So I'm wondering if anyone has been able to tell exactly how the 3rd person works in Skyrim. I'm talking specifically about whether the camera is free a la GTA, Splinter Cell, RDR, etc. in the past ES and Bethesda Fallout games the character's position changes with the horizontal movement of the camera unless you hold down a button/key, which was awkward for actually playing. I will be playing mostly in 1st person but if there is a free camera then I would like to play stealthy sections of the game in 3rd person because that's what I'm used to from Splinter Cell.

So can anybody tell if this is the case?

Its exactly like the other Bethesda games, Fallout and Elder scrolls.

Hmm, that's a bit of a letdown. So do you know what the "improvements" are that they are said to have made to 3rd person?

In the animations they are super fluid and not painful to look at

You can shoot a bow in 3rd person too.

3rd person looks great! Personally, I won't use it in combat... as I want to see my awesome dual casting spells in 1st person... but when I'm not in combat i'll be in 3rd person.

Always 3rd person for me. It is like that since Morrowind. Had some hard times with shooting bows, but this time they fixed it so yeah..

Which is exactly how I like it so I'm good.

Pretty much this. Although, depending on how spellcasting handles, I may switch to third person for Dragon battles and when fighting multiple enemies at once (3-4+).

It did seem that camera was a bit off when I saw it in the stream.

Ya they added a cross-hair to help aim and it looks much better.

The camera is a little more over the shoulder sort of like Gears of war and seems to be zoomed in a little closer as well.

There's a crosshair while using bows and Spells I think.

Sweet, that should make spell-slinging more manageable in third person then

Also in 3rd person when you pull out your weapon the camera would slighlyt adjust upward for you can see a liitle better in battle so I feel 3rd person is going to be good either way

Pete Hines recently confirmed on Twitter that you can still zoom the camera in and out. Still hasn't been confirmed how camera zooming works, but I did notice that in the 20 minute gameplay demo, the zoom in the third person varies slightly throughout the video when that perspective was being used. Regardless, the third person perspective is a much more viable option this time around.