Ok, so I just finished a 16 hour "fuck, I can't put this game down" playing spree (including not eating!), and here's my impressions so far. (WARNING! INCOMING WALL OF TEXT!)

1) The game looks spectacular. The scenery is borderline pornography by itself, the character models look great, and so far, I haven't hit any real bugs to speak of.

2) After hitting level 15, I can say that there seems to be at least some minor level of enemy scaling, but nothing compared to oblivion. Your biggest danger is running into something you have no business fighting (Word of Warning): if you guys hit a dungeon called Bloodlet throne, or something to that effect below level 10, run like hell. The boss in that dungeon will fuck your shit up if you don't turn the difficulty way down, which actually leads me to my second point.

3) This game is pretty damn hard. I had to turn the difficulty down to apprentice because I was tired of every fight with the undead or sub boss enemies being a nightmarish struggle, and even then, you'll still get your shit fucked up. A lot. So save often.

4) Holy Shit, this game is awesome!

5) After hitting something around 7 dungeons, I can say that none of them have been repeats, They've all beer really unique. Another point in it's favor.

6) Duel wielding isn't as awesome as we'd hoped it's be. Not being able to block makes combat rather dangerous, even with a good set of heavy armor (thanks to the great new blacksmith and enchanter skilsl).

7) Bows are good again, but not exactly a great choice against fast enemies, like dragons.

8)Dragon fights live up to the hype. You'll freak out every time you see one, especially if you're all alone, and if you win, you feel a great deal of satifaction that you brought that thing down.

9) Sheogorath returns in this game. I won't spoil what happens, but it's very entertaining and, what's more, you get the wabbajack out of it. I will tell you that you start it in Solitude.

10) Pickaxes are extremely rare, and I've only seen one smelter in the game so far :/ .

tl;dr; Bethesda listened to our complaints and seems to have fixed most, if not all of the most annoying problems with oblivion and this game kicks 72 flavors of ass

Beach Bum wrote:

BlazingGlory wrote: 3) This game is pretty damn hard. I had to turn the difficulty down to apprentice because I was tired of every fight with the undead or sub boss enemies being a nightmarish struggle, and even then, you'll still get your shit fucked up. A lot. So save often. tl;dr; Bethesda listened to our complaints and seems to have fixed most, if not all of the most annoying problems with oblivion and this game kicks 72 flavors of ass So far I haven't had too many difficulty issues myself, but then I spent a good chunk of the last 6 months playing Demon's Souls and Dark Souls so I might never find anything difficult in another game again. I've found that if you bust out the magic even the novice spells can murder stuff when dual casted which helps a lot with difficulty. I do agree though they fixed nearly all my complaints from Oblivion and really made this game a blast. So glad I dropped the money at launch for it, it was worth every penny.

I've more or less decided to do something rather stupid in my playthrough and do a restoration/candlelight only run as a Breton, which, up until the point I started getting the good heavy armor upgrades, was a bit of a nightmare because I was everyone's punching bag. But now that I've made myself a set of legendary dragonbone armor and even 2 legendary daedric swords, the game has gotten much easier. so I went back to master difficulty

Oh, and anyone who hasn't started the companion quests DO IT NOW!!! Seriously, you're gonna love what you get out of it.