Skyrim players panic as Bethesda releases suspicious patch for a version of the RPG that you can hardly even buy anymore

Bethesda just dropped a new Skyrim update, for a version of the game that you can't even buy anymore, alarming players who couldn't work out what had changed.

Last week, players noticed an update to Skyrim: Legendary Edition - the version of the game that came bundled with all of its DLC. That sparked some concern, not least because the original version of Skyrim and its Legendary Edition are extremely difficult to find and purchase on Steam. Add to that the recent mess that Bethesda made of Fallout 4 mods when that game's next-gen update launched earlier this year, and even an update as small as 600kb was setting off alarms among those players still enjoying the earliest versions of Skyrim.

Skyrim's Special and Anniversary Editions are the versions of the game that Bethesda would rather players get into now, but the patch notes pushed on September 5 were for the original version of the game, widely known as 'Oldrim'. Those patch notes read that "the Skyrim launched was updated to improve data file handling and support streaming platforms." It's the first half of that sentence that caused particular concern, as 'data file handling' is pretty closely linked to community modding. Despite the concerns that that led to, however, it seems that it was the second half of the patch notes that were more important.

While Bethesda would prefer you play newer versions of Skyrim, that didn't stop it from adding both Special Edition and the original version to streaming service GeForce now earlier this summer. While Special Edition players could access the game via the streaming service with no issues, the original was taken down for maintenance extremely quickly. Even after that maintenance ended a week later, players were still dealing with multiple crashes and other visual issues.

The patch, then, was to fix those visual issues, and the data file handling helped GeForce Now deal with mods that players might have been running via the streaming platform. While there have been some reports of issues with mods, YouTuber Juice Head suggests that they weren't able to replicate those issues, and it's likely that this is simply the result of playing a game as buggy as Skyrim with the complications of scaling it up to higher resolutions.

It takes 14,000 real-life steps to trek across Skyrim's massive map, according to a dedicated fan of the RPG who made the journey himself.