I definitely can't complain about the lack of character customization. This was probably the only game where you can customize your character to have white, black, or bloodshot eyes. I went with a spell casting Breton:
Blood will splatter on your hands if your enemy bludgeons you hard enough:
A few general notes
- As I said before, moving around is harder and aiming is easier with a mouse. I've played Oblivon on the 360 and Skyrim on the PC and it's hard to say which platform has the better controls.
- Difficulty can be all over the place. I may have no problem taking on 5 bandits, but taking on two ice wolves or 1 adept conjurer can be pretty hard.
- The skill leveling up system is a double edged sword. While it's nice that the skills that level up the fastest are the ones you use the most, it can also encourage you to be intentionally slow and inefficient in combat. The more hits you take, the more your armor and restoration skills increase. Sometimes the easiest way to level up these skills is to get the attention of 2 bandits and let them stab you repeatedly while you occasionally heal yourself for minutes on end. A conventional experience system wouldn't have this problem, but then the game would have to impose rigid class restrictions and wouldn't feel as free-form and non-linear anymore.
-The armor system has been revised so that cloth armor will always either boost total magicka, make certain spells cheaper to cast, or significantly speed up regeneration. Without the cloth armor, your ability to cast spells in combat is extremely limited.
-At first I thought dual casting was a gimmick, but it adds as much depth to combat as shields.
- Perks feel much better than stat increases; I hope all RPGs adopt a perk system in the future.
- Certain NPCs are randomly generated. When I loaded one game, I encountered an orc who wanted me to kill him. When I reloaded the game and went to the same spot, I found a hunting merchant instead.
- 3rd person is more practical for combat. When kiting monsters, like giants or mammoths especially, knowing how far behind you they are is of the utmost importance.
- This is the only game I've played that features mountains but is not a headache to travel through. That's because paths up and down mountains are frequent and ledges are constantly built on the side of mountains so that you never have to fall too far. Sometimes the game ignores physics and lets you walk down the edge of a mountain that is almost completely perpendicular to the ground; it's less realistic but it makes travel much easier.
- Skyrim's environment is much less repetitive than Oblivion's environment. You never feel like you're traveling through copy pasted tiles.
- The inventory system still sucks. You can easily become over-encumbered after clearing out one mine, frequently have to go back to town to sell your equipment to merchants who might not have enough to buy it all, and are constantly pausing the game to drop things so that you can continue. I wish the limit were 10,000 pounds instead of 300 pounds.
- Go attack a giant and then just stand there, I dare you.
