Ok, so I'm absolutely thrilled with this game so far, and it exceeds my expectations in every way (particularly when it comes to the depth and complexity it has over TES IV), but I wanted to just raise one concern I had about the an instance where the AI seems to have taken a back-step from previous games. Let me provide an example to illustrate(specific details have been omitted to avoid spoilers):

So I was walking along the road while journeying between cities, and I came upon a traveling bard. Unfortunately for the bard, he was about to cross the path of a sabre-toothed beast up ahead that had wandered onto said path in pursuit of a goat. Attempting to help the bard preserve his life in the fight, I hit him with my 'courage' spell to give him a health bonus. He took exception to what I thought was a helpful intervention, and turned around and starting viciously attacking me (for a bard, at least, lol ). 'That's no good, I thought' and hastily reloaded my save. To test out whether he would react just as violent as fashion, I immediately cast 'healing hands' upon him -- to which, he acted as if he were undead, and again attacked me.

Those who played Oblivion would know that if you cast heal, protect, courage, etc. on 'neutral' NPCs they would do the logical thing and... well, not try to kill you. I hope that this is just something that slipped though testing, and not something that's not present by design.

This should probably be in spoilers ...

Yes that sounds like a bug. If you tried that on a normal townsperson who isn't in combat, what will happen?

Fortunately there is an alternative, and that is to personally kill the sabretooth yourself.

Yeah, no, I tried that and the sabretooth eviscerated me But yeah, I did eventually manage to save both the bard and myself by nuking the sabretooth with some high powered spells while the bard did his best to 'tank.' I will investigate whether the same 'bug' occurs on normal townsfolk.