Skyrim (no spoilers)
According to Steam, I've now clocked up 201 hours play-time on Skyrim, so I thought I might make a few observations here.
- It's beautiful. Everybody says this, because it is. In many ways it's the most outstanding feature of the game: you just can't look at it without going, "Gosh, how beautiful is that?"
- It's big. For example, after 201 hours playing, I've discovered 6 of the 13 standing stones, and I discovered 3 of them at the very beginning of the game. It's extravagently content rich: there are huge cave systems with no connection to any of the game's plots (as far as I can tell), every book is readable, there are more than 70 voice actors. If you wander at random in any direction (and you should), you'll find odd little vignettes scattered across the landscape. You can catch the fish, and pick the flowers, and so on. One of the more remarkable technical feats of the game is that you can explore the whole of vast 'outside' area without ever seeing a loading screen.
- It's buggy. Some of the bugs have achieved internet fame. More boringly, it crashes to desktop from time to time: there's no error message or anything, the game just stops running. By default, the game autosaves fairly often, so you're unlikely to lose much progress (and it's surprising fast to load), but it's still a pain. NPC path-finding is a bit rubbish too (that may be unfair: I have the impression that path-finding is hard to implement, and that Skyrim is better than Bethesda's previous efforts). The list of bugs is very, very long (just google "Skyrim bugs").
- You have a high degree of freedom as to how to build your character . There aren't any classes as such, you can just decide which skills you want to develop. However, certain builds just don't work well, whereas certain other combinations are very strong, and may result in the game becoming too easy. My first character ended up as an assassin (after a few inital forays in other directions), my current character is a pure mage. (You can also spend a very long time at the start of the game adjusting the details of your character's appearance.)
- The game difficulty is perhaps a little skewed. There are 5 difficulty settings: the game defaults to the middle one, and I've never heard of anyone playing on any setting easier than that. I find the hardest difficulty setting presents a reasonable degree of challenge, and I'm scarcely a hardcore gamer, nor am I playing a particularly powerful build. Fortunately, there are various mods to increase the difficulty.
- The content is partly levelled, so the game gets harder as you get higher level. However, it isn't completely levelled: some dungeons level in, say, the range 10-30, so if you go there when you're level 2, you'll get killed, and if you're level 72, you'll stroll through. Some creatures are levelled, but some aren't, which can have the odd effect of an apparently fearsome monster being easier to kill than a perfectly ordinary and cuddly looking creature.
- The stories are not the game's strongest point. I mean, there are a lot of them, which is nice, but many of them aren't that interesting. In particular, I found the main quest somewhat disappointing. It had fun moments, but the end was something of an anti-climax. The game rewards random adventuring more than focussed goal chasing.