The best computer games from the past decade.
Go.
Well, gonna throw out there: Morrowind, STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl, GTA 4, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic, Mass Effect 1 and 2, and Crysis 2. Obviously my tastes tend towards relatively non-linear first person games. Starcraft 2 also deserves mention, and I'm a big fan of Knights of Honor and Crusader Kings.
Initial impressions of Skyrim:
Complaints:
Lots of reused animations. Still yanks you to third person to sit down for some reason, and if you equip 2 swords only one of them shows up on your character when they're sheathed. Characters also still move kinda glide-y, and the lack of a stair climbing animation is almost criminal. And of course clipping galore. Also, I do not at all like the finishing moves. They lack variety, yank you out of first person half the time, and look pretty bad.
Lots of quest triggers are faulty. For example, dialogue options show up that presumably indicate you overheard something that you never overheard. And in some cases quests fail to update - this happened to me when I went to Rorikstad for the A Night To Remember quest...nothing happened after I talked to the guy. I was SOL until I bumped into someone in Whiterun who asked me about a ring, so I went to a place and killed a monster and suddenly it checked off the "Go to Rorikstad and do this" objective. That whole quest was really poorly done overall.
Speaking of quests, the Radiant Story system works really well to keep gameplay varied, but it means you completely lack any sense of context for the places you go to. I would absolutely love a little bit of history about the places I go...really, anything.
The non-quest-related NPCs have less personality this time around. A lot of them you can't speak to at all, you just press E and they say a line and walk away. It's a far cry from Morrowind, where you could ask anyone you ran into about pretty much anything. I really liked that flexibility, although with so many more voice actors I suppose it'd require a lot more dialogue. My biggest complaint in this area is you can no longer ask guards for directions. Sometimes I need some fucking directions. Just let me ask the guards about the towns. As it is they're often somewhat faceless places at first glance. Getting a bit of exposition from the guards would be nice.
Not sure if there's much more I'm angry about...I feel like the focus of the game has shifted substantially. Oblivion was all about creating a world and letting it do its thing while the player watched. Which wasn't great, but it meant things tended to have a certain personality they sometimes lack in Skyrim. Skyrim is somewhat more old school - everything ends up in a dungeon crawl. The dungeon crawls are good, but the fact that I spend almost all my time in them detracts from the believability of the world. The coolest parts are the quests that don't involve narrow corridors and hundreds of faceless bandits.
Now that I've let that out...Skyrim is fucking awesome. The world is beautiful, the exploration is great, the dungeons are much more interesting and varied, the combat is a thousand times better than Oblivion, dual-wielding swords is awesome, the voice acting is damn good, and the art direction is top-notch. I've had the game since Friday evening and I've already put in over 24 hours.
A few more complaints:
A bunch of the textures are too damn low-res.
Making carry weight, underwater breathing ability, running speed, and jumping height standard for all characters and impossible to alter makes my character feel less unique and personalized.
FUCKING LOW RES TEXTURES. Seriously, guys, it's almost 2012. Get with the program. A lot of this stuff could be Oblivion.
But seriously, I'm loving this. Like, really loving this. A lot.
Dumping bodies in rivers? Best thing ever. Watching them go sailing over waterfalls? Even better.
And of course, fighting my way through a pack of bandits to the top of a tower, only to encounter their chief...and promptly yell BOOSH and send him flying off a ledge to the ground hundreds of feet below is as good as it fucking gets.