Skyrim - 5 Reasons @ IGN

IGN has a fluff piece titled 5 Reasons Skyrim Will Make You Its Bitch, with producer Craig Lafferty offering comments about some obvious sections:

2. There's an insane amount of things to do and see
One of the best aspects of Oblivion was its abundance of water-cooler moments – because there was so much to see and do off the beaten path, there was always plenty to talk about with friends who were playing the same game at the same time but in an entirely different way. Like that time you became a vampire, or when your friend happened upon a body floating in a stream with a suicide note tucked into his pocket. Then there was that quest – 'A Brush With Death' - that transported you into a painting in search of a missing artist. It was a watercolour water-cooler moment!

"There's definitely lots more stuff like that," says Lafferty. "We don't want to give anything specific away to spoil it, but we've got a big open world to go anywhere and do whatever you want, on top of the main quest which is about 30 hours long. We still have the guilds – so the mage's guild, the thieves' guild, the fighters' guild, those are back. The mage's guild takes place in the College of Winterhold. So we have that as well as 150 handcrafted dungeons, and probably over 500 individual activities to do in the world so there's a lot of that as well as the main focus of the story."

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More information.

Another nice feature of the game is the dynamic class system, which essentially means your character will level up and evolve in an organic manner depending on your actions – so you can just pursue the things that you're interested in and your character will automatically mould to your style, eliminating the need to get bogged down spending stat points.

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An interesting point. One reason I still have (had?) faith in Bethesda to work on delivering a RPG is that their games kept a large number of listeners to allow recognizition by the gameworld.
They kept the link between actions and consequences in a game like Oblivion with skills being improved by actually working on them. No generic XP gained through combat to distribute on skills, regardless of the actions the character takes (no social skills being increased on the basis of combat only for example as it happens in so many socalled RPGs)

Class playing is much more limited than role playing but you have to start somewhere and Oblivion has a stub of an internal recognition system to understand what class the player plays. Not much was done from that, one has to admit . But a start.

In Skyrim, too early to tell but it looks as they have dropped the ball on this one.
Hard to speak of a dynamic system of class as classes are just a figment of the player's imagination and have no virtual existence in the gameworld.

I could state that I am going to play the following classes (based on one developper's comments):

-monk, HtH combat, froc and beard.
-tavern brawler, HtH combat, cloth armour, hair
-fair strong man, HtH combat, U-jersey, fine moustache, bald
-thug, HtH combat, only pants, bald
-professional wrestler, HtH combat, only pants, hair.
etc...

Only HtH combat has an input-output connection through the game. All these classes are probably not fluffy, imported from non autochnous cultural references, and have no virtual existence in the game world. They correspond with nothing.

In a RPG, one has to wish it to see this as an improvement.

Skyrim comes with a 'dynamic' customization system with the result being no class.

Skyrim is obviously aiming on the GOTY title(s)/reward(s).
Will creating hype about it help, I dunno, but honestly I just hope it'll be fun like Morrowind was.

Skyrim, like all TES games, is a bit of a paradox for me.

I can write several pages worth of strong and reasonably objective criticism aimed towards it - and yet it's one of the titles I feel most assured will be worth both my time and money, and then some.