First, let me talk about Oblivion. Oblivion was great. It was the first modern game I started playing, and it wowed me wholeheartedly. When I started, I had Shivering Isles and all those yummy mods. I recount spending tons of time installing mods and trying to make my own mods (bad mods, now in retrospect). Of course, there were flaws, but the game was great, and I was enraged when Fallout was released when I was scouring the interwebs for info on Elder Scrolls V. Yeah, I like Fallout in the end.

Skyrim. First of all, I want to say, the game is awesome, and I give it, say, 9.5/10. It will probably go up to 10/10 when the mods roll out. (Ok, 1000+ are out. But with creation kit not out yet, the heavy mods are not out yet. So in essence, the mods "for realz" have not shown themselves yet.) With like 5 years in between Elder Scroll games, saying that this 5th Elder Scroll game is going to be big is more or less an understatement. Let me start out by what I like.

Obviously, I love the large game. The many locations. For the few saying "zomg oblivion haz moar locations dan skyrim", realize that that is merely the number of fast travel markers. Many dungeons are cookie cutter variety for Oblivion, while the dungeons in Skyrim vary. And I thought the dungeons were good in Oblivion. Now I see Skyrim. Whoa, baby. I love the combat. The combat in Oblivion, while fine, isn't really that good. The melee part, for me, was just block, then attack. The player is encouraged to block until being hit, then counter by whacking the enemy a few times, then blocking again. That's a bit inadequate, even for awe-struck me. After all, the game really centers around combat. Why do you explore? Why do you make money? To be the baddest knight in Tamerial. In Skyrim, the dual wield has me in a dream. The power attacks are actually something I really want to use all the time now. The leveling system makes more sense to me. (In Oblivion, to have max levels, you actually had to make your "specialized" skills as low as possible. WHAT?) The perks system is great. I love the constellation perk interface. I like how there are more than a few voice actors this time around. And DRAGONS. YEA! The new skills are good. I can't really argue with the removal of some of the skills from Oblivion either.

Now, let's talk about what I dislike. From a technical aspect, I am disappointed. Where are the fancy DX 11 effects? And what the hell are those blocky, ugly shadows? And only support for TWO CORES? COMON! I mean, I love this game, I love this company, but to be fair, that's sad. And the max support for memory at 2gb? I KNOW, many mods can fix the issues or help lessen the effects of problems in Skyrim. In Oblivion, there is the OBGE 3. In Skyrim, I'm gonna see SGE. Sure. But this doesn't give makers of this game the ability to make mistakes like this. Nobody is going to be able to release a "multi core" patch. For now, people are going to get CPU bottlenecked, unless they get like Core i5 2500k and OC it. The UI. Oh no. The UI is just bad. Really, I want to say that it's just feels like a console port. Making pots svck for me. I'm tired of clicking the ingredients, pressing R to craft, then pressing "ok" after the potion failed to be produced. The whole Skyrim-stuck-with-Steam thing is annoying me as well. The process of having Steam DOWNLOAD the game after I BOUGHT THE CD is just ASININE. I had to manually change things up to make it install from the CD. I sometimes feel like Bethesda is turning their back on PC people, when they release shady patches that lock modification of the exe. People, piraters are gonna pirate. You can't stop them. Trying to stop them is only going to piss of legit people like me. (The large address aware patch had to be changed to work again, fixing an oversite by Bethesda.)

Yeah, sure, my complaint paragraph is larger than my "in-awe" paragraph. But at the end of the day, I willfully overlook the negatives of this game and just enjoy the game that is Skyrim.

I've got a junky little blog that I post on when I'm really bored... I just made a huge compilation of my thoughts of the first 60 hours....http://kloakedkhajiit.blogspot.com/