What Bethesda took out of the game in SSE that was in LE?

[Distortedrealms]

Since this involves LE I figured I could post this here. So when I switched to SSE a few years ago I always felt like something was off, like things were missing that I just couldn't put my finger on. I came across a mod recently that would let dragons attack cities again in SSE and I had no idea they took this out for SSE. I always remembered Whiterun/Riften were notorious for attacks in LE and I enjoyed the battles very much. Bethesda removed dragon attacks in cities for SSE. I then found other mods restoring other things I remember from LE like vampire attacks in cities, and NPC mourning times. My mind was blown as I had no idea they nerfed the game so much making SSE. 

 

Is there a list of other things they took out when making SSE so I can find mods to add them back in? 

Edited May 3 by Distortedrealms

[fuchs11]

LE has better character rendering and textures looks as if there is ENB. In SE they broke something and textures look plain.

Also LE has immersive first person sexlab camera mod which was not re-implemented in SE/AE.

 

Sadly my system froze every hour or so using LE modlist so I had to switch.

I think I may reinstall LE just to play sp campaign

Edited May 3 by fuchs11

[Derpakiin]

On 5/3/2026 at 2:06 AM, Distortedrealms said:

Since this involves LE I figured I could post this here. So when I switched to SSE a few years ago I always felt like something was off, like things were missing that I just couldn't put my finger on. I came across a mod recently that would let dragons attack cities again in SSE and I had no idea they took this out for SSE. I always remembered Whiterun/Riften were notorious for attacks in LE and I enjoyed the battles very much. Bethesda removed dragon attacks in cities for SSE. I then found other mods restoring other things I remember from LE like vampire attacks in cities, and NPC mourning times. My mind was blown as I had no idea they nerfed the game so much making SSE. 

 

Is there a list of other things they took out when making SSE so I can find mods to add them back in? 

I think back in the day the dragon attacks were happening frequently enough that they were killing quest related NPCs. One of the earliest mods 'run for your life' was made to get NPCs out of the way.

 

If you look in the creation kit, you can still see remnants of where dragon attacks were meant to happen in cities, you can even see dragon perch markers on the roofs of houses in Whiterun. 

 

It might be me, but I think SE may have also fixed that dreaded dragon skeleton following you around and ragdolling somewhere in the distance. 

[Kastagir]

ENB Mist.  Still absent from SE/AE.

[Roggvir]

On 5/3/2026 at 1:51 PM, fuchs11 said:

LE has better character rendering and textures looks as if there is ENB. In SE they broke something and textures look plain.

...

I think that mostly comes down to the overused "image spaces", volumetric fog in weathers, and the abysmal "character lighting" (likely a lousy attempt to fake subsurface scattering).

- Image spaces are basically camera filters that set the amount of fog, color saturation, and contrast in various cells (both exterior and interior).
As you enter a cell, the game applies the associated "filter", applying color tint to the whole screen and/or making it (de)saturated, etc., and the ever present fog (even clear sunny vanilla weather has annoying subtle fog) makes everything look ...blurry? weird, wrong.

 

- Character lighting is that weird glow effect that the game applies to every NPC - best visible in some very dark interiors where you see the NPC literally glows.

 

Long time ago, i made an xEdit script to generate a plugin that "fixes" all these problems and more.
I published the old version on Nexus, so if you feel adventurous, you can have a look at it (before running it, you need to edit it - to read what it does, and disable features you don't want).
It was intended to be used with vanilla weathers + True Storms + Community Shaders, so if you are using some non-vanilla weather mod, you may need to adjust or disable some tweaks (everything should be documented in the script), but even with vanilla weathers, you may need to adjust the script to your needs/taste.

[woodsman30]

On 5/3/2026 at 7:51 AM, fuchs11 said:

Sadly my system froze every hour or so using LE modlist so I had to switch.

I think I may reinstall LE just to play sp campaign

Check out what this person has been doing https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/120953

this is something else and a game changer for LE. I have always had a stable game but it is LE so crash here and there. This changed so much that crashing is all but non existent I tried it with my heaviest load order and  the game is rock solid crashes never seems to happen. 

[FixMeUp_Lurker]

When I first tried SE on my back then only PC to play Skyrim with a 15' 1024x768 screen I saw they removed 4:3 aspect ratio from the game, which made me unable to play it. Nowadays I see they tried to "Fix" SE on the Steam Deck and made it worse, on LE you can enable/disable controller controls in-game, on SE (AFAIK) you need to run it with SteamDeck=0 if you want to be able to use Mouse and Keyboard, so you need to restart the game if you ever want to switch controls (made me appreciate those games that instantly change the given shortcuts/prompts based on your last used input device, like No Mans Sky)

 

I'm trying to make a setup for limited resources PCs (mostly for Linux, because if you have a low-resource PC Win11 isn't worth it IMHO), so I may start a new Thread about it, thanks for the inspiration !