So, Skyrim's out 11/11/11

[Treesh]

Having said that, do you think the Elder Scroll series is any good? Lol, and no, this is not a setup to some bashing. I'm asking because I'm curious as to what are the highlights people who want to play this game are looking forward to.

I played 2, 3 and 4 (Daggerfall, Morrowind + 2 expansions, and Oblivion w/ the expansion and the Knights of the Nine add-on, respectively).

2 had a ton of bugs, but was immensely fun despite them. You could buy your own ship, but anything you would put into containers would disappear so instead of really decorating, you just threw everything into a pile on the floor. Thievery was very lucrative and gave me a lot of enjoyment. Don't ask me anything about the storyline though. I just ran around and stole things mostly until I finally decided that maybe I should actually finish the game.

3 had housing, but it was quite limited so I just used the construction set - basically the world editor that the devs used came bundled with the game. That's what really set 3 apart. There were still tons of side quests that you could do. You could just go out wandering and dungeon crawl if you didn't want to do any questing right then. Thievery was nerfed slightly, but still enjoyable. That game I didn't actually finish until the 4th game was going to be out soon so I made a character who just did the main storyline and nothing else just so I could say I actually finished it. There were some monsters and hostile people who would completely wipe the floor with you if you went into that cave too early. It was a satisfying challenge to beat them before I got too big though. The environment sucked me in though. When it was storming really hard outside or the big sandstorms hit in the desert areas, I stayed indoors as much as possible. One of my biggest time sinks in the game itself (I ended up spending more time in the editor creating rather than playing the game for a while there) was taunting NPCs who were wearing pretty dresses and convincing them to fight me so I could kill them and take their clothes off their corpses without being slapped with a fine for murder. I was a big collector of fancy, shiny things. =)

4 was a bit disappointing for me, but I still ended up enjoying it. It didn't feel like a TES game though. Thievery was completely pointless so I had to just give up on that. As I leveled, the monsters leveled so it really never felt any different from when I was a wee baby fighting rats in the sewers. Most of the time, I really didn't care if I helped out the NPCs or not unlike in 2 and 3. I did have to laugh at some of their shenanigans though thanks to the improved AI. I really didn't like the changes to the melee system though. Yeah, they added in "power attacks" that you could do when you got skilled enough and depending on how you moved while attacking, but meh. It just wasn't as satisfying to go in and just beat them into submission. You also couldn't just taunt and mock people into starting a fight with you so that little side game wasn't there for me. The Dark Brotherhood questline started out FANTASTIC. I loved having to actually do the stealthy stuff and not get caught by anyone. Then when you got to the point where you picked up your assignments at drop points, it was just poor tedium. Go here, kill X, go to a new place to get your money and new assignment, repeat ad naseum. Bleh. In 3, the stuff that had magical properties had pretty little glows so I went around collecting that stuff, but they removed the glowing in 4. I could decorate to my heart's content in 3 because of the lack of gravity. I still have the screenshots of my decorated house. Basically, I decorated by dropping shiny things, lamps, candles, pillows, all over the floors and walls. In 4, when I got my multiple houses, to decorate you just got more money and bought ready made furniture sets for each room. I ended up sort of decorating by just keeping some stuff that I got from doing stuff on the main quest, but it just didn't satisfy that interior decorating itch like 3 did. It was just as open ended questwise as 2 and 3, but there ended up being less other stuff for me to actually do in game. Oh, my other problem with 4 is that the mobs just really don't drop much in the way of interesting loot. There were a couple of dungeons I went into that actually had folks dropping fancy little magical stuff (although that toon didn't actually wear any of it), but most of the time I never saw anything exciting so it didn't even have the "shopping" factor that Diablo 1 and 2 did. There just really didn't feel like there was actual progress with my characters in 4, unlike 2 and 3.

For 5, basically I'm looking at it going to be more like an FPS than a TES game. Yes, I can dual wield spells (which looks like it'll be fun as hell), but the rest of it, unless they've given pretty things to steal or something else to do besides just quest, it's basically just going to be spoon fed questing.

I definitely second the suggestion that if you have an Xbox to rent it first to see if it's something that's going to hold your attention or not.