I did something with Skyrim I have never done with a game before, I went to the midnight release, and then spent the next 24 hours playing it.
Skyrim is incredible, if you played Oblivion, then you know how good Bethesda is at making fantasy RPG's, and I'm happy to say that Skyrim improved on Oblivion in many ways.
In Oblivion, the combat system worked perfectly, If asked, I would have told Bethesda to change nothing, but they did, and it's awesome. In Skyrim, you can duel wield weapons and spells. This comes in handy when you're fighting off three undead Nords in a dungeon, steel sword in one hand, fire spell in the other. You can also do cool combinations like two spells, or duel swords. Throughout my time playing, I experimented with several different combinations. When you wield duel swords, you occasionally get what I call "cutscene kills," which are essentially one hit K.O.'s except really messy. A sword and a spell lets you capitalize on balencing your stamina and magika, when one runs out, you can switch to the other. When you wield a bow and arrow, that takes two hands, which stinks for me because that's my preferred weapon.
The other major difference I noticed was that there was no class system. At first, I was opposed to this change because without having a distinct class to be, the individualism that I value from playing RPG's is lost. However, I was swayed from this opinion when I realized that this let the player enhance any skill they wanted instead of being stuck in one class they may realize they don't like. For instance, in oblivion, I was a bard, this meant that I was predominantly a stealth fighter, and specialized in hand to hand combat and bows. But what if while on a quest, I discovered the sword of amazing penmanship? Well then because I wasn't skilled with a blade, I'd be stuck wielding the bow of two bit poems instead of writing review masterpieces.
Also, in Oblivion, whenever you talked to someone, it would zoom in on their face, and they'd creepily stare at you for the ten minutes you spent seducing them into telling you where they hid the teddy grams? They took that out, now you get a wide view of their body, and you can look around during conversation. The thing about speaking that they changed that I didn't like was getting rid of the conversation wheel. Every now and then in Oblivion, you would encounter a situation in which you had to get someone to tell you personal information, only you're an elf, and everyone in the game is racist, so they don't exactly draw you a map to the sword of amazing penmanship. So you would have to enter into a fun mini-game, where you tell jokes, threaten, coerce, and make small talk with the person until they trusted you enough to leave you alone in their house so you could steal all their sentimental heirlooms.
Instead, Skyrim takes a conversation lesson from Dragon Age, and just gives you options with (threaten), or (persuade) next to them, and you better hope you're character's skill level is high enough, because there's no playable way to control whether they take nicely to that, or introduce you to the business end of a very large axe.
Now for the plot, You're dragon-born, and you need to kill some dragons to save the world. That's really it, the story plot isn't what makes The Elder Scrolls good, it's the freedom. The freedom to rob a palace dry and then sell it back to the court blacksmith, the freedom to chose any side in any confrontation, and the freedom to be a freaking awesome game.
So at the end of the review, Skyrim is the coolest game of the year, and if you don't play it, you're missing out on the adventure of a lifetime.
