Have you played Biowares Dragon Age? "good" things you might do may not end up doing much good at all..and the mean stuff...the opposite.
Over-rated in my opinion. The choice/sonsequence dynamic is done much better in the two witcher games. Don't get me wrong I really like Bioware and spent a long time on Dragon Age as well, but the writing and choice aspsects get waaaaaaaaay to much praise. Dragon Age is horribly generic and cliched and the choices are painfully obvious - just like in every Bioware game I've played it's saintly good or dastardly evil and no reward whatsoever for a more nuanced, middle path. Witcher actually gives you tough choices where none seem good, where Morrowind, on the other hand, leaves it up to your imagination to make your own morality, which I find vastly more immersive and affecting than the transparent good choice/evil choice dialoge approach.
Pretty much aye. Oblivion, the last one, was one of the best games I've ever played and this looks MUCH better.
Dual wielding is almost reason by itself to get horribly excited. It's also almost guaranteed that we'll get dragon riding mods before long which will be utterly awesome.
There's talk of Skyrim taking on more of a Fallout style for levelling up, certainly it has perks like Fallout which Oblivion didn't have. You levelled up in Oblivion by using that stat, so the more you used a sword, the better you got with it - but when you levelled up you could upgrade whatever ruling stat you wanted - Strength for attacking, Speed for running and jumping, Intelligence for magic etc. It's meant to be alot simpler this time round, thankfully.
Yes, I'm really looking forward to this. I always loved the idea behind it anyway - improve by doing works so much better for me than the arbitrary points for levelling thing, and practice by doing, say, a small spell over and over again feels so much more immersive than killing and re-killing some re-spawining mob - if that's even an option. Not to mention that Dragon Age, again, is horribly restrictive in it's class system. I don't want to be just a mage, I want to play, not have to play the game 4 times to get the full experience, as it were. It feels far more restrictive in Dragon Age than their other games for me. The party system also just made me think back to older RPGs with real nostaligia and wish I could just create my own party and play with them instead of some of the dullards Bioware foisted on me - another thing that I think was over-rated in DA:O.
Anyway, it seems like Bethesda have learned from some great mods out there and really made it a pure connection between doing, skilling and levelling - no metagaming or stats to get in the way of that, and if it works as it seems to be intended I think it'll be absolutely amazing, because the fun for me in the RPG genre is far more about the role playing bit than the min-maxing of stats and combinations of skills bit.
Owlchemy
A Curry eating fat orc.
Never played Elder Scrolls before (Fallout 3 was one of the first RPG's I've ever played) but the more I read up on this, the more I excited I am about it. I read that Oblivion had a different levelling up to Fallout 3 - I liked that you could distribute experience points however you wanted whereas in Oblivion, you got experience points for performing certain actions (is that right?). Which do people prefer?
Morrowind for me, though I really like the world and concept of the Fallout games. I would absolutely love a sci-fi version of The Elder Scrolls with the same approach to levelling, mind, there's a real lack of good sci-fi true RPGs in my opinion.
Though I also think the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series does an incredible job of combining a hell of a lot of awesome RPG elements into a far more F.P.S structure - basically an open world F.P.S where the 'levelling up' type feel is done through equipment instead. The original in particular is not just fun to play but has the best atmosphere of any game I've played and some genuinelly terrifying moments. It's the only game that's ever made me hunt down the book it was based on, and the film based on that (though I've yet to finish them).