Nice, I think you guys have pushed me over the edge. I'm going to have to pick this up.

I think of spent somewhere around 1000 hours playing Morrowind in and still have probably only seen around 2/3 of the entire game world. I've only explored a small piece of Solstheim and a tiny bit of Mournhold, and have not even visited every city on the mainland of Vvardenfell.

If Skyrim gives me that kind of experience again, I'll be extremely happy! I'll be reporting back on how it all went.

Like others have said, you definitely need to try this game. The atmosphere and depth of the game are easily on par with Morrowind. There is just a ton of interesting things to do, from the simplest of talking to every NPC and learning their stories, to just exploring towns and cities and the landscape. I mean, words can't even do justice how good this game is. You just have to play it to believe it. I'm an old school gamer myself and I find Skyrim to be one of the best, if not the single best game I've ever played. It's really that good.

The first day I bought Skyrim, I went back to play an old roguelike. I still came back to Skyrim, but its more like reading a book than it is playing a man's game. If you put in the time, you WILL get to the next chapter. For me, there is no feeling of accomplishment beyond perceived value based on time invested. However, when the mod tools come out, everything changes. That's what I'm here for.

Atmosphere is the most important part to me. Combat, balance, and "game-ness" have always been secondary. The Elder Scrolls has always been about immersing yourself into another world and forgetting about your own for a while. Oblivion struggled with this at times. If Skyrim does this well, it sounds great to me.

I'm really quite shocked at how good this game has been received by young and old gamers alike. I've become jaded lately when it comes to video games - usually when a game comes out that looks beautiful, it means that they took shortcuts on the gameplay. If you are all telling me in 2011, when the gaming industry has become almost solely about profits, that it is both beautiful AND deep, I'm really quite surprised and impressed.

seriously, stop talking and go out buy the game, you will love it. its like that world is real and outside is a fantasy rpg.

My friend, you have no idea. You absolutely must play this game. That's all that can really be said. Buy it asap and bask in the glory of Skyrim. I too was bored of video games for awhile, but this game, well....this game just blows everything else out of the water. I don't even know what else to say, just get it as soon as you possibly can. You will love it.

I'm an old school gamer. I loved Morrowind, one of my all time favorite games, but there were things about it that I didn't like. I really had to play the game modded.

Daggerfall, can't really comment on because there were to many bugs a glitches for me to even attempt to play.

Oblivion, well after a couple hundred mods I managed to get the gameplay tolerable, then I went to tackle the story and found out that it svcked so hard it wasn't worth playing even if I had good gameplay.

Skyrim is something special. I bought it expecting that I would need to mod it like Oblivion and Morrowind, that is what I expect from Elder Scrolls games. Hours and days in I was surprised, no need to mod it little detail changes here and there would be nice but no need. It wasn't until this morning that I realized one thing that I will seriously need to have modded, and that is Unique Equipment is both boring and svcks. I had just spent hours running all over Skyrim, tackling the most difficult and epic dungeons I have found to date, went through epic boss fights, all to track down an artifact of such power that knowledge of its existance was erased to protect the world and this piece of crap is what you give me? It's the same with all unique and artifact items that I've found, all a disappointment.

That said there is something that compensated for that and brings up into discussion on actual content to determine if Skyrim is worth an Old School Gamers time. First on the list is crafting, Smithing is one of the most intensely satisfying experiences I'm ever had in gameing. Being able to build your own equipment and it actually being worth wearing is rare and is balanced well in my opinion. Very good.

Alchemy is basically the same as Morrowind and Oblivion except insteed of having alchemy equipment to carry around there are alchemy labs in various locations that you use.

Enchanting, is good too. It has less options than Morrowind, and you can only place one effect on an item unless you have the master perk which allows for two effects.

Crafting has allowed me to make my own equipment the way I want it.

Combat us definitely designed to appeal to modern crowd, but that isn't really a bad thing. There are a lot of different ways to fight, and a lot of thought was put into making them all fun and balanced. It demands of the player, not just high stats, but also player skill.

There is level scaling, but unlike Oblivion it is barely noticeable until much later on when you realize there are and aweful lot of those boss type monsters running around. Instead of making all of the monsters suddenly be higher level it replaces then with different higher level monsters. you can always judge roughly how dangerous an enemy is by it appearance and name. So no more common goblins becoming unstoppable killing machines when you level up. Fortunately it doesn't level up all of the monsters. If oyu are only fighting one or two enemies they are likely to be higher level enemies, but if you are going to go against a large group most will be low level enemies you would have fought at level one with a powerful leader and maybe some middle level managment guys to create variety.

There is lots of clutter everywhere, sometimes there is more than Morrowind, other times it's more like Oblivion. A lot of unimportant clutter you can't pick up, but you can kick it around. It's good.

I'm still uncertain about the RPG stats aspect of the game. They have greatly water it down. They took out Attributes completely, and instead focused entirely on Skills and supplemented them with a perk system. Health, Magicka, and Stamina are now all determined by how many times you choose to increase them when you level up. Classes are also non-existent. That said the perk system does create an astounding variety of potential characters. It also gets rid of the need to plan out what skills you want to increase when you level up to make sure you don't get screwed on attribute points.

Straight non-combat build aren't viable at all. You go into this expecting to fight dragons and a lot of them. That said non-combat skills used properly greatly enhance your combat potential. The one I'm suprised they kept at all was Speachcraft which really just determines how good you are at selling stuff. The in conversation stuff is, unfortunately, of little consequence, and there is no way to practice it other than selling stuff as far as I can tell.

Can't really comment much on thief skills other than to say stealth works, and lockpicking is like in Fallout 3.

Unless you are going to pay very close attention to what people are telling you, read books and notes very carefully, and take your own notes, turning off quest markers isn't really viable and even then you will need to pull up the map to see where a location is marked at.

Exploration is really good, but in my experience it is focused on the outside world and dungeons and less on the cities. In cities you get quests and advance their little storylines.

Overall it is a very satisfying experience, and with the exception of the occasional bandit camp over populated with Bandit Plunderers, I feel very much like a well rounded level 37 warrior should feel like.