Is anyone playing this besides me? The sheer scope of the game is...well, its huge, in a word. The world, on a flat map, is roughly the same size as Oblivion but if you factor in the number of mountains, hills, dales and such that make navigation a good deal more difficult and it is at least twice the size it was in Oblivion. The models, colors and textures are all what you'd expect at this stage of development in games, the writing/scripting and voice acting are superb (the cast includes Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, Joan Allen, Lynda Carter, Vladimir Kulich and Michael Hogan), but there are a few faults, some minor, some major.
One major fault that I've run into is that the game tends to freeze, for no real reason. I've gotten into the habit of saving regularly just in case it occurs. Since I started playing a couple of weeks ago, it has frozen at least four or five times; once after I'd gone a couple of hours just gallivanting thru the country side but no autosaves occurred as I'd not transitioned between indoor and outdoor environments (the game will usually autosave when moving between the two)...that was a bummer, but it provided an opportunity to try a different approach. Still sucked having lost all that work though.
That's my one major beef...this game is not as intuitive as the previous one, if only because the world is so large, sometimes it can be hard to figure out where to go next. I do like interacting with the different townsfolk between Holds...the dialog isn't cookie cutter- that is, what one merchant says in, say, Whiterun, won't be exactly the same as what another would say in Riverwood, beyond the usual merchant stuff regarding wares. They've managed to craft a world that would feel like a living, breathing thing, if it weren't for the blasted freezing!
Still...I've managed to learn two Words of Power (thu'um they are called) and I've just recently collected my first Dragon Soul (the power you'll need in order to be able to utter a specific Word of Power). I can tell you this, a Level 15 Warrior with an upgraded WoP can take down a good number of enemy combatants singlehandedly. Dragons are of course a good bit harder.
