Obviously the Hearthfire bombshell is out, and my own personal feeling is a pretty big meh, but I will reserve judgement until someone can play it and tell me if it is what it appears to be. My question to the forum is thus: should Skyrim have been more simish from the start? To me, the answers seems to be yes, because the game has little odds and ends in it that seem suited to this purpose, such as the ability to cook food, own a home, get married, and do odd jobs that might constitute work (fire wood chopping, picking crops, etc.)

Fable really developed along this route, and if you've played all three like I have, I would welcome your insight. I personally always found the simish stuff in Fable to be engaging and as long as it remains disentangled from the main activities of the game, it was great to be able to work and buy property. The biggest problem with Fable is the one I find Skyrim developing toward and that is it is so incredibly simple. You buy a few shops with some meager start up money and then you just keep buying more with the interest you earn from those shops and so on. Pretty soon you own the whole world. I'm not saying I see them doing something like that in Skyrim, but if they do add in property ownership or some kind of greater economic system outside of the usual kill, loot, and sell mechanic, I hope they do something interesting with it.

Long story short, I think adding more sim-like elements to Skyrim wouldn't have killed it, and given their current DLC plans, it seems to be well in line with what their consumers want (or what they think we want). I think building this stuff into the game from the ground up would be a fantastic idea moving forward, but I would just politely request that you keep it separate from the whole saving the world/empire/whatever schtick and also actually invest some time in whatever further elements you decide to add. Marrying an NPC who has the personality of a broomstick was not a lot of fun, investing time in other systems with similar rewards is mind numbing to think about.

I'm sure they probably wanted to have more stuff in as well but with the deadline they set there's no way they could have everything they wanted in.

Maybe not too much simish, no matter how much it fits into the game its an elder scroll sooo. But a dynamic economy like they said they would make and also a survival system like fallout new vegas where you have to eat, drink and sleep. Anything else that is in sims is unneccessary