This game succeeds where Oblivion fails, in my honest opinion.
At first I was skeptical reading the reviews on the forums, about people saying the game sucks and I decided to take a chance and purchase the game. I played it for a little bit. Quit. Spent a few hours deciding whether to take it back, then told myself to try it again. It was the best thing I ever did.
The good:
Graphics are amazing. The draw distance is further than Oblivion. You can see over mountains. The land is georgous, and really feels alive. The images and textures are more sharp and not like a "bloom/soft" feel like oblivion. I personally, think the graphics are better.
Combat is fun to say the least. It can be somewhat repetative but really what combat isnt? You can do quite a few different moves and setting hotkeys is pretty easy, although you only get about 10 or so hotkeys. You really have to set up hotkeys to different spells and skills a lot depending on your play style. I would have liked to see a couple different wheels where you could make presets, but no big deal really. Archery is fun as well especially if you get the skill where you fire multiple arrows. I also like the death animations. It's really quite entertaining when you smack a bandit with a heavy bardiche and he goes flying down the hill. Let us not forget that if you like to dungeon crawl, and don't happen to have a mace, you might as well give up. This is the first game I have come across that has real realism based on maces and undead. The things you hear about in D&D but never really see it. Swords/halberds/bows/ do very little damage, which makes you want to carry around a mace for those "just incase" situations.
The amount of weapons and armor in this game is ridiculous. Lots of different looks and features to each. If you add cold/spirit/fire/etc. damage onto a weapon, the weapon starts to glow that color. One cool feature is that each piece of armor has a specific armor ID. This means that if you get the same exact piece of armor, say as an example "Leggings of Terror" ID 545 that gives you 200 in slashing, piercing and bludgeoning resist and combine it with your current "Leggings of Terror" which gives you say 189 slashing, piercing, bludgeoning resist; you will notice how the stats increase and the "class" level of the item goes from lvl 1 to lvl 2. Combine another exact piece and the armor class goes to level 3 with even better stats. Lots of options here. You can spend hours running around buying armor pieces and combining them.
The best part about the game for me is the customization and skills you can learn. You can learn lots of different skills, can untrain them at any time (for some gold) and try something new. The spells look especially good and there are lots of options to choose from. Each class you could potentially spend 15 points in. So you won't be able to be the best in everything, you will have to pick and choose, which really helps out the replay value. There's a great deal of variety between the spells. I think all spell classes give have a couple different creatures you can summon.
Alchemy is actually fun to fool around with. You can make any kind of potions you want and can experiment with any combination. Its really quite amazing what you can come up with. If you add enough ingredients you basically increase the strength of the potion. You can also increase your permanent stats by mixing ingredients that only affect permanent stats. (you don't want to mix permanent stat changing ingredients with temporary ingredients even though you can make some pretty cool potions by doing that).
Last but not least, realism. This game feels and acts real. I told a bandit to get out of the road and leave and he didn't just dissapear. He walked down the mountain and I found him again later where he setup camp a ways down from the road. I got a quest that was to make a suit of armor. The armor cost was higher depending on the size of my character. So if I had made a smaller character at the beginning of the game, I would have been able to pay less. Lots of cool quests and "different" quests and definately something new.
As far as the story I have no idea, I haven't done any quests for it. Seems to be somewhat interesting though.
The bad:
The worst part of the game in my opinion would have to be your horse/pet. The game has obvious clipping and pathfinding bugs. Some mountains you can't go up on your horse and some areas of land your horse gets stuck and stops. Then you have to turn it around and go back the same way you came in to get out of the "stuck terrain". Sometimes you even get stuck to a point where you have to dismount, walk down a ways, and then whistle to have your horse come to you. Also sometimes your horse goes left when you want it to go right which only only seems to happen in clipping bugs mentioned above when the horse gets somewhat stuck). When you are not experiencing these bugs, the horses/pets are beautiful and move like they should in life.
Horse combat is lacking. However powerful in the game, horse combat is somewhat degrading due to the fact that you can't have your horse set at a nice running pace and swing at your opponents. Your horse or whatever has to be going somewhat at a slow trot where you can swing at them, but that also means your opponents (like multiple bandits) surround you and your horse, and if it is early in the game, you will get owned really fast. I haven't found any new animals to ride on since this review so I cannot say if it is any different on those animals/creatures.
Voice acting which has been mentioned lots of times, isn't that great. A lot of the characters do sound alike, there is some differences, but their tones all have that "duke nukem" feel. Some of the girl voices sound nice though.
Lip synching does not match up to characters mouths on some portions of text. Again, no big deal on this one.
The controls are somewhat weird at first but you get used to it after a while. Not really a bad thing.
If you have any of the elemental damage on your weapon, the effect looks pretty cheezy when it hits an opponent. Fire seems to look the "coolest" out of the bunch where as lightning looks the worst.
The bottom line: You have to play this game for a couple hours before you start to get into it. If you play for an hour or two and feel yourself not really liking it, keep playing. I was the same way until I started to understand the game, how the controls work. After you figure out the issue with the mounts and know why it happens and how to avoid it (when you can), it makes the game so much better. In my opinion, if you like RPGs and have patience, you won't regret buying this game. After you get into it, believe me you won't stop thinking about playing it for quite a long while.