While character creation does feel a tad empty here I have to disagree with all the praise of Oblivion's levelling and progression system. Sure you had to plan your character's development, but it was the most restrictive and counter-intuitive way to do so ever. If you wanted to immerse yourself in the game then character development in Oblivion certainly didn't help. For instance, if I wanted to level up my thief perfectly I COULD NOT tag the skills I actually wanted to use most as my primaries, or else I would over level (missing out on getting more attribute points per level) and the bandits wearing glass armour and daedric maces would steamroll me. How did that help immersion? That a thief would have its primary skills as Destruction and Heavy Armour so that using sneak/archery/light armour didn't force a level up without +5 attributes. I'm all for getting into character development and planning - I love doing that - but Oblivion's system was VERY bad. Sure it's nice to think back on it nostalgically and say "ahhh those were good days, we had to think" but I distinctly remember how frustrating it was to play the way you wanted without completely destroying your character. After I had levelled up my secondary skills enough to get +5 to an attribute (i.e. the ones that were actually an integral part of my character's build) I had to proceed to grind the primary ones to get a level up. I like how Skyrim has handled it, I feel as though there could have been more depth to the perk system however, but it's better than that whole primary/secondary junk Oblivion had. Just be thankful they didn't 'streamline' their system as much as WoW is doing in the next expansion. All in all it was really nice to just jump into the game and play. There is still a great deal of planning you can do if you take into account perk progression/weapons/spells/armour/enchantments/potions/shouts/etc. The depth is there, it just looks a lot more simpler, ESPECIALLY with the addition of Shouts. EDIT: yeah the new fonts are weird... I have no idea what possessed them to choose something like that. VERY strange choice imho. EDIT EDIT: Not being able to assign points/'tag' skills was a great change too. I didn't know how archery/magic/melee/stealth would handle, thus I much prefer not getting locked into a build and then having to restart my character because I disliked it. For example in Oblivion I first started as a melee orientated character, after about 30 hours I remade because I hated how melee felt floaty (still does, which is why I'm sticking to magic ^^). It's ok to argue that you want a deeper levelling system, but you have to think that some older levelling systems are incredibly flawed.
