New Skyrim trailer, with gameplay.

I predict a triumphant return of Svanar Gunnarsson, my Nord warrior. Shit looks badass. I know it's fashionable to hate on the Elder Scrolls series these days, but I don't give a shit. I love them.

Now you're talking. Just played the Dragon Age 2 demo... I was left with the feeling that if THAT was a big budget fantasy RPG, we're in big trouble. god bless Bethesda for restoring hope!

Gives me hope that the next Fallout game won't be as buggy as a Prohibition-Era Flophouse.

It's fashionable to hate on them? Since when? So help me I will strap all of these people down and force them to play Daggerfall. After about 5 minutes I won't have to have them strapped down either...

Since Oblivion, mostly. Looots of people seemed to love to hate on it, mostly due to ugly faces, level scaling enemies, dynamically generated dungeons, etc. I mean, I get where they're coming from, because I feel like Morrowind was a much stronger game... but at least the actual gameplay wasn't broken, like in Morrowind. As in you could actually play a mage. Oh, and it was buggy, but not AS buggy.

Edit: Yeah, Backgammon, I hear you. I felt that way about the first Dragon Age, though - like they threw most of their money into Mass Effect and The Old Republic, and Dragon Age was somehow a "bonus game" they made on the cheap. Which isn't to say I didn't love it to death, but... yeah.

I'll pop on to admit that I'm one of those Elder Scroll haters. Around when Oblivion came out, I was looking for a cheap RPG to play and I found the Morrowind Game of the Year Edition for $10. I knew of its popularity and thought, for $10 how can I go wrong? I patiently put in over 100 hours of play, explored close to half of the island, completed all the quests in both expansions, and got to level 50 something before I finally quit in a fit of rage. Here's what I didn't like:
- the vast majority of NPCs had no personality and you couldn't have meaningful conversations with them; you could just click on a word and they'd tell you some information, frequently word-for-word repeats of what some other NPC told you.
- I'd frequently break side missions because I'd found the location I was supposed to go to long before I got the side mission and mucked with it, screwing up whatever it was I was supposed to accomplish.
- while the size of the map is very impressive, I found most of the locations I could explore to be boring. There'd be random gear in various places which was great when my character didn't have much early on, but after a while it became tedious to explore locations that didn't have anything interesting in the way of gear or plot. There was no way to tell if a location would prove interesting or not until I explored the whole thing and discovered that indeed, there was nothing there worth the time I spent in searching it.
- I would do environment changing events (I assassinated the King of Morrowind because I was tired of him sending stupid assassins to kill me) and not a single NPC would register the change.
I kept hoping with that huge map to explore that I'd find something interesting to justify the praise I'd heard about the game, and granted there were enough small things to prompt me to keep trying, but in the end I got fed up with the wooden NPCs and gameplay that didn't interest me. I did end up trying Daggerfall after that and after 5 minutes decided it was just a worse version of Morrowind. It's cool that y'all like the game, but if you had me strapped down to play more than 5 minutes of Daggerfall (or Morrowind), I'd be begging for the sweet, sweet release of death.

Those were some REALLY ugly faces though...

Personally, I loved Oblivion. I loved Morrowind more, but I still loved Oblivion.
And I can not wait for Skyrim. From what I've read the combat is going to be much faster paced with finishing moves, new blocking defensive mechanics and generally more in depth. I really hope this is the case, even if the whole"dual-wield" thing is only a gimmick, I think the combat could be vastly improved over Oblivion. That being said, I really do hope that the Dual-Wield is NOT just a gimmick, or horribly implemented, like the horse in Oblivion was. I really want to run around with two big hammers and beat in some goblin faces!