This is looking very intriguing as always. For one I'm so extremely glad that Bethesda have finally thrown away their extremely obsolete game engine for a much newer, much slicker one. If there was one thing that annoyed me about games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 it was that it was much too CPU-intensive for what was actually going on in game. My PC has run prettier games like Crysis and Crysis 2 with pretty much no framerate hitches whatsoever, and my PC still grinds down to a single-digit fps count during the final battle of Oblivion's main storyline unless I set all graphics slider to moderate-minimum. It was just plain inefficient. My hope is that Skyrim will run much better at a decent video quality. For the rest, I'm just plain looking forward to seeing it on my shelf as Blizzard, Valve and Bethesda are pretty much the only developers I care to spend money on.
The new combat system sounds especially intriguing. The interchangeability of the player character's hands sounds like unlike previous games it might actually be possible to swap between magic and combat without too much of a hassle. Still, what with the ability to switch between sword and shield, dual wielding, and magicing with either one or two hands, I hope it is still possible to wield two-handed weapons, since if magic can be made more powerful by loading a single spell in both hands, the same should be possible for melee, right? On that note, I hope that Skyrim will reintroduce a greater variety of weapons, since a lot of them went inexplicably missing between Morrowind and Oblivion.
Also, any one know if Skyrim will feature things like combat on horseback (which Oblivion, despite the ability to ride horses, sorely lacked) and better character animations? It would add a lot of immersion into the game that Oblivion in special failed to provide.
Ohe last thing; I hope that Skyrim will be a game that can stand on its own without the express need for mods. I realize that Morrowind and Oblivion thrive on its mod community, and that's not a bad thing; Morrowind, probably one of my top 3 most favorite games ever, as a game was greatly enriched by mods, adding detail and character to an already expansive game world backed by a mostly solid gameplay and interface (save for perhaps the infuriating lack of regenerating magicka and the clusterfuck quest journal), but in my opinion, Oblivion was much too reliant on third-party mods to enhance its gameplay to actual tolerable standards. When I first played through vanilla Oblivion and finished every quest I could find I was left feeling empty. The sights were wonderful and watching dead enemies ragdoll through the air in mad pirouettes after launching off of my magical lightning hammer was always fun, but as a whole the game didn't leave me with the same impression that Morrowind did, and the mods that added wandering adventurers and allegiances to the land of Cyrodiil, and new mobs to kill to the countryside of Cyrodiil, and more houses and stories to the cities of Cyrodiil and a risen water level to Leyawiin didn't manage to fill that void. All this third-party artifice made the experience more varied and enjoyable to a point, but I kept seeing things left and right and feeling that they shouldn't be there... No amount of added content could replicate whatever it was that Morrowind had and that Oblivion didn't, and as such I remained unfulfilled.
Many PC gamers today can't fathom playing Oblivion without inventory, gameplay and leveling overhauls. Between my real life friends and online acquaintances I can't find anyone that plays Oblivion without mods like O3 and Better Cities, and the fact that the actual mod support has developed actual third-party software like OBMM, designed for the express purpose of fluently incorporating mods into the game, is only further evidence of the necessity of mods to enhance Oblivion's core gameplay. All I'm saying is I hope Bethesda have been taking notes from all this third-party content, so that vanilla Skyrim will be an enjoyable experience without the whole rigmorall of mod-hunting to add spruces of substance and color to a bleak and empty shell of a game.
