Good evening! It's been nearly four years since I last joined the gamesas forums. As the subject line suggests, I'm having trouble with playing Skyrim Special Edition. In summary, when I click the "Play" button the S:SE Launcher, the game loads to a black screen and behaves as if it isn't responding. Occasionally, it will play the background music. Otherwise, it's incredibly difficult to close in full screen mode.

For some background, I just purchased a brand new desktop with an Nvidia GeForce 1080 built in. I went through the usual routines of updating drivers to ensure that everything was working. This weekend I installed Skyrim: SE (I had the free update since I owed all of the original Skyrim content on PC) and successfully ran through it for a few hours. On Sunday I closed out the game with about thirty superficial mods installed. Everything appeared to be running smoothly.

This evening, I try to log on to find the black screen issue. Convinced that it was caused by my mods, I uninstalled all of them only to find the issue persisted. I deleted the local files and the Skyrim.ini files and proceeded with a fresh install. No dice, same exact issue. I searched online for some solutions and found that there were three common resolutions: 1), drivers weren't updated, 2) my graphics card was not the preferred processor, and 3) the executable file wasn't run in administrator and/or compatibility mode. I noticed that my Nvidia Control Panel wasn't working properly so I updated the GPU's drivers. Thinking that issue 1 was the cause, I tried to load the game again. Still a black screen. I then tried the preferred graphics processor issue only to find that the control panel does not offer such an opportunity because I have a desktop with a singular GPU. So I gave issue 3 a shot and set both my executable file and the launcher to both compatibility mode and run as administrator. It still didn't work.

One curious observation I made was that the game briefly worked after I verified the cache once and when I ran the game through windowed mode. That would imply that something isn't being processed correctly, or that something else is getting in the way.

Is anyone able to offer any sage advice? I'm stumped at this point and tempted to step back to the 2011 version in hopes of better luck.

Thanks for any help that you can spare!