Clear GOTY contender marred by poor AI and graphical glitches. Clearly an Xbox port with poor support for PC.
The good:
*damn good graphics for a game of this size. water now flows and pushes you back, grasses, trees, fog look real.
*dual casting powers is neat and inventive.
*quests are long and detailed.
*less copy paste map edited dungeons vs oblivion.
*some dungeons are very neat.
*enemy mages are more challenging.
*dragons put up a tough fight, but do get repetitive.
*better level scaling apparently. Enemies at lvl 50+ don't have ridiculous amounts of health.
The bad:
*the menus and power system clearly only have consoles in mind and can be frustrating to deal with. Assigning powers and armor is tedious and time consuming. Can't view a basic character overview.
*you cannot assign spells/weapons well during combat without using Q.
*cannot cast powers while swinging a weapon, might as well just switch to sword/shield or dual cast rather than going sword/spell.
*typical graphical glitches like with oblivion/fallout. GPU is only 30-40% taxed yet I only get 30-40fps. Must play on high when I should be able to run on ultra. Joke, poor pc optimization for high end GPU's.
*No option to turn off/tweak HDR, bloom, or shadows. These are meaningless to me as I prefer higher frames and better texture/AA/AF first.
*less emphasis on RPG features. Creating a class is now dull and meaningless. More for the noobs that make sloppy builds. Classes with passive abilities like Breton and Altmer still stick out as overpowered vs classes with only greater powers.
*Still dislike the leveling system, perks seem pointless and the skill progression makes me want to cheat. Should've just done EXP for kills/quests and awarded perks and skills at level up.
*once you visit a dungeon, enemies that respawn in it are stuck at the level you were when you first entered it (will be lvl 5 even if you're level 30).
I did not mention quest bugs or other various bugs as they're meaningless. They will be patched. The ones i addressed are more concerning as Bethesda never fully addressed graphical problems on high end GPUs in their other titles either.
I still recommend for GOTY.