For me, it's the music. I'm a music lover and the soundtrack for Skyrim is just sublime. The ambient exploring music is beautiful and has a kind of wistful and sad feel to it, that fits perfectly with the setting and the story. And the combat music, particularly the combat tracks for dragon fights (not including the main theme), are exciting and epic-feeling too. And it just sounds so great, very professionally done. If it was done with a computer, I can't tell. It sounds like a real orchestra and/or choir to me. (Is it? I kind of assumed it was electronic in origin. : / )

The visual beauty is starting to wear off for me; I'm less and less taking it slow and stopping at nice views to see the scenery and have gotten into "gotta finish this quest" mode. But the music always satisfies and I find myself having the ambient tracks stuck in my head when I'm not playing the game.

Quite frankly I was underwhelmed by Oblivion's soundtrack, and only the main theme of Morrowind I felt carried any emotional weight. But I feel this time Jeremy Soule has really stepped up to the plate.

Did any of you have similar things where one little or subtle aspect of the game made you go "wow" and realize this is a great game?

well i wasn't going to buy it originally, then i entered a contest for a free copy of which i came within odds of 1:3 to winning but lost, then i decided. hey, i have lots of money 59.99 is nothing to me. so i bought the game even though i had heard nothing that i liked about it.

I think it's probably the unlimited quests. But it's hard to pick one, the game is great in so many ways.

But if I have to pick one, it will be that dynamic quest system.

Mirglof- Do you like it now that you've played it? And I see you've been around here for a while. Have you played the other TES games? If so then I can understand why you might not have liked what you heard about Skyrim. I was initially very skeptical when I heard of all the radical changes they were making to the series, from the story elements (200 year jump!?) to the gameplay elements (axing Mysticism? No more attributes or character classes?!? O___O )

Nubius- I like the dynamic system too. It's *almost* too much for me though. At the moment I have about 25 quests that need doing and am almost paralyzed with indecision about which one to do and where to go....

To me, the selling point is that it's an Elder Scrolls game, and these days, good fantasy games are hard to come by (in my opinion). I loved Oblivion but wasn't too thrilled with Fallout 3. I can see how Skyrim sort of combines the two, at least for how the game operates. Overall, the PS3 graphics are a bit of a disappointment, but hey, I'm sure it'll bring hundreds of hours of enjoyment, so you can't beat that. Sitting here reading posts makes me want to get back into the game, so that's a plus.

Proper armor design.

The words before Skyrim in the Box...

What I mean is what after you actually bought and started playing the game really stood out to you.

lots of content. Otherwise it's pretty buggy and not balanced well. but I'm impressed by the amount of content.

i loved oblivion and had over 100 hours in that game.
as far as im concerned if a game is fun for more then 60 hours its worth $60 so assuming skyrim would be also 100 hours of fun it was a no brainer.