Well, i got the game today finally, at 10am this morning, and it took me 11 hours to pry myself away from it. Yes, i have been playing with frozen pizza's for 11 hours, alongside my girlfriend who is still playing now. So i figure I'd give a personal and small review for the PC version, and see if anyone is having as bang up experience as I am.

First of all, i have a 5 year old machine. I have a E4500 Dual core 2.2ghz, DDR2 800 Mhz 3GB ram, and GTS 250 Nvidia graphics card (the only "new" bit in the machine). The game runs perfect on the default medium settings, with very minor stuttering at huge open zones, which goes away very very quickly. Otherwise smooth as butter, and well optimized.

First of all, characters, quests and stories, as well as environments, voice acting and design are all top-notch. There are no complaints here, the quests are not forced, you feel like you are in a world, instead of in a game that has a world. The animations are a lot more lifelike, and there were many areas i was pleasantly surprised, though i would spoil some things if i went on about this. The dungeons are very good, there is a lot more loot that is placed by hand, and they feel alive, with cooking pots, firewood, random fun npcs and even their own problems. Again, not spoiling anything.

Now comes the two PC problems that people have been yelling about. First, the Crashes and startup problems. My girlfriend had none. I had two crashes in the 11 hours of gameplay, both not disturbing the gameplay for more than five minutes. Both strangely occured while using a loot all option to loot tomatoes from a barrel (at separate dungeons). Otherwise there were no crashes, freezes or any other problems.

Secondly, i really expected the UI to be utter crap. I got a decent UI... I don't really understand why people are complaining about it. Mouse is perfectly usable in the UI, although it is Clunky and you do have to get used to it. Once you get used to the controls, it flows very naturally. The favourites tab is very nice, although i would have like hotkey combinations of spells, instead of favourites, it still works. The rotating of the objects is quick and easy using your mouse wheel and buttons, no problems there. After about 2 hours i got completely used to it and it flows naturally. I DO NOT HAVE VSYNC OFF. I saw no reason to take it off since my machine can run it fine and i don't want a crap x/y sensitivity issue going on.

Combat works better than in Oblivion, which is what i expected. Melee is a lot harder than the previous games, and you can really feel those swings. I haven't tried archery, but my girlfriend is doing just fine with it, being sneaky and stuff. Magic is fun to an extreme point, i can channel a shock spell in one hand, a fire spell in another and blast off. I can channel a frost spell while healing myself. Wonderful. AI is also vastly improved, bandits tend to duck behind cover when they see me flinging spells at them, and enemies tend to crowd you if it's only melee, leading to my many untimely deaths. Dragons are smart too, well, if you're not trying to bug them up by glitching them (they are AI after all, give them a break). They tend to extend their necks behind rocks to breath at you, and they try to negate your clever usage of terrain by flying around and doing dives.

Graphics I'm not going to comment on, on medium to me they are pretty. I have no standards for graphics and it doesn't interest me. Maybe i would be disappointed if i had Ultra and whatnot, but on medium it looks very nice.

Now the game isn't perfect, it has a few buggy things.
There are some texture glitches like the water suddenly deciding to not show up, or a spell effect disappearing. Sometimes (this is slightly more often) an item would disappear from it's place until it's moved.
Secondly the difficulty is all over the place. I'm not sure if I'm just killing some legendary or very high level monsters out there (there was this druegar named priest i met at level 12, he had insane damage and hp, dropped a unique item as well). Dragons are damn hard as well (For me at least). I play on the Normal difficulty. What i mean by difficulty spikes is that i can take out 5-6 bandits easily, but then suddenly BAM, a sabre-tooth cat mauls me in two hits >< . I am a bit of a glass cannon mage/swordsman, but still... even with 120 armour (stoneskin+alteration perk and no armour) a ice sabre-tooth mauled me in two hits. After that i took down an entire fort of necromancers who did not expect a breton to just gun and run the dungeon, obliterating everything in his path.

Thirdly and lastly, this is nitpicking here, I hate, hate, hate, hate the [censored] compass and it pointing to objects on screen. I don't mind it pointing on the map, but when I have a flipping arrow over the npc i want to follow it kind of ruins my immersion.

Overall, for me at least, it was worth the money and waiting, and I can tell you that after playing for 11 hours i felt like I accomplished so much and i didn't even feel like i was grinding anything. It just has a great flow, the game that is.

Also the map is HUGE. At the start i thought oh...this is a bit small. Hell no, it takes you ages to walk someplaces. I'm ashamed to admit I used the fast travel about five-six times, since they don't have a damn caravan in winterholde and i can't fight ice-saber-cats chomping on my breton behind.

Edit: I'm also adding in the Sound is volumed very low, my speakers are on about 3/4 and my master volume is at 100% and then it's normal. I wish the default was a bit higher. On the upside the Shouts sound just the way i wanted to, loud and awesome.