LOL great post!!
I found the terminatoresque city guards annoyingly lazy too.
What I hated about them the most was that, even though they were absolute player-character-killing-machines and could detect you stealing something through five feet of stone wall, they were absolutely useless when it came to fighting other monsters.
A guard can kill the player character in about four hits most of the time, yet when you enter a low-level dungeon with them, an entire troup of guards dies on you the second they encounter their first scamp. Wtf? It seems to me that, given their relative strength, that quest should have played itself.
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As for skyrim, I really hope they'll take some hints from games like BG, Dragon Age, etc regarding the magic system, or just take a step back to the Morrowind system and improve that significantly. I really like the way you can craft your own spells (within bounds, of course), but the difficulty is that the interesting part of Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age combat comes from the interplay of different character classes. Being a fighter character in Dragon Age is pretty brainless and boring, but it's because you get to use that fighter in the context of a team consisting of support/offensive casters, rogues and archers that the gameplay becomes interesting.
An ability like
mark (increase incoming damage on target by x percent) is not much fun, but when you combine that with a cloaked rogue backstabbing an enemy at exactly the right time ... that's awesome. It's about the synergy, and that's what allows you to build genuinely interesting characters. It is completely viable to build a character with zero DPS, as long as its buffs, traps and skills are good enough and you have the party to support it.
TES games, on the other hand, are solo. That mark spell is cool and all, but you'll be the one casting it and the one doing the backstabbing, while tanking hits from other enemies, probably. That changes matters. Good luck getting anywhere in the game without at least a solid Blade, Blunt or Destruction skill. I think I stopped playing my Illusion/Sneak character some 3 hours into the game. The current system just forces you to build all-round characters, and in the end, you'll possess skills in ALL magic schools.
In that regard, I think the addition of party members would be a really great thing to have. Perhaps using the auto-AI system featured in Dragon Age, where you could pre-program the behaviour of your team members based on certain circumstances, or Final Fantasy's gambit system. Hell, go all Mass Effect on the game if that's a better system.
I know it was already possible to hire mercenaries in Oblivion (I forgot if Morrowind had this feature, too), but that was a pretty basic DPS addition, nothing more. You more or less only used the mercenaries to take the hits while you stood back and chugged mana potions and casted death spells. You couldn't control them, order them (other than "Stay here"/"Follow me"), spend their skillpoints, etc. Mostly they just charged into a room full of demons while you were still healing and got themselves killed.
I realise that TES games are about adventure and exploration, not really about tactical combat the way DA and ME are, but I think a somewhat fleshed out combat system could really help the game. "Buy spell, cast spell, level up spell" doesn't really cut it anymore, for me.