Ever since I discovered the Elder scrolls game of Oblivion on the 360 I have had nothing bad to say about the Elder Scroll games, however with skyrim I am beginning to have second thoughts. I will also state that I know more about the workings of software and hardware than the average user might know and I will say that I understand to some degree the gravity and complexity that must be involved in order for a game like skyrim to be programmed in the first place, however I think that somebody may have dropped the ball a little bit in the acceptable level of usability department. For example with the Dawnguard DLC at level ten you get approached by someone from dawnguard and the vampire attacks ensue however having had to start over from level 62(I will get to that next) I have realized that by instantiating this particular quest line this early for a player that is just getting started it doesn't give a new player a chance to get the money that it requires to purchase the home and decorations in Whiterun. Also I am guessing due to a villager death from vampire attacks Aventus Avenicci (The Jarl of Whiteruns head pee-on in case I misspelled the name to much for recognition) was selling me all of the decorations for the whiterun home but for some reason the alchemy lab was not showing up I tried several times by loading my last save and changing the order of which decorations I purchased but I went so far as to pay for the alchemy lab twice on several attempts and that part of the home was empty. So if you want the game to be more realistic by having villagers die fine by me, however you should at least allow the player enough time to get established with a place to stay and store the items they don't wish to sell before the villagers start getting offed. By level 14 I went to sleep in my Whiterun home and awoke to still find no alchemy lab went to the front gates and there was Belethor laying dead on the ground; it can be tough enough getting started but not having a general goods shop keeper in the main city, not to mention the only main city you have access to when just getting started, is really just an annoyance to make a player go to a different town for a general goods store; not to mention the fact that some players might want to go through and complete as many side quests as possible when discovering a new town even if it is the very first one. Also I would like to say that maybe you should have considered the vampires attacking the villages for players that side with Harkon and not with Serana. After all if you join the Dawnguard you get all of those kill the master vampire side missions shouldn't that account for something in a world that your actions help to shape?? Also I feel the vampire attacks should only kill villagers that are shop keepers/side mission dependant after going to the Dawnguard fort if the player/user starts the storyline and begins to ignore it for too long (i.e. more than one side mission or more than 3 or 4 days of Tamriel time); epic fights between vampires and town guards cool, killing shop owners before the player can even get themselves established with the basic necessities not cool.

I have also had to start my profile over from lvl 62 because I left the city of windhelm when the mission Blood on the Ice started because I was trying to complete about three or four different missions when that mission/quest began. Somehow between the time I had left that quest and got back to it something had bugged in the game and I could not complete the mission which became a problem a few months later when I completed the storm cloak mission bought a home in windhelm and then couldn't furnish it because of the of the glitch/bug in the quest. Although it is no ones fault but my own that I do not have a save before that happened to revert to; I would like to point out though that I did not know the gravity of the quest when it bugged up otherwise I would have done so when I still had the saves present on my hard drive. I realize if I would have not overwritten any of my previous saves it would have softened the time loss in the game but even then I would have still lost over 30 levels and they really don't keep coming easy after a while. Whats the point of owning a home that is full of cobwebs and crates that you can't do anything with???

Please do not mistake my post as hate mail as I have spent many hours enjoying both Skyrim and Oblivion and although the game froze occasionally in Oblivion (My biggest time loss in oblivion was 8hrs of gameplay which happened because the game froze when auto saving and the single auto save got corrupted. I kept thinking about saving it and then forgetting to do it so that one was both my fault and the games)in Skyrim the problems are beginning to seem so numerous, however, that it really seems as if someone in the development process dropped the ball somewhere along the line. I can honestly say that I do appreciate and understand how much work must go into a game like this, but the flow of the game play should not be forcibly interrupted, the DLC should not interrupt the starting process of player(as in completing enough side quests etc. to purchase a home and furnish it), and any mission that hinges on making or breaking something important like the ability to furnish a home should really be tested better and/or by more people. It really isn't good enough when you have a game with so many outcomes to just test that it works or if things work in different order; you really should have people try to mess stuff up when you are in the testing phase.

Also I would like to say that of all the spells you made in the game they are great but clairvoyance really should be one of the default spells and I am going to tell you why. Some players, myself included, have played your Elder Scrolls games for countless numbers of hours. When doing so we learn ways to make things go a little quicker such as find short cuts through mountains etc. This may not seem like much but it can cause players who know what they are doing as far as terrain navigation to miss out on things. I have started over on the Skyrim game several times, some my fault and others Skyrims fault, and when I was reading an article in Game Informer it asked something about finding a couple in danger of being robbed/killed by a bandit (or something like that) and it being a moral choice. Out of 5 to 10 playthroughs I have seen this particular part of the game one time and by the time I got close enough to identify that I was going to shoot the bad guy with my bow and arrow while sneaking the couple gets killed. Maybe I am the only player that thinks so maybe I am not but I can say that you always have great ideas and you have very addictive game play; having a first person point of view in open roaming environment is so cool! Although I must say that even though you have the heroin content if you can't get the level of acceptable usability higher before the release of the game or at least have frequent updates to help alleviate the rough spots; patches being released really does show your users that you are trying and if your users do not think that you are trying you will eventually lose credibility with your customers and clients. Word of mouth can be the best advertisemant or the worst enemy of any company and right now I am really not sure if I should brag about Skyrim or boo about it.

p.s. I just want to say thank you in advance to anyone that takes the time to read all of this lol