Glad I waited. After all the patching, Skyrim is a lot of fun but with few surprises & little added to the formula.
So when I heard about Skyrim, I gave myself 2 rules:
1-I will not buy it for the PS3.
2-I will not buy it anywhere near the launch date but will wait for the "big patch".
Let's just say I was very glad I stuck to those rules. I haven't had one (complete) freeze up the whole game; it has frozen for several seconds at times where something is going on with the narrative but compared to what I was expecting, that's silky smooth.
The thing is that it's actually a little less than I was expecting. I imagined that on the other side of all the Fallout work, we would see some more of the innovations from those games integrated into Skyrim.
Like the intricately branching storylines from New Vegas. There are storyline choices to make in Skyrim, but those choices affect little more than those particular storylines. There could've been more interweaving. Especially with the "guild" missions and other side missions. The Civil war's progression doesn't exactly seem to affect them much.
I also feel like the combat has taken a step back from the Fallout games. It is a bit of an improvement from Oblivion (in that the enemies are smarter and come in a greater variety of shapes & sizes; greater than your size or a little smaller) but I loved the introduction of VATS in Fallout 3 after cursing the ranged spells and archery from Oblivion and I expected something similar like Sight of the Dragon or FATS (Fairy Assisted Targeting System) added to Skyrim. It would've been a cool feature to add to TES and it would've made it feel more like a whole new game rather than a huge expansion pack to Oblivion.
And it is Huge. Not quite as huge as Oblivion so it has less of that realistic feel to the wilderness and there are fewer dangerous (and/or random) encounters between locations but there are a ton of locations to explore thanks to the creative use of topography & a little reckless cluttering. But I haven't had one of those moments (which I appreciate) where I literally get lost in the world the way I did in Oblivion or Fallout 3.
And that's not to say there haven't been any improvements. I'm happy they carried over the lockpicking from Fallout as it was pretty fiddly in Oblivion. The mining/smithing addition is also a welcome bit of crafting that will give warrior class characters more immersion.
Overall, Skyrim is a fun game with a lot of content and is generally a great value as games go. I've definitely got my money's worth that's for sure. I just feel like it's unfortunate that I have to put all Bethesda games in a patching quarantine before I buy them. I was also hoping to see some of the best innovations and styles carried over from their previous games from this gen but I tend to see the laziness of the New Vegas map and the frustrations of Oblivion's combat more than the branching story of New Vegas and the Crash Junction like combat of Fallout. If you didn't play Oblivion or the Fallouts, I can see this being one of the most expansive & impressive things you've ever seen, but otherwise, you may get tired of it long before you get through even half the content.