Skyrim’s special edition is being released across every major system, and with it, Bethesda is hoping to add enticing new content. The most recent entry is Survival Mode – an option that primarily adds weather and hunger hazards to the game. The only problem is that this has existed in varying forms for over five years through community modding and nexusmods.

We covered the Creation Club just days ago, but Bethesda keeps making moves that are underwhelming to say the least. We want to support updates, and we want to support exciting new content, but a re-release of a game six years old with content almost equally old is neither of those things.

The special Edition is priced around $30, and for that price, we expect a lot of new content, or a lot of revamping of existing content. However, a number of mods already exist that do much of what this $30 edition do. Frostfall and Realistic needs and Diseases could handle much if not all of the survival elements of the game. Meanwhile, there are dozens of mods for graphics, so any of the improvements Bethesda has done have already been done by their community.

This is one of the bigger issues of releasing creation software to the community. Bethesda wants to have their cake and eat it too – they gave good content to the community in the creation kit, but now they want to capitalize on what has already existed for their game for years. It would be as if Valve announced a special edition of Team Fortress 2, complete with dozens of hats.

If Bethesda wants to actually excite and impress the community, they need to first stop insulting them by asking them to pay for what is free.