GenieKnows Games Narrowing the field

Excellent RPG right here. Some would say that it's not quite up to par with it's predecessor, Morrowind, but it's still quite an achievement in game design.

Pros:
Huge open world. Absolutely excellent environmental graphics. Great voice acting. Plenty of character customization. Tons of quests. A fair bit of items and spells.

Combat is much improved over the last game. Skills are more balanced.

Cons:
Leveled enemies and loot is rather lame, overall. Yes, it creates an environment where you can tackle any quest at any level, but it starts to suck later on in the game when everybody is of an equal power level and are all using the best armor in the game... not to mention that there are very few uniquely placed treasure items to find, which more or less makes exploration a waste of time.

Missing several spell effects that added a lot to the atmosphere and the sense of freedom in prior games. For example, no levitation, can't lock doors anymore, no jump spell, no slow fall spell, no mark and recall (targeted teleportation) spells, no Intervention spells (teleports you to the nearest temple), no blindness spell, absorb health was put into the wrong school of magic, which makes the correct school of magic significantly less useful.... and so and and so on...

The problem with taking all of these spells out, is they didnt add anything in to make up for them or replace them. Which means you wind up with significantly less options as far as spell casting goes.

No throwing weapons at all. You get bows. That's it. In the previous game, you got throwing knives, shurikens, throwing darts, and crossbows. Granted, marksman is supposedly much more realistic now, but Im not sure that it's worth taking out every other option for it.

No spears. Blunt weapons and axes were combined in the same weapon group (huh???!). This results in characters that seem far less unique than they should be.

Enchanting is almost completely useless now. In the previous game, you could enchant anywhere with up to 8 effects active at the same time. In Oblivion, you can only enchant at an altar (which you have to be a member of a specific guild to have access to in the first place, or pay $$ for a separate add on), and you can only add 1 effect on armor and accessories.

Cities are now separate areas. Each city is surrounded by walls, and you have to go through a gate to get in. In the previous games, outdoor and city exploration was seamless in most cases. The created a much more immersive feeling in the game.

No Great Houses! In the previous game, you could join a Great House and work your way through the ranks... and you could only join one House with each character. This added a huge amount of replay, as you had to play the game with 3 different characters to experience everything.

No vampire questline. The previous game had 3 factions of vampires, all with their own individual questlines.

Can't turn into a werewolf! In the previous game's expansion, you could turn into a werewolf.... very fun!

Im sure there's more that Im missing... the gist of it is, there wasn't enough added back into the game to justify the amount of features that were cut. This makes the game, in my opinion, inferior to Bethesda's previous efforts, from a freedom and immersion and replayability standpoint.