Skyrim!

[TLI-Inferno]

I bought Skyrim a bit over a week ago. It's awesome.

I figured I'd give some advise to people. I'll give as much advise as I can without spoiling the game too much.

First: Do not sell dragon scales or dragon bones. They will be useful much later on.

Second: Do not put perk points into pickpocket, lockpicking, or speech. While these can be useful early on, they will eventually be useless when you have huge amounts of gold, and as many lockpicks as you would ever need. You will not, however, be able to retrieve your perk points which you already spent yet wish to use elsewhere.

Third: Do not underestimate smithing + enchanting. You can improve and enchant heavy armor to add magic bonuses, making it useful even for mages.

Caution: below part may spoil surprises for you; if you want to be surprised when you play the game, do not read below.

Now, to brag about my own accomplishments that I made today:
1: I can now summon a dragon. Yay.
2: I dual enchanted an entire set of items to increase blacksmith skill, and then drank blacksmith potions. Then I created the strongest heavy armor in the game, and improved it. I then drank an enchanting potion and enchanted the armor to increase my heavy armor skill and decrease cost of destruction casts. I also had maxed the Heavy Armor bonus perk, the Matching Set Bonus perk, the Heavy Set bonus perk, and all other perks relating to armor bonuses, and the result was, when wearing all of these items, a single piece of armor gives 600 armor. And I'm wearing a full set, so picture the total armor gain. I also have 100% reduction to the mana cost of destruction spells, allowing me to dual cast the best destruction spells at literally 0 mana cost. Essentially, I can't be hurt, but I can dish out as much pain as I want.
I also found out that the level cap is NOT 50. I passed level 50 today, and was surprised to find that I could continue to level.

Now, more spoilers: My guide to success.

Smithing and Enchanting can help you no matter what type of character you want to create. Here are some tips for rapidly increasing these skills:

Go from town-to-town buying as many iron ingots and petty soul gems as anyone will sell you. If you have no leather, buy some leather and use a tanning rack to convert it into leather strips. Then, forge as many iron daggers as you can hold. Bring these to an enchanter. Enchant all of them. This will rapidly increase both blacksmith and enchanting. In addition, you'll have a ton of valuable and light enchanted daggers to run around selling to everyone, getting you massive amounts of gold. You will probably increase your speech skill as well, from selling so many daggers.

Also, companions can be helpful if you prepare them right. You can trade items with a companion. They will automatically equip items that are better than what they are currently using. Give them the best items that you aren't using for yourself, and your companion will actually be somewhat helpful. You can also use them as pack mules. One companion from Whiterun, a Nordic housecarl woman, actually says "I am sworn to carry your burden" whenever you request a "trade" with her, knowing full-well that you intend to load her up with loot to carry for you.

In addition, I find that weapons are extremely useful. I built my character as a mage, because I like using spells. But you can get weapons to deal hundreds of damage, if you get a powerful weapon, improve it, dual enchant it, and poison it... Meanwhile, dual casting the strongest offensive spells (which would cost much more than the average player's magicka to dual cast a single time), you can deal only around 200 damage. Of course, I can dual cast these as much as I want, because I'm just that awesome.

You claim to detect bragging in my speech? Nonsense! (Because my stealth skill is so much higher than yours! My bragging remains undetected!)

[Setokaiva]

Haha, great, thanks for all the tips and I'm glad Skyrim is everything its cracked up to be (and more). I probably should get this game now... only thing I'm concerned about is difficulty because you can always make your hero pretty much indestructible, but I like a challenge, so I might not use a cheesy divinity build like that (no offense).

[Lord ussfletcher]

Awesome!

[TLI-Inferno]

No worries, my game bugged and all of the saves of that character are gone. I made a new character a week ago, and played it for a while.
My new character is level 52. It uses heavy armor and dual wields 1-handed swords.
It has a total of 1599 armor, and the swords, without enchantments, deal 360 damage each. I can use berserk to double their damage, halve my damage taken, and I can use elemental fury to increase my attack speed incredibly. Also, due to perks, power attacks with these dual wield weapons seem to be dealing incredible damage.
I play on Master difficulty, which is supposed to be near-impossible. Somehow, I still managed to kill the final boss with one dual wield power-attack (which is 3 quick strikes), with berserk active.

Anyway, seto, don't worry about the game possibly getting too easy, because when you play on Master, spells can kill you incredibly quickly. No matter how good your items are, you can only push your health so high, so you can still keep the game pretty intense. Plus, the stronger you are, the stronger your enemies are. I notice that when my attacks dealt 5 damage, I could kill enemies in 3 hits. While my attacks unbuffed now deal 360 damage, and the same enemies manage to survive an attack. I've read that the difficulty supposedly does not scale with your character, but it most obviously does.