Yeah, but not exceptionally so. There are some C&C, but general quest design is one of the weaker aspects of Skyrim in my opinion.
Radiant quests are by their nature shallow, main quest lacks intrigue, guild questlines with one exception lack sense of guild-y progression.
Some of the bigger side quests, like city intrigues or daedric quests are good.
Some quests are triggered via books and there are some treasure maps too - nice touches.
Writing is somewhat improved and some quests quite heavily utilize existing lore and there are some pretty neat ties to previous games.
Journal is often unhelpful and quite a few quests (not only the radiant ones) are pretty much impossible to complete without quest markers.
As in loot? Not really. There are some, but majority is tied to quests.
Random exploration will mostly net random loot.
I think that most hand placing was done for books
.
Shouts help a bit here though since some can enhance player´s combat portfolio significantly.
Definitely. Telling mini-stories via level design/item placement is one of the highlights of the game. Majority of dungeons have something unique to "tell" and some contain great "interior vistas".
Dungeons are rather monotone in terms of player´s progress though - they´re very linear, few more labyrinthine would certainly not hurt. I feel like it´s all dungeon delving and not dungeon crawling and after a while there are not many surprises in how the dungeons are structured.
Some are a bit too long for their own good and some are underutilized story/quest-wise while being some of the best locations in the game visually at the same time.
Occasional puzzles help the pacing, but there´s not really a great variety of these.
Still, much better than Oblivion.
Non-stilted voice acting?
Not stiltedness-free or exceptional, but more varied and generally better than in Oblivion.
better than Oblivion's dull world
That would be a resounding yes.
The world design is amazing (z-axis and raggedness ftw, etc.), art direction is great (hopefully it won´t sound too over the top when I say it´s classy), weather effects are beautiful, lore isn´t taken "lightly", there´s an abundance of "little touches" all over the place (these are really not to be underestimated, they enhance the experience significantly), cities feel quite lively Gothic-style and their design mostly makes sense. There´s, as usual, still far more bandits and such than normal citizens in the game world though
. One major conflict (not strictly main quest related) adds a good deal of tension to the world and, along with few local conflicts, works well as a setting "enlivener".
Getting to some locations may sometimes result in an environmental puzzle even with quest markers on and there´s a set of mini-quests (treasure maps) which employ this literally.
To cut the rest short, enemy level scaling is a lot better (there are issues - some tougher opponents seem just like renamed weaker ones without much further distinction besides damage they dish and some major questlines seem to scale quite rabidly, but weakest opponents never leave the picture and at least wild life feels scaled just about perfectly, aka not scaled at all), character development is a bit more interesting overall (perks, shouts, no attribute multpliers) and it allows for a good variety of distinct play styles and masters of all trades are not possible, but it is shakily balanced (useless skills, "exploitability" - but that´s not really new in TES games, and I don´t think removing attributes and spellmaking was really all that good move), dragons are an impressive feature and tend to cause some emergent scenarios, faces are a lot better, random dialogues as well (even bandits and such have some), loot is unfortunately just about on par with Oblivion´s.
Overall, to me Skyrim feels a lot more like a work of enthusiasts and less like a "product", compared to Oblivion. Despite the myriad of flaws I see in it, as a sum of its parts and given it was made by an AAA+ developer, I can´t help but consider it an admirable
effort
. Top 1 game for me this year.