It's funny... my one and only issue with the game is not getting much attention. Am I the only one who thinks the quest design is a bit plain?

Every quest except for a few exceptions seems to be "go to this dungeon and bring me back something/kill something." Every single one. Now all the games of this style are filled to the brim with fetch quests, there is no denying this. Morrowind was filled to the brim with fetch quests, as was Oblivion. There is something different about the presentation here though... those games masked their fetch quests with dialogue and circumstance that made them seem like more than they were. You weren't walking to 9 different spots on the map and clicking something, you were doing a pilgrimage for the Tribunal and praying at their holy spots. Skyrim literally just says "hey I need this from X cave go get it for me" over and over.

Which is not to say the writing is bad, it's actually quite good and MUCH better than Oblivion's writing. It's just that it makes no illusions, gives no false context. Mr. X needs his thing and you're going to bloody well go get it. Mr. Y needs to die and you need to get your ass in there and kill him. There's no fanfare or elaborate context, just dungeon diving.

Now there have been exceptions of course. There is a quest where you try to bring love to Skyrim for a divine which is pretty good at masking the errands involved. The mage's guild quests seem to add more bread and circuses to the errands as well. Perhaps the thieve's guild and dark brotherhood questlines are the best, like in Oblivion. I haven't done them yet and will likely wait until my second character to do so.

Still, overall, when I scan my quest list all I see are weak justifications to raid one more dungeon, and that's kind of a bummer. The game is still great, but it's the blemish on the otherwise beautiful skin.

They start off as generic as you've described. Since I'm spoiler-proof, I looked stuff up and DB does have some peculiar assignments later on. Not many though.

There's a fun cockup in the whole "join the Dark Brotherhood" routine. See, as before to contact them you need to sleep. But in Skyrim you don't need to sleep for anything else. HP and MP regen and levels are instant. So, you can spend days being eligible for initiation but never trigger it. Wiki says you might even miss the note that hints that you're eligible.

You do get a well rested bonus like in Fallout 3, but it just boosts your health or something.

The Dark Brotherhood initiation is very, very well made :)

Yeah... a two-stage affair. I got two speech and one archery point on those guys in the house. Funny thing, if you pickpocket the hoods they still act like they can't see you.
I hope, some mods will make the important girls in the DB and TG hot and not "supposed to be hot, but are hot only if you see the outline".

BTW, is it me or does Skyrim employ more women than Cyrodill? Especially guards.

after finding out I cant get every perk :( I re rolled...............

I had invested in dwarven smitthing (WHOOOPS) I figured I'd need both the things leading up to the dragon armor but finding out I dont.... hello restart.

Pretty much depends on the options the enemy has to begin with, which is in most cases just 1.
Now do the opposite and charge an enemy archer firing at you with a sword drawn - how does he react once you reached him?

Because it isn't a subset of Alchemy. From a "realistic" or roleplaying point of view, I'd say it's gotten exactly the spot where it should be, delivering what it should do.

Compared to what other skills? You can pretty much exploit alchemy, enchanting, smithing or pickpocketing so far, that you can purchase the whole country. Anyone doing so, is doing it unhesitant.
As for the grinding: compare it with how many times you have to hit an enemy to level your combat / magic skill - I would guess they're way easier to do, especially since you can buy all needed ingredients.

No surprise here. The amount of coding involved doing for, let's say 30%, of the NPCs AND giving them anything meaningful to do after the marriage, would be massive - because let's face it, just giving them 5-8 different abilities / follow-up quests wouldn't cut it.
Sucks for anyone wanting to play a Don Juan / Casanova role, but should be more then enough for others. If not, the Sims is that way. :p

.... how many times has this been discussed already? How many different approaches have come up?
You can basically go with a leveled version or one with difficulty-sealed-off regions /items / loot. And last time I checked, I haven't found many open world games that work so good with the second option.

Actually this part is very true. The main reason people bitch and complain about other standard RPG's is the extremely linear progression and handholding..For a world like Oblivion and Skyrim to work, you HAVE to have leveled as you go loot and beasts...I mean what fun is it really when you go start out a new game and find a dungeon to get that +200 damage, +200 Elemental damage, +200 Bleeding Dragon Buster Sword of Awsomeness that basically makes the rest of the game a total breeze......Just won't work like that. Unrealistic?
Possibly, but we are playing a fantasy game here.

If they ever release a game that doesnt scale, i can bet one millions dollars that the first mod out after naked lady skin will be a scaled monster/loot addon.

Flipping coin between Breton/Imperial/Dunmer and I have important question. From lore point of view, which one of these would be best Witch hunter? (not by stats or abilities, I mean from lore point of view, history and that stuff)

lol....funny you should mention the naked lady skin...i went around checking to see what kind of mods were out for Skyrim already...found a site where 6 out of the top 10 had something to do with nakedness/beautifying/smoothing up faces..the rest of the list was a map mod and a few weapons...lol

On a sidenote i think SkyrimNexus is worth checking out for good mods, i'll look more into it after i get done with a solid chunk of my first playthrough

Probably Imperial. Dunmer are mostly outcasts already and have varied spirituality. Breton's are pretty focused on magic and high-end society, so I doubt they would care enough to get their hands dirty. Imperials are all about control and conquest.

RIP Shadowmere :'(
I thought you could never die but I guess that drop was pretty high.

Ah... M&M6. You get your ass handed to you in most new locations for the first 80% of the game, but if you keep on going and loot better and better stuff, in the finale you can carpet bomb orcs with meteor showers while flying and strafing them with laser rifles... Or vaporize single dragons,... because the flocks will still rip you a new one.

You miss the point: Cooking is redundant. It wasn't needed but might have been useful anyway as a simple subset of Alchemy that raised skill perhaps a quarter or less the amount of potion making. Otherwise, food items could have simply boosted health and stamina regeneration when eaten. Perhaps for eight hours, +10% per item eaten to a max of +100% total. You could recieve a message saying "You are already well-fed" when overeating... That alone would be worth it. ;-)

Compared to looting, hunting, smithing, etc.

You can easily generate hundreds of gold by gathering free ingredients, which have a neglible weight, along the roads. That's with low Alchemy and Speechcraft (which controls selling price) skills; the amount of money generated at higher levels must be ludicrous. Given the grind necessary to increase the Alchemy skill, it isn't a matter of "unhesitant" exploitation but rather a practical requirement.

Smithing seems much less profitable so far: The needed items are expensive to purchase or require effort to gather (hunting, mining, looting). You must loot or purchase armor or weapons (not cheap, and heavy) in order to practice the skill. Parts of the smithing process, tanning and smelting, don't raise Smithing skill. Produced items sell for low prices. The skill does seem to increase at a faster rate per use than Alchemy, but it doesn't seem to be enough (at least at early levels) to compensate for the wide gap in profitability.

I haven't tried Enchanting or Pickpocketing.

Enchanting involves destroying enchanted items (expensive), looting or purchasing soul gems (which seem to be in limited supply and are not reusable), and capturing souls (the better of which can be difficult to obtain). This might be counterbalanced by the value of produced enchanted items; as I said, I haven't tried it.

I read, here and elsewhere, that Pickpocketing is very unbalanced.

EDIT: Discovered after posting this that Conjuration increases VERY quickly with the use of the spell Bound Sword. The mechanics of Conjuration in Skyrim appear significantly different from previous TES games. SV suggests that summoned creatures increase the Conjuration skill by an amount relative to the amount of damage they deal in combat. I'll leave my original comments below, but bear in mind the above when reading (and see later posts for more information).

Combat skills increase quickly because of their nature: In a given fight one strikes repeatedly with a weapon. In contrast, skills such as Conjuration (or Alchemy, as in potions per fight) are needed only once or twice per fight. There should be a corresponding difference in the rate at which these increase. Simple restrictions such as increasing Conjuration only while in combat (or a cap on potions produced per day) would prevent exploitation of the higher rate of increase. Voila: Natural increase, no grinding required.

How about:

Check "married" variable or NPC property: If equals 0, character is married or not interested in marriage. If equals 1, character can be married. Assign dialogue/quests/abilities/whatever based on "job" variable/property or highest skills, etc.

That's not fair coming from someone who defends cooking as a good addition to the game. :-P

And it has nothing to do with wanting to seduce everyone: Rather, I'd simply like to be able to choose the *one* spouse I get as I prefer.

How about price and rarity as limiting factors? You know, like in Morrowind? And besides that, much of Skyrim isn't leveled anyway.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying "Skyrim sucks!" It's rather that I'm disappointed with several aspects of the game that I feel could have been much improved.

One VERY good change:

Picking alchemy ingredients is no longer so tedious: The plants are large and easily harvested without having to precisely align the crosshair with stems, flowers, mushrooms, etc. That simple change makes a significant difference in gameplay and enjoyment.