Been playing Skyrim off and on for the past month between work, and my impression thus far is surprisingly positive. I hadn't really seen any of the pre-release hype or marketing due to where I've been, so coming into it my expectations were something roughly on par with Oblivion, but with nicer graphics. (I enjoyed the hiking sim aspect of OB, which is why I even bothered to buy it in the first place.) Turns out that, as some people pointed out previously in the thread, its quality is closer to that of Morrowind.
The removal of stats, while obnoxious in the sense that I'd rather Bethesda try to fix the existing character system instead of gutting it, ends up making the character progression flow a bit more smoothly than in MW and OB. Specialization is pretty much required because of the perk system; I haven't really found a way to do a viable "jack of all trades" build for the endgame because perks are required to actually be effective with certain abilities, i.e. having destruction at 100 without any of the perks is pointless since the magicka requirements of the spells and the damage output will be vastly inferior to a character who took all the perks. I do kinda wish that perks were awarded more slowly, perhaps once every second level, just ensure that you absolutely had to specialize in only two or three skills to be a viable character. Also, some of the perks are rather dubious in their usefulness (the entire lockpicking tree is pretty much worthless, for example). Still, the system that they've put in place is more conducive to semi-balanced play than the previous entries in the series. Well, except perhaps for crafting...
Crafting is still pretty damn OP, though not to the same degree as MW or OB (at least without knowing a very specific and bizarre exploit). The crafting skills, particularly smithing, level way too fast and basically break a lot of the balance at lower levels if you pursue them with any degree of perseverance. The ostensible cap on one's crafting abilities do somewhat lessen the balance impact at higher levels (since it sometimes seems like the game was designed around having combat characters be at least somewhat proficient at crafting disciplines), but I was able to make a Daedric bow that, with my enchanted gear and all the archery perks, was doing a hair over 500 damage per hit. To be fair, I did kinda powergame a bit in order to get that (made potions that increased enchanting, made enchanting gear that improved alchemy, repeat ad naseum until it's possible to make really powerful +skill enchantments and +smithing potions). Anyway, crafting could definitely stand to be nerfed a good bit. On a side note, the resource gathering element of the game was pretty cool at really low levels: starting out as an archer, I spent a few hours hunting animals for their hides and mining iron in order to make decent gear.
Level scaling is handled waaaay better than in OB, and even MW in my opinion. Rather than scale everything to your level, dungeons get a random level assigned to the creatures within when you first enter them, and remain at that level for the rest of the game. That causes some moments where you enter some ruin thinking that it'll have some easy loot, but instead you get one-shotted by some super-zombie or somesuch. Certain dungeons do seem to have preset difficulty levels, though (like the ruin that you go into early in the game as part of the golden claw quest). Also, some mobs seem to mildly scale to the player's level, like bandit groups which would mostly have regular bandits in the beginning of the game but have the specialized types later on. In spite of that, I haven't seen any issues with bandit and equivalent mobs keeping pace with the player's abilities; instead, they seem to increase at something like a 1:4 rate (just a wild guess, but it's for illustration's sake). I think that some loot scales with the player. I seem to be getting a lot more potions of extreme/ultimate whatever at high levels than I did at lower levels, though most of the potions that I pick up are in the overworld (not in something's inventory), so maybe not. I've heard that unique quest reward items scale with your level, but I haven't really played enough to say if that's the case for sure or not.
Combat is better than OB and MW, but it's still languishing somewhere around passable. It's more complicated than the LMB mash-fest that was MW or the LMB-RMB-LMB-LMB-RMB mess in OB, though it's still fairly basic at it's core. The dual charging for spells is a good way of keeping mage's damage output competitive with their physical counterparts, but I haven't really played much as a straight mage, so I can't really say for sure if an endgame mage can really compare that well with physical combat characters at the same stage. Still, magic seems to be a workable character path, which is more than can be said of MW or OB. Oh yeah, and dragon fights aren't really as epic as I would have hopes. Maybe they're brain-meltingly awesome as a pure melee character, but as an archer, they're rather anti-climatic.
Exploration and world design are leaps and bounds ahead of OB, though it's kind of hard for a nordic-themed game world, even if it's relatively well executed, to compare with the utterly alien weirdness of MW. I also think that MW just felt bigger, but I think that that's in large part due to the piss poor view distance and the lack of location markers. Ah, location markers. Fuck them. There's probably a way to turn them off, and I really should have found it and done it by now, but w/e. Basically, location markers kill some of the joy of exploration. Whereas in MW, for example, a hill ahead of you might mean any number of different types of places to explore (or none at all), in Skyrim, because of the markers, you always know pretty much what you're going to see over the horizon. Keep in mind that I still enjoyed the exploration in spite of the markers, just not as much as I would have without them. If nothing else, it's still a lot of fun as a hiking sim. (Not really related, but I wish that Bethesda would make an ES game again that's actually to scale. Yeah, it wouldn't look as pretty because of procedural generation, but god damnit I want to be able to get lost in vast mountain ranges and use my mad land nav skillz to find my way out or walk across expansive rolling hills and so on. It's probably never going to happen, but I can always hope.) Anyway, dungeons are... well, most of them are, as quite a few people have pointed out already, rather linear. I'd say that around 80% of them follow the formula of linear path to end boss followed by a secret path that leads back to somewhere near the dungeon entrance. It didn't bother me too much at first, but after doing it 50+ times, it's getting a little annoying. On the plus side, there's still a reason to actually explore dungeons because of the possibility of unique gear or other rewards (like shouts). Pretty much all of the dungeons which are supposed to house humans are well laid out, though. Living areas, cooking areas, eating areas, study areas, etc. Lots of little details which lend and air or believability to them. There are some dungeons that still have a relatively non-linear progression, but they are very, very few. There is one, though, that's absolutely astounding that it's in a modern Bethesda game: Blackreach. It's an absolutely massive cave that has probably around a dozen other dungeons attached to it, numerous enemy encampments, and gorgeous artwork. It probably took me around 5+ hours to get through it, and there was still shit that I hadn't done. It's really quite disappointing that it's the only dungeon of that type in the game, though. Would have been fucking awesome if Bethesda had taken the same philosophy in building all of the game's dungeons.
Quests are overall rather meh. The only questlines that I've seen that have any type of multiple solutions are the civil war questline (and even there, the decision is just about which side you join) and the Daedric questlines. (I think that there might be a couple more that are slipping my mind right now.) The rest of the quests are pretty straightforward "go here and get this/kill this/deliver this/talk to this person". This isn't necessarily a horrible thing if you already like the series, though, as those are pretty much the standard quest formats for the previous ES games. It's rather disappointing that Bethesda didn't look at what Obsidian did with the quests in NV and integrate that mentality into their development, though. Rewards are often nonsensical for some of the smaller quests, such as a guy giving you 800 gold for delivering a ring to him from a jewelery shop. The main quest is rather disappointing. I had a strong feeling of "that's it?" after the final battle, and the people don't really seem to react much to you having just stopped the world from being destroyed. The civil war questline is an even worse offender in that regard; after completing it for whichever side you choose, everyone in the world still talks as if the war was still going as it was before you started playing. You'd think that they could have tossed a few extra lines of dialog in and removed some of the dialog references to the war, but apparently that was just too hard for them. Feh. The guild questlines are silly and make me wish for the return of the more politically oriented factions from MW, but for the most part they at least aren't as dumb as some of the shit from OB. Definitely overly epic, but I didn't find anything too terribly jarring. (FYI, I haven't done the DB questline yet, so I'm just speaking of the other three.) Maybe my standards have dropped to low in recent times. I don't really care too much.
I'd say that Skyrim is about a 7/10 if you like the series, maybe even an 8/10 if you get more enjoyment out of the hiking sim aspect of the series than most. Basically: if you didn't like other games in the series, you aren't going to like this either. If you did like the other games in the series, especially MW, you'll almost certainly get some degree of enjoyment out of this.
