My review of Skyrim:
I had a ton of fun with it, but left a bit disapointed. It is on the verge of genius and in some ways is genius. The environment is essentially perfect, and traversing it, particularly in the early stages of the game, makes you feel like you're on a grand adventure. Filling the environment with caves, camps, and wild animals is also great. I cannot think of any qualms with the world itself. As far as I know, it is without peer in this respect. Your ability to customize your charater and playstyle is also excellent. I played as a pure mage, relying on conjuration, destruction, restoration, and illusion to get me through the game. There are many, many ways to play the game successfully, and that is a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, the gameplay, quests, NPCs, and plasticity of the world all need a lot of work. My biggest complaint is with the plasticity of the world. Your choices mean next to nothing, which becomes more and more apparent as the game progresses until you arrive at the point where there is little motivation to run errands for other characters, kill bandits, or save the lives of others. Most of the time, your choices only effect what loot you will get. Decide to save an innocent man's life instead of eating him alive? You get gold instead of an artifiact. Murder an entire city? You will have to go to jail or pay off a bounty. After that, no one really cares. I started the game as a pragmatic mage wanting to become powerful yet not unnecessarily hurt anything along the way. that is, unless they tried to harm me, in which case I would gladly destroy them. but as it becomes more and more obvious that my decisions had zero effect on the world I was playing in, I stopped caring and stopped playing.
In the future, I would like Bethesda to somehow make a game whose world properly bends to the actions of the player. I do not know if such a thing is possible given the time and budgetary restrictions. If it isn't, I don't think I will bother playing another one of these games. I had a great time with Skyrim, but once is enough. The gameplay, puzzles, quests, etc. simply aren't compelling enough to keep me playing long after it has become apparent that my choices in the game have meant nothing.