What I mean by the title is how did you first imagine Skyrim to be like when you first saw the announcement trailer and the gameplay trailer? What did you expect compared to what you actually received? I thought the game would be similar to Oblivion with bigger city's, amazing NPC AI with enhanced radient AI, better graphic, and animation, very in-depth, and so much more.

Heres one of the first pages on the Skyrim forum to see what people originally thought.

http://www.gamesas.com/forum/118-skyrim-general-discussion/page-3132?prune_day=100&sort_by=Z-A&sort_key=last_post&topicfilter=all

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1102208-tes-v-ideas-and-suggestions-170/

edit: The title was supposed to be Imagined*

I Imagined it to be much as it was, an open world RPG where we slay dragons

I thought Dragons were going to be challenging and use a lot of shouts.

I'd imagined the big man himself, Alduin, would be able to use any shout of the game against you in the final battle. So much for that! :<
I was also expecting the DB to shout "DOOOOVAAAAHKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN" at some point in the game just like in the trailer, at least once. It was soooooo epic!

There's lots of other things, only I can't remember them.

I was looking forward to a TES5 announcement for so long, but when I heard it was gonna be in Skyrim, I was like "Oh crap, please don't tell me it's gonna be all snowy and gray/cloudy now." The enviornment was my only concern. It ended up being that way, but the game overall is still solid.

Have you been to Autumshade forest? you know outside riften?

Shush , you. Snow's the best.

I thought Skyrim is going to svck ass but then it turned out to be fine. It did not even remotely live up to its hype (who does?) but it certainly was better than I had anticipated.

I tried my best to not imagine what Skyrim would be like, because doing that is a stupid idea. You'll either: over-hype yourself because you imagined the perfect game for you, or you got pessimistic and create an unfair bias to hate the game before it even comes out.

I imagined only what was explicitly announced and nothing more, so Skyrim did not disappoint me.

The game is actually a lot less snowy than I imagined it to be. Falkreath and the Reach look incredibly warm despite being north of Bruma.

I no longer imagine things, knowing that they'll never look like what I imagined. So I've never been disappointed; that's what you wanted to know, didn't you?

Honestly, the game met almost all of my expectations and more. The only three things I was looking forward to, but did not receive in the end, are:

1) Bigger cities; the cities in Skyrim felt little bigger than Oblivion's, and none of the cities were nearly as big and detailed as the Imperial City in Oblivion

2) The ability to bash chests/doors open in case you have no lockpicks. I recall Todd Howard saying something before the game was released where the player will have the more realistic ability to bash open locks if they have no lockpicks, at the risk of damaging their weapon. I really would have liked this - it would have really come in handy.

3) The graphics. They were awesome graphics, but I think they could have done better in areas. Particularly the textures - there was barely any mapping on them, and when there was, it was only ever really specular mapping. Everything felt too smooth in contrast to Oblivion, where everything seemed pretty accurate, mapping-wise.

Otherwise, I think Skyrim is possibly the best in the TES series, and I really enjoy it.