Well, I guess this thread is as good a place as any to give my little minireview. I've played about 3 hours, so admittedly, I'm not covering a lot here. Also, I'm no writer, so bear with my grammaticaluarities. Or something.
The Good:
With the problems people have had with Soft Shadows-gate, I have to say that the environment detail of interior spaces is quite good. It's hard to describe in specifics, but the general feeling is that yes, they did take criticism about Morrowind's caves and dungeons to heart. The "tutorial dungeon" offers a mix of old gothic-style archways, natural caverns, and sewers featuring a more generic medieval style masonry. All the buzzwords (parallax mapping, normal mapping, etc.) were put to good use in these instances.
After I left the first dungeon, I immediately made my way around to the Imperial City. Once there, I just kind of wandered around, and only went inside two places within the city-- the newspaper place and the Tiber Septim hotel. As EvoG said, interiors are great, and in the case of the hotel, cavernous. Manor houses in Morrowind seemed too small for their descriptors, but in the case of the hotel, it was huge. The sense of scale is much better than in Morrowind, as the exterior models of buildings closely match the interior spaces. That was one of my biggest beefs with Morrowind.
The last place I went was a little waterfront shantytown outside of the Imperial city. One of the first things that impressed me was when entering one guy's house, he got up from his chair and approached me pretty quickly. It gave a real sense of "Hey, what are you doing just walking into my home like that?" even though the NPC didn't actually say that.
Combat is... well, it's improved since Morrowind, but if you've just recently played MW like I have, it's VERY EASY to find yourself slipping into that mindless click-click-click routine. Once I overcame that tendency and actually used Blocking and squared off with the mob I faced, the experience became much more enjoyable than the previous game. I won't toss words out like "kinetics" and "visceral", as I really think the value of the combat lies strictly in the eye of the beholder.
Okay, time for the Bad. And yes there are some bad points here which have already been mentioned before, but I'll say them anyway. I won't, however, go into graphics glitches, since I haven't experienced very many. There was some texture tiling on a distant hill, but other than that, my experience there is on par with most other people.
First, foremost, and the one I think Bethesda needs to be taken to task over hardcore is the interface. It's absolute ass. Remember all those user-created pictures making fun of it-- particularly the inventory showing only a few items at a time? Yeah, those are all true. This is pure console garbage, and this really, really god damn fucking infuriates me. Didn't Deus Ex Invisible War teach the industry a lesson? Hell, even the PC port of Fable had a decent interface tailored to the PC. Whoever did this fucked up, piece of horseshit interface needs to have a pineapple imbedded with rusty fishhooks shoved up their ass a few thousand times. This interface is the epitome of incompetence. I don't know what in the fuck Howard and Co. were thinking here, but the dumbfuck that let this one slip by QA needs his ass fired and blacklisted from the industry. I'm not being too harsh, either.
Okay, now that THAT is out of the way, the next thing that bugs me is the dynamic conversations. Okay, I understand the purpose was to add atmosphere to the game and I respect the effort. The execution leaves much to be desired. Most all of the exchanges I've heard follow this pattern:
NPC1: "[NPC name] is a fine [profession name]. You can't go wrong with him/her for all of your [what the profession caters to] needs"
NPC2: "Indeed. You can always count on [NPC name]"
NPC1: "Goodbye."
NPC2: "Be seeing you."
It gets old. FAST. Like I said, I've only played for about 3 hours, and I'm already sick of it. Other examples include two sets of two NPCs on opposite sides of the street having the EXACT SAME CONVERSATION. And of course, my favorite is the "The fighter's guild is hiring. It's a good way to make some extra money... if you have the stones for it." ("stones" is a euphemism for "balls" WOMEN DON'T HAVE BALLS!!... except for stalin_brando's choice o' chicka, but I digress)
Human characters are okay. Khajiit and Argonians look fine, IMO. However, orcs and elves don't just look ugly... they look fucking ugly x 100. Dark Elves' textures are hideous. Not "Wow, that race of beings is rather unattractive" hideous, either. I'm talking shitty artwork. FaceGen's limitations are all too apparant, here. I would rather have the super-model look of Better Heads for Morrowind than this garbage.
For all the hype over soil erosion, I'm just not seeing much of an improvement over Morrowind's terrain. Of course, I've only been around the immediate vicinity of the Imperial City, but I'm just not seeing a whole lot of improvement there (for those wondering, all my settings are maxed out, with a resolution of 1024 x 768). I expected to see little details, such as the shader effects in Far Cry of the water ebbing and flowing on the shores. Hills and terrain features just don't look all that rugged.
Anyway, that's all I have to say at this point. I'll add or clarify as I've played more.
-D4
) and I too sorta felt bad that what I was animating and what was being created was not Ultima even spritually, just in name. The characters were fun and the work was great, but we weren't creating an 'Ultima'. 
