TL;DR version:

begin with 6/10;
add 3 if you have no problems with levelscaling and/or a mod comes out that removes levelscaling;
add 1 if some of the most pressing bugs, annoyances and balancing issues are fixed.

Levelscaling: way better than Oblivion, but still very annoying
Quests: high quality, with surprisingly few bugs
Lore, immersion and realism: good job, although lore still fades in comparison with Morrowind
Balancing: could have been better, yet not bad (but see levelscaling)
Bugs and design flaws: few serious bugs; lack of player-owned containers at the beginning of the game

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First let me say that I am not yet done with the story. In fact, according to the UESP list, I am midway through the main quest, and that at 92 hours of gameplay and level 35. This reflects more on my playing style than on the game itself, but it shows that the claims of Skyrim being linear are somewhat exaggerated, to say the least.

Levelscaling

The first section of this review is about levelscaling. If you are comfortable with the idea that roughly 80% of your ingame enemies are levelscaled, and not in the Morrowind way of levelscaling, then you can just skip this section - most likely, you will not consider any of the points I make interesting.

I didn't have much hope that Bethesda would abandon levelscaling to begin with - "never change a running system" is too much of an article of faith in software development. I had hopes that it would end up better than Oblivion's and maybe even better than Fallout 3's levelscaling. It did end up better than Oblivion's one: there are no literal bandits in daedric armor, and there is no sudden onslaught of enemies immune to normal weapons (in fact, there are no enemies immunte to normal weapons anymore - this is, I think, an improvement over Oblivion and Morrowind). Still, most of Skyrim is levelscaled, and you will notice it even if you don't look for it. Many places in Skyrim are harder on levels 5-15 than on levels 1-5, because on levels 1-5 they do not spawn enemies at all. It happened to me at least once that I was forced to go to an already discovered place using Fast Travel, because the only way to it suddenly started spawning witches. These witches became cannon fodder on higher levels, but the very fact that at some level I couldn't reach a point by foot but could fast travel to it is rather immersion-breaking (fast travel isn't supposed to be a teleportation spell - it is supposed to be an abstraction for travelling by foot!). More importantly, the very idea that you don't gain an advantage by levelling up took a lot of excitement from my game. Why train skills if it will benefit my enemies just as much as me? Leveling up felt like running on the spot, with the constant danger of falling back. It did get better around level 25, when I finally was able to handle most of the enemies the game threw at me in the wilderness (except for mages; more on this later). Maybe I indeed outran the levelscaling? Or the leveled lists "slowed down" around level 20? Or I got better at tactics? I don't know. But if I ever feel like replaying Skyrim with a new character, I might just as well get it to level 20 by console at first, because the game isn't fun if one is not making progress.

Due to levelscaling, Skyrim neither has any real comfort zones (regions where you are pretty much safe unless you are a level-3 character or walk into caves; the Ascadian Isles were such a zone in Morrowind) nor real danger zones (regions one should avoid unless well-skilled and well-prepared; "you don't just walk into Mordor"). While the snowy regions of Skyrim seem to be slightly more dangerous than the Whiterun-Helgen-Falkreath area, and the Reach is harder than both of these (due to being a war zone), it is hard to notice the differences, and all of these zones gradually become harder as you level. On higher levels you will confront frost trolls on the way from Riverwood to Bleak Falls Barrow. Whether you are seeking adventure in the mountains around Winterhold, or trying to have a relaxing walk in the vicinity of Riverwood, the game will often throw the same kind of enemies at you, as if monsters could fast travel.

This said, Bethesda did avoid the one really big mistake they made in Oblivion: the attribute multipliers. They took the Alexandrian solution: drop the attributes. I must say I am not missing them at all. Some claim that without attributes, Skyrim isn't a real RPG, but I prefer this solution to Oblivion's contra-intuitive and immersion-breaking hunt for +5 multipliers. Of course, abolishing levelscaling would be a better fix to this (the only reason to hunt for those +5's is to get stronger faster than your enemies; if the enemies don't level, it doesn't really matter whether how fast you improve).

Sidenote: If someone is planning a mod that removes levelscaling (like OOO for Oblivion), I am available for comments, testing and/or enemy placing.

Quests

I can only speak of what I've seen so far (haven't finished any questline spanning more than two quests), but what I've seen so far is fascinating. It seems that Bethesda has learnt to make quests at the same time interesting, complex (lots of interaction, complex decision trees, nontrivial AI) and relatively bugfree. Yes, I am aware of https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs, but only one of them is a serious plotstopper that is not easy to avoid or to fix by the console (I am talking about the bug that breaks Blood on the Ice).

The lack of consequences of "The Forsworn Conspiracy" and "No One Escapes Cidhna Mine" was somewhat disappointing, but then again I have no idea what kind of consequences these quests could reasonably have without ruining the player's gameplay comfort. After all, a burned-down Markarth and half the shopekeepers murdered would make most players just reload an earlier save. The two quests themselves are well-done and build up tension very well.

Even the randomized "radiant" quests don't really feel like coming out of a machine. Morrowind had a lot of handmade fed-ex quests that were no less trivial than these randomized ones. I was particularly astonished at how some apparently pointless-looking actions and errands trigger essential quests.

Lore, immersion and realism

Where not spoiled by levelscaling and poor balancing, Skyrim's world feels rather immersive - certainly more than Oblivion's. Several places show that the developers did care for realism. In contrast to Morrowind, where Dwemer machinery felt like an affront to physics and conservation of energy, this time we see how these Dwemer constructs are powered by soul gems, and we also see where they come out of. Wolves hunt in packs and show actual flock behaviour. Bandits don't let themselves get killed off one by one. While Morrowind felt immersive in part because the player's fantasy was forced to interpolate many things that the game failed to give, Skyrim feels immersive because the developers actually built in all of these things. Skyrim is as concrete as Morrowind was abstract.

There are several things, though, that keep Skyrim from reaching Morrowind's level of immersion. Most importantly, Skyrim might have 10 times as much new lore as Oblivion had, but this is still 1/10th of Morrowind's lore. There are also too many Nordic clichées for this new lore to be actually that new. Still, it is a giant step forward from Oblivion and provides for an immersive game experience.

Balancing

Balancing a levelscaled game is extremely difficult. I pity the developers who had to do it. In a non-levelscaled game, you basically decide how strong a character must be to survive in a certain place, and place monsters accordingly (of course, deciding is the hard part); in a levelscaled one, you have to take into account all possible levels of the player. I wasn't surprised to find some oversights on Bethesda's part here; I was kind of surprised that there were so few of them. https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs/208614 is the most glaring of them - nothing beats being trapped in a dungeon that can only be exited by beating the final boss, and finding out that you can make basically no damage against the final boss while he takes you out in 2-3 shots. Add to this that Sigdis is one of 3 brothers, and the 2 remaining ones are very doable with the appropriate tactics.

What I still haven't figured out is how to fight mages as a warrior. Against warriors and archers, several tactics work. Against mages, the only ones seem to be
- spamming health and resistance potions,
- buying the appropriate resistance armor/amulets/rings.
Magic seems generally useless, since damage is done faster than reverted, and particularly in the presence of shock-casting mages depleting your magicka. Maybe it's just me missing the obvious... but if not, then the game seems to underrate the difficulty of fighting spellcasters, particularly vampires. I have yet to clear out a single vampire lair without a potion drinking orgy.

Bugs and design flaws

If you belong to the "not buying Bethesda products until the second patch" faction, rest assured: Skyrim in version 1.1 (that's the day-one patch) isn't as buggy as Morrowind with its latest official patch. And that despite the complexity of Skyrim's quests and AI would allow for 10 times as many bugs. Yes, Bethesda has learnt a lot since Oblivion. Besides many minor bugs that didn't seriously hurt my game experience, I had a https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs/209221 and occasionally https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs/208442. Both of these were averted by saving and reloading. I know of very few bugs that aren't immediately obvious when encountered. Save often and you will be mostly safe.

Now for the other kind of bugs - the ones that are not bugs but features. Obviously this is a very subjective category. My favorite issue of this kind is levelscaling, as detailed above. The second design flaw, in my opinion, is the absence of a container where the player can put his stuff in at the beginning of the game, before one has bought the Whiterun house (or any other house, which isn't much easier). This forces the player to collect his stuff on some corpse and return to it regularly so as to make sure it doesn't respawn. Not a particularly well-documented method (I just knew it from Oblivion) and not quite immersive either, but necessary, since on level 5 you have no idea which of the items in your pockets are important, which are replaceable, and which are useless vendor trash. As a dev who knows exactly what kind of stuff is needed where, you might not understand a level-5 player's troubles deciding between a mace and a greatsword; but I don't think the game would become significantly less challenging simply by giving the player some places to store stuff in. Why not give Gerdur or Alvor (depending on which side the player takes during the tutorial) a chest in their house for the player to put items in? The chest might be limited to a weight of 600, to still make buying a house lucrative.

Conclusion

Skyrim is a high-quality game. While levelscaling and a few other flaws are marring my personal experience of it, the number of actual objective problems that would keep somebody not averse to levelscaling from enjoying it is small. Morrowind has a worthy successor.

Indeed Morrowind does. Skyrim did make my jaw drop with how immersive the world is in flavor and content.

I agree with you on level scaling, but this new system I feel is not as big of a disaster as Oblivions. I would also like to see your magic scale with you. I am pretty sure they dramatically lessened the power of magic because it was grossly overpowered in Oblivion. That is however not fair to this game: the spells should scale with your level or better yet "spell creation" with maybe some small restrictions.

This is a really well thought out and articulate review of the gripes I now have about Skyrim. I currently am level 35 with about 55,000 gold, and archery and sneak as my 100 point skills. I have barely touched the main quest, choosing to clear out dungeons, dwemer ruins and locations that might have new words of power. When I first started this game, and about until the 3rd day playing (and to be honest, I have put in waaay too many hours in this game in a short period of time), I was stoked with the variety of quests, and interesting dungeons I explored. But then it happened. I started to hit the wall, and the fun started to diminish, now to the point where I am starting the game up, playing a little, and then saying to myself "what is the point?". I also want to point out that I have been playing on Master difficulty the whole time, and now, still on Master I one-shot enemies, and take down dragons, giants and bosses within about 1-5 minutes, with maybe a health potion and a stamina potion. All of the loot has become boring. The really cool things about dungeons and quests have become rote and uninteresting now that I see that there is a limit to the variety. I have completed the companions, thieves and mage guild quest lines, and done 3 or 4 daedric quest lines. This game got way too easy too fast. I have a house and a companion. I guess the whole point of what I am saying is that without depth or true challenge, the game just runs out of steam (for me). Anyone else feel this way?

Also, I can't wait for the modders. I feel that they (as they have always done), will "fix" the game and put the challenge and depth that Bethesda has forgotten about. My other gripe is that there isn't that much variety to enemies. I mean every dwemer dungeon has three types of mechanized enemies and the falmer. Humanoids are just given robes or different types of armor, and trolls have different names. I feel as if I have seen just about every single type of creature there is to see, and I would say I am about 1/4 of the way to completing everything in this game.

Yes, I am also wondering what I did wrong that I still have only two on-self healing spells (not counting wards and other restoration stuff), one of them useless, and nobody is teaching me anything better. My restoration being at 65, I expected more...

bluesugar: Are you fighting the Sneak+Archery way all the time? Somehow nobody ever manages to balance this properly... Even though I must ask whether you always one-hit shoot enemies at the first try, or have to reload if they detect you?

Very well-written post, and it tends to sum up my sentiments word for word.

Well, if I don't one-shot enemies, I either have to hit them a few times (with or without the 100 point ability that paralyzes them), and my companion sometimes gets a hit in on them. I guess I could stop playing as a stealth archer, and mess around more with sword and board, but that isn't as fun. I haven't been challenged in a dungeon since level 10, on Master.

Thanks everyone for the compliments.



I assume sword-and-board won't be "as fun" more because it will be extremely hard than because it won't be challenging enough. Of course, you will run into plenty of regular bandits whom you will be able to dispose with in a few strikes, but then there will be bandit plunderers and bandit highwaymen, and these can pose quite a problem...

Was skilling up your archer-and-sneaker as easy as fighting is now? I imagine that blowing one's cover could be deadly for such a character, since you would then have to rely on your companion to do all the damage.

There was some cursing up to level 10 or so, until I started to get higher in the archery tree, and then it became trivial.

A well written review.

I particularly sympathize with you on magic. Somehow, it just doesn't seem to 'work' in the game, and I can't quite explain it. Part of it might be the addition of 'hose' spells that just constantly shoot a stream of fire/ice/electricity from a mage's hand. There's no real way to avoid them, so basically you need to eat the damage and try to catch the mage who is cleverly backpedaling, and kill them before they kill you. Better hope you have enough stamina for a power attack to stagger them!

Another thing I find unsatisfying is mage vs. mage combat. Admittedly I haven't gotten any ridiculous perks yet (knock down dual casting for destruction, for example) but it seems like for the early levels all you do is stand there hosing each other down with a flamethrower, hoping the other guy dies first. I found it particularly difficult to try and solo through necromancer or evil-mage oriented dungeons as a magic user, so much so infact that I mistakenly believed that my Altmer was suffering from the magical weakness trait that Altmer in previous games had! Perhaps I just needed to bring Lydia with me...but if playing a mage is predicated on either summoning a spirit wolf, or always having a dead body on hand to ressurrect to tank for you then... No bueno.

I agree with most of this. The scaling is not OMG HORRIBLE to me like it was in Oblivion, but I definitely notice it and dislike it.