fire salts.

[cdrjohnshepard]

2:44 My God, Big Dan you’ve found the Conduit! Saren Arterius and Matriarch Benezia are en route to your location. Joker! We have confirmed location of the Conduit! Plot us a mass relay solution to Sol, on the double mister!

[rickgear]

Does this have a separate achievement list as the legendary edition. I'd love to earn all achievements by doing another playthrough?

[noiteetion]

Congratulations, all this Skyrim talk has made me reinstall Oblivion. Why buy a game 4 times when I could just play Oblivion?

[notjimpickens]

Pass, todd howard himself said hes just gonna keep re-releasing skyrim every other year if we keep buying these, taking time, money, manpower and effort away from TES 6.

which im kinda worried about because of how cyberpunk launched which basically did the same thing tes 6 is doing, teasing stuff years in advance to build unreal hype and release an unfinished, inferior product then what came before it, from the same studio because of greedy execs ruining the flow of development.