Speaking of marathon gaming sessions,
I am level 50 with Destruction, Smithing and Enchanting on 100, One Handed and Light armor skill at around 90 and rest not much important, total gaming time to this post - 67 hours (says in save game file), and finished a LARGE amount of quests,
I have to say that main quest storyline might not be as impressive as I have expected, nevertheless it could have been worse (and I've seen worse), so there I do agree with you.
However, I must also say that side questlines are about as equally impressive as main one, finishing the College of Winterhold questline and Companions guild and pretty much everything you can do in the game is incredibly impressive, well done.
I do disagree on the world feeling less populated, it's quite the opposite I might add - world feels actually very much alive and offers a lot of locations, each town is specific in architecture, it's people, overall feel.
And I really do must point out that, as the game developers said in the "Making of" trailer, little details that matter are incredibly polished up.
My brother plays, wears a full set of Ebony Armor (very rare and powerful), and a random town guard comments something along the lines of "Woah, Ebony armor, very nice to see". I wear full Glass Armor set, some other guard comments "Light armor, faster on your feet... smart".
Pull out a weapon, guard asks "Is there a problem?".
Random people commenting, example - I use "Detect life" spell in streets of a town (seen as blue flames in user's hand), child says "I wish I could play with flames like that!"
All of such details that really make the game, are there.
Even if the main storyline might finish on one afternoon of dedicated playing, it's but a tiny fraction of entire game.
I really gotta get some screenshots. My brother has a full Daedric Armor set, looks incredibly nice. Glass Armor is better for my character (Battle mage), also looks equally as good. Spells well thought out, useless ones gotten rid of, skill development improved very much.
There is quite a few bugs I've ran across though.
For example, my brother is playing an Argonian character, and whenever he uses a Blacksmith forge, the animation in the background is wrong - the yellow-hot metal the character is supposed to hammer is oriented completely wrong, and appears to be not animated at all. He transfered the save game over to my laptop and same thing happened, while my character both on my laptop and transfered on the PC has a normal animation.
I happened to clear the cave before a quest which requires you to kill certain character in a cave, which resulted in me getting stuck. Had to use console commands to progress the quest one step further.
Also happened when character Septimus approached a book Ohgma Infinum, everything just got stuck and I also had to use console, for both me and my brother's campaign (I guess that one happens a lot).
For everybody else, when Septimus approaches the book, and finishes his speech and then, nothing happens and you cannot talk to either him, or use the book, use this console command:
"setstage DA04 55"
DA04 is code of the quest, 55 is the quest stage (will take it one step further).
Back to playing!
