I was mildly excited for the setting and expected improvements to towns and AI behaviour. Things that we saw in the original Gamescon trailer with windmills, watermills, people chopping wood etc. were what had me most excited. So all of the "LARP" stuff, I guess. Screenshots released soon after (or maybe even before?) showed improved character models, particularly for the Khajiit, and the trailer clearly showed some neat stuff like stealth kills and even the fabled diagonal walking animation, meaning the player would no longer slide across the ground. I was hoping that maybe there would be expansions to the skill system from Oblivion after some of the complexity of Morrowind was culled, but I was also aware that it would most likely feature
more consolidation of skills. I never expected them to throw attributes out the window.
In the end, I was cautiously optimistic. I'm still torn on whether it's a better or worse game than vanilla Oblivion. Admittedly a lot of my expectations were probably coloured by being a frequent contributor to the TES V Suggestions Thread on the official forums, with those threads eventually reaching into the hundreds. There were all sorts of discussions about crafting more in-depth skill systems and ways for the player to interact with the world, especially after Oblivion introduced radiant AI which was probably its one redeeming feature, regardless of how funky that system could be and how dumbed down it reportedly was compared to what Bethesda was working with during the game's development. I wasn't disappointed upon release, but the game didn't sink its hooks into me like Morrowind or even Oblivion, for all of its many faults. I played through it once as a Battlemage type character and then rolled a stealth character to grab all of the achievements for the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood. None of the quests were particularly memorable. It was an adequate entry in a series which I had lost some of my affection for in the years previous.
Unique daedric artifacts were less powerful if you got them at low levels (what the actual fuck?).
Ackshually Jarl, the Daedric artifacts and some of the only magical items in the game which are not level scaled, because the quests themselves are locked off until the player is at a particular level, ranging from Level 2 (Azura, Sheogorath) to Level 20 (Boethiah, Clavicus Vile, Hermaeus Mora). The same is true of Skyrim, although the quests are all available at far lower relative levels, with the highest requirement being Level 30 for Boethiah in a game where scaling generally stops at approx Level 45-50, and many being available at Level 1.
The player can also grab Umbra right from the get-go, since the character herself is always spawned at Vindasel at the very start of the game. However, while the Umbra sword is always available at its full strength of 28 damage, Umbra's Ebony Armour is scaled to the strength of Orcish until you hit the level where Ebony would normally spawn in levelled lists.
