First of all, less retarded shit
-why can I waltz into town with an Alb as companion? and no one says anything?
-why do I have to be in a certain position to hack safes, and if i'm at a slightly different angle, instead of the hacking menu i see... a wall?
- why are there things i can accidently steal in front of vendors, forcing you to move around, again, at a certain angle, to be able to talk to the fucking vendor without instead accidentally stealing his shit and making everyone hostile?
- why is my companion completely oblivious to the fact that people/animals are chasing me to kill me half the time? and why does he stop attacking after a while?
-why do people write the combinations to their safes on the walls or on the floor?
- i could go on for ten pages so i'll stop here, but you get what i mean
secondly, interface/gameplay improvements. Why is everything so jerky and tied up? the PC doesn't move like a human, not even an average-agility human, i mean he moves like his reflexes have been impaired by some important head trauma. Why does the melee combat have to be so stupid? I mean, I know, it's been the same since Gothic 1, I am now able to endure it, but let's face it, it's a shit combat system, it's boring (especially for an Arpg) and it goes from having the character be completely useless to an instoppable juggernaut, with no real sense of progression, at a moment you're garbage, ten levels later you kill everything if you put enough points in combat and have the right equipment, but you never feel ilke you're "learning" and improving, you're simply able to wield better weapons.
ranged combat is pointless. If all I have to do is stay on top of a rock and stun-lock my enemies, just remove the combat altogether or something.
Crafting felt quite pointless, weapons-wise. Food and potions are fine, but the weapon department lacked any depth. Oh, so I can make this tier 2. And "enchant" it with some other damage.
Cool.
What this game did right was the exploration - I don't even mind the respawns, it's a big world, animals and people get around - but that also feels like a lost opportunity to do so much more. You could have had tons of "old-world" shit laying around, telling stories, not only stories related to the plot, simple stories of people long gone, a la fallout, you could have had intriguing locations not necessarily related to the plot, just places to visit where you could learn more about who used to live on this planet before all the shit went down, what and how did these people think, how did they live, etc. Instead, everything you find is painfully always related to the plot some way or another, I get it, budget restraints and all, but it just makes everything so dry and "cheaper".
In Morrowind, for example, you learned a lot of stuff, lore-wise, from people and books, and all that stuff wasn't necessarily related to your mission, some was, a lot wasn't, it was just a long, detailed description of the world, and it made the exploration so much more rewarding and interesting. It's still good, but bare-boned, and it could have been so much better.