Now here’s an odd bit of news. Bethesda recently announced the system requirements for the PC version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition over on the Steam page for the original Skyrim, and it reveals not only what sort of PC you’ll need to play the game but it reveals that you’ll need more space on your home consoles to play Skyrim than on PC.

The PC minimum and recommended requirements are listed below.

You’ll notice that they aren’t too bad; it’s about par the course for most eighth gen games, which have been surprisingly under par compared to the system requirement jump that happened with PC games going from the PS2 era to the PS3 era.

Most surprisingly, however, is that the special edition of Skyrim on PC only requires 12GB of free hard drive space. If you head over to the official Bethesda website, they announce that the Skyrim: Special Edition will require 17GB worth of free space for the North American version on the Xbox One, and 25GB of free space for the European version. That’s 5GB more on the Xbox One than the PC version.

The PlayStation 4 version is even higher yet. It will require 20GB of free space for North Americans and 33GB for the European version.

So just for reference, the Euro version for the Xbox One is twice the size of the PC version of Skyrim: Special Edition and the Euro version of the PS4 version is almost three times the size of the PC version.

Technically, this could be due to the PS4 Pro version of Skyrim: Special Edition running at native 4K, which would explain why the game is so much bigger this time around, especially considering that the original game only required 6GB of hard drive space on PC.

In addition to adding 4K support for the PS4 Pro version, all version of the special edition of Skyrim will support god-rays, screen space occlusion, and higher quality assets.

Bethesda recently announced that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition has gone gold, which means that the gold master disc is being sent off to the printing press for mass distribution, so it should be ready for purchase on October 28th.

I’m still kind of curious why the console version is so much bigger than the PC version? While ultra HD assets could be the excuse for the PS4 Pro version, I’m left dumbfounded trying to think what they could possibly have added to the Xbox One version that required the extra space? Well, technically the consoles are receiving mod support, so maybe the tools and extra assets are already embedded and included in the core package? I guess we’ll find out at launch.

(Main image courtesy of Vancouver)