I'm one of the biggest fanboys for the elder scrolls series, but skyrim has me worried... Morrowind IMO was the best RPG of the time and still the best in the series not taking into account the stupidly bad graphics compared to modern games. The essence of Elder scrolls is - and this is a direct quote from Morrowind's manual - "The goal is whatever you want it to be." Oblivion started to stray from this idea when it introduced the "new" sort of buggy levelling system. Between Morrowind and Oblivion, the developers removed 6 skills, 16 weapon types, and 7 spells. This was an acceptable loss, but an old fan could tell that oblivion felt streamlined in design. Skyrim by the looks of it has taken more cues from oblivion and is treamlining more and more facets of the game going so far to take out hand-to-hand, which personally doesn't matter to me, but it has been a skill in elder scrolls since day 1. I think that the developers are taking a backward approach to the design by removing instead of adding.
Thoughts?