I don't know about the main-quest areas as I haven't started the main quest yet. I'm 45 hours into my gameplay and have visited three cities so far. All I have been doing is wondering around finding things on my own, I don't play with the hud on and don't do quests of any sort. When I find a fort or a cave I go into it and clear it out. And the ones I've been to, and my map is dotted all over, have almost all been very small compared to the ones in Oblivion. Perhaps you have found a couple that take weeks and weeks of in game time, in which case that would really be amazing, but I haven't found them yet, and kind of find that hard to believe. If I do ever find it I will become a believer I guess. And no I haven't used horses, I don't see the point to them for my gameplay style.

In Oblivion I could travel around for the time I've spent so far and not run across anything similiar the whole time, I've passed by the same caves now three or four times already. This game map is much smaller. Again, I didn't say it was a bad thing per se, but there is no comparison. You are wrong on this point, eventually you will see the error of your ways in this matter.

ETA: The average time it takes for me to clear through most forts and caves I've been to is probably an hour or so (ETA this is in game time not real time)...a lot less the the weeks and weeks of these so called non-quest dungeons you've been to.

Uh, how long have you been playing?

I've probably logged a thousand hours or more in Oblivion. In Skyrim about 45 hours so far. I don't know which game you were referring to, thus the two references. If you want to use that as proof that it is as big, you can't. I could easily spend 100 hours in Shivering Isles before coming back out to Oblivion Cyrodil in the game Oblivion. I have a very good feel for these things, I've spent long enough in those game worlds to know how Skyrim feels in comparison. When I walk by the same giant camp three times in the same day just wandering around because the way the mountains are built they lead me in that direction, I feel more restricted in my game play, and can tell how small the game world is in comparison to Oblivion.

Skyrim is 16 square km, the same size as Oblivion. I'm not sure what you passing by the same area has to do with anything.

Wrong. The most disappointing thing in Skyrim is the horrible, horrible looking shadows.

This must be including unsurpassable landscape such as high mountain peaks as well, that's the only way I can see them justifying this claim, which is rather cheap if you ask me, because a lot of that is vertical, not horizontal, and is not playable anyway.

for what it's worth, i've managed to kill two.. it took me a while to figure out what was attacking me since the water was only about knee-deep, but once i saw those evil fish i thwacked away at them with my mace until they were dead dead dead! i wasn't aiming too well, so i'm not sure if they were difficult to hit because they kept darting backward out of range or if being above-water vs. underwater made a difference... or i could just svck at 3rd-person melee aiming.... but at least they were dead!

now that i've mostly fixed my shadows i'm not too disappointed in anything other than the overall lack of time that went into the PC UI... too many darn clicks!

oh, and the companions' lack of personalities, but dragon age: origins definitely set that bar very high... it's kinda sad that the only comment she has to make regarding days of running around is the occasional yawn....

Oh here are a couple more things that pop to mind.

I found a huge waterfall and am thinking, I'll just jump down into the base there. If you've been to the bases of huge waterfalls you know there is plenty of room to jump into them from high up, this is a no-brainer, in real life that is. So I jump, and not even from that far, and land in knee-deep water and die from the fall. Totally lacking reality there. The pool of water at the base of that water-fall should have been much deeper, enough for me to have safely jumped into it.

And here is a glitch that got me very upset. I had finally saved up enough gold to buy the house in Solitude because I love the city. I was relived to finally have a place to store all the books I had been saving as I was loosing room for anything else. So I don't have enough money to buy the upgrades but I do buy the house. And I go and see there isn't much in it just one little drawer to store things, and I was relieved and put my books into it, a lot of books I didn't count.

So finally I get enough money to buy the upgrades, or at least a few, and when I get back to my house the container I had my books in was replaced it was GONE and ALL my books with it, and other things I had stored in it. I was very mad and frustrated at this. I thought I was supposed to keep my things in my house safely.

This is a huge bug in my opinion. Just horrible.

Rain STILL falls though objects.

That was the last think on my list of complaints from oblivion I was hoping they would address.

At least all the dungeons aren't all copy pasta'd like in Oblivion

Magic in general doesn't have enough spells. It's an unacceptably low number in Skyrim, and I can only hope they add a bunch of new magic in DLC.

I'm really sad that here is no co-op option in this game!! It would be so awsome to play this game with a friend!!!
(I have a PC copy, cause of the "beter" graphics but all my friends play on the 360, so I'd even buy a console version if there was co-op in this game!)

I agree with this.

One thing to note, if you notice in some of the caves, and even some of the rock formations out in the open it looks as if the textures are low-grade for some reason. I did a lot of modding in Oblivion making my own world, in fact it was a sizeable world, pretty huge in fact, I spent six months making it so I learned TES Editor pretty good. What the game creators were doing were taking objects that were created for a certain size and made them bigger (there is an expand/shrink function that works on any ingame object, trees, people, creatures, items, etc...everything) than they should be thus making the texture quality look poorer. I did that all the time so I know what it looks like. I've noticed they did that in a lot of the caves, and noticed it on a few of the rocks in the mountains I've been too. It's no big deal to me, but I can see how some can wonder why one texture looks detailed and then right next to it it looks a lot worse.

the fact that if i tag all my quests, half of them dont even show up on my compass, and if i make a blue marker it often ends up behind the white one

I got depressed when my favorite in game characters DIED ON ME.

I was going to marry one of them too...

So, some things I am missing? I, as a casual player actually have a lot to complain about. I cared about the little things. I don't typically DO the quests. "How can you enjoy a game about quests without doing the quests?" Well, quite simply, I just really liked the environments in Oblivion, saw they were going to be even better in Skyrim, bought the game first day and even waited 6 hours in line. Yes, a casual player can be a mega fan too. 3erd in line. One of the few girls there.

First thing I noticed was the lack of customization compared to Oblivion for your character. I get it that they didn't want to make the non-human characters look human with a different skin, however, they did cut down considerably on the amount of customization you could do with a humanoid character. I liked being a pink-haired Nord. And even the colors they did provide for hair were unsatisfactory. I wanted PINK for a humanoid character, and I was not given my pink. I also liked having purple hair or some other unreasonable color. I also had a hard time making my Nord attractive. His skin looked so blotchy and I didn't know how to fix it. There was no way to make him look younger. Not that I play in third person or anything... well unless I want a laugh.

The next thing that makes me angry is that I can no longer leap tall buildings in a single bound or build my hand to hand combat to the point where I don't need weapons or build my character in such a way that I can be a packing mule for 1ton + weight. I know it is weird to want to be this super human, but, hey it was fun!

I recently found out from someone else that you are no longer able to ride horses in first person. This... makes me extra sad because I was looking forward to riding on my horse in the various pretty environments as advertised... and yes, I will miss doing this in my underwear.

I don't really like the new way of doing alchemy either. I can deal with that though. At least it isn't gone. Kinda wish the Alchemy kit would go with my everywhere.

No spellmaking...

the dark brotherhood lair wasn't as cool as the one in Oblivion

The recycled combat system and lack of verity in enemies/encounters as well as their behavior in battle.

Is it sad that I noticed that too?

1. No companion horses.
2. No horse combat.
3. No traveling kit like a simple campfire and hide to sleep on when you are adventuring.

Try exploring some of the Dwemer ruins =P

no horse combat was particularly disappointing, i thought for sure they would have implemented that.

The interface, and the streamed graphics sometimes lingering for too long (hello waterfalls)

Loss of spell abilities mostly. The steady elimination of spell abilities since Daggerfall depresses me. I miss levitation, jump, open lock, etc.

Other than that, I'm happy with everything I've encountered so far.