Huh, my favorite mods now require the overpriced DLC. Go figure. I stopped playing this to come back to it after it gets more content and the mods progress some more, but I guess I'll wait for the DLC to go back on sale.
Annoyingly long intro in Skyrim
There are alternative start mods that drop you right into the game in under a minute.
Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim did X better
Morrowind was an RPG where the player was truely limited by his character, Oblivion introduced more actionadventure elements, and Skyrim is just a hand-holding action adventure game. They're all 'good' games within their respective archetypes. I'm a Morrowfag myself, but what really gets me is how they couldn't improve anything between games without gutting things.
Best UI:
Morrowind hands down. Most efficient, easy to look at and quickest to navigate, and highly customizable in game. Even with a mediocre monitor resolution I can see/interface with most everything I need to with a single click. Takes advantage of the PC interface, and the character preview that you can select items from is great. 2D scrolling is terrible for inventories. I actually didn't mind the Skyrim interface as much with the UI mod. What I would LOVE to see is the return of a customizable multi-window and grid-inventory interface for TES VI with the interactive character preview AND 3D object model interaction.
Quest interface:
Chase-the-objective-marker is alright if you can't be bothered to read a journal and signposts, but what kills Skyrim for me is the loss of immersion without a proper journal or even the
option of playing without handholding. I would be just fine with a magic compass if they kept the
real adventurer's journal.
Classes/Stats/Perks:
Perks are stats by function. They provide the same things Stats did, +X% to Y thing. Perks could be as good as stats or even better if they weren't so clunky. Things like pulling a +100% bonus to something out of your ass by saving them up, or something only scales in HUEG 25% blocks, or one particular thing would
only ever get one boost and it suddenly doubled it. Creates a real scaling and balance issues, as opposed to a relatively smooth function of variables from 0-100. Mods mostly addressed this, but again it's hard to balance when you only get ONE perk PER level, as opposed to say multiple minor boosts to stats every level. I don't see why we can't have stats AND a wide variety perks, like an expansion of Oblivion's system. Except they couldn't be arsed to fix what was broken by Oblivion's level-scaling, so they replace it entirely with something that is still functionally the same damned thing with the same damned level-scaling issues.
You know these sorts of rants are a dime a dozen and I could bitch about every aspect that was changed between games, but I think the core problems are Bethesda gutting things before tweaking them and level-scaling. Seriously, fuck level-scaling. Morrowind had minimal level-scaling, and I think the heavy level-scaling in the later games reduced the unique content in game progression.
You know what I hate the most though? The change in art direction. The series suddenly started sucking Tolkien's dick and lost all it's charm.