It's the autumn of 2011 and I'm paying $60 for Skyrim. It's the Autumn of 2022 and I'm paying $70 for Skyrim.
We’re starting to see the dawn of $70 games, with AAA releases like the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Call of Duty pushing for that extra bit of moolah. Fine, making or remaking big games is difficult and expensive, but what about $70 for a port of a one-year-old remaster of an 11-year-old game? Skyrim Anniversary Edition on Switch says “make it so.”
The Skyrim Anniversary Edition, not to be confused with 2013’s Skyrim Legendary Edition or 2016’s Skyrim Special Edition, debuted last November on new-gen consoles and PC. Its edge over the 2016 Special Edition is pretty much just the inclusion of the 48 previous Creation Club items (premium mods approved for sale by Bethesda) alongside 26 new Creation Club items. The Switch never got the Special Edition, so this new new release is also the first instance of the SE’s upgraded version of the Creation Engine on the console, as well as the only way to get at any of those Creation Club doodads.
I hope this gave you less of a headache reading than I got writing it, but it only gets worse. The 2021 release of the Anniversary Edition was “only” $50! Not only does the Switch Anniversary Edition’s $70 price tag rankle in a vacuum, it also highlights the absurdity of the base game’s continued $60 cost on the system—an indignity when I got it in 2017, and an absolute absurdity in 2022.
For those prices, you can get every Elder Scrolls game including Skyrim on Steam or GOG with enough cash left over for a hoagie or a bad haircut. The inherent flexibility of the PC and the dedicated community over at NexusMods would also allow you to customize your games with things like Goku or hentai.
And why haven’t any of those other Elder Scrolls games or Bethesda’s Fallouts made it to Switch? In the absence of a richly deserved Oblivion Platinum Jubilee Edition, I will one day spit in the face of God and install my physical copy of Oblivion Game of the Year Edition onto my Steam Deck through a Frankenstein apparatus of USB Blu-Ray drive and USB Type-C hub-dongle thing.
Truly though, this is all just a perverse prelude to 2034’s Starfield Anniversary Edition, which will break new ground by costing 34 PrimeBux. It’d take me seven centuries’ hard labor in the lithium mines to afford that!
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