We won't get it here in the EU until Thursday/Friday so I will be watching this thread like a hawk on caffeine.
If I even whiff a spoiler I'll hunt you down and put your homestead to the torch!

I have an Inspiron 9300 with 1 gig of ram, 1.73 pentium m and a Geforce go 6800. I preordered the game hoping that it will run, even if I have to drop the settings all the way. Should I be worried it will be "hella laggy"? Or should I be alright?

Just posting to "subscribe" to this thread.

I think the big performance killer is going to be SM 3.0 effects which nothing short of the current cream of the crop handle well (7800, X1900) so with those turned off (and any radeon pre X1800 flat out won't run SM3.0) I would assume it would run alright.

Of course all the fancy SM3.0 effects are what makes it so pretty.

You and me both. It's taken over four years for Morrowind to be impressive visually to me. Both because of needing an awesome machine and because of mods necessary to replace hideous default faces.

It is a stupid feature, one that I also allowed myself to watch. For only about two minutes. What I saw looked so awesome it made me want to scream like a little girl.

There Lobster, happy now?

I started watching some videos on the net and I'm definately going to head out and buy it. I just can't resist the temptation to buy something this badass looking. The new laptop has a X600 Radeon in it and 2 Gigs of RAM so it should be up to the task of the running the game. Hopefully my boss doesn't find out how many games I have installed on it.

Widescreen 1900x1200 Civ4 FTW!

I almost did the same thing today too Zero.. we are all sad men! The day is almost upon us.. I dub this night.. Oblivion Eve

Dare I even contemplate picking Oblivion up with my current specs? (I'm totally GFX-card illiterate, I have no idea of what card does what in which generation and whatnot).

P4 3MHz, 768MB RAM, GeForce 5700LX.

Be gentle

Tamron: unfortunately your system will not run OB well, the 5700LX is going to hold you back a lot (it is below the min requirement of the game) and you will likely need more memory too.

Thanks guys, I'll run the tool at home tonight, though I'm not expecting good news

I'm pretty sure there's no spoilers in here aside from mentioning that there's an opening dungeon.

I spent a couple of hours with the game last night, and am thoroughly pleased so far.

For reference, this is on the 360, played on a standard-def 27" tv (with component inputs and running through a surround sound rig). Just my highlights here:

Pros
- Sound is excellent; surround placement is very accurate, music & atmospheric effects are highly immersive, voices are for the most part quite well done.
- The gameplay itself is, as expected, very similar to Morrowind and Daggerfall, i.e. it's definitely an Elder Scrolls game, for better and worse. Varied, very open-ended, everything I expected.
- I was surprised by how much I liked the physics!
- The opening dungeon is pretty well done, giving you the opportunity to try most of the gameplay elements that'll matter in helping you decide what class to play (based on what you had fun doing). It was immersive and entertaining, and in many ways reminded me of the opening dungeon to Daggerfall. I found that much more immediately engaging and interesting than Morrowind's start.
In addition, when you finally get out of the starting dungeon, again like Daggerfall, you're out in the open and must find your way to a city, which immediately gives you some exploration and fun, rather than dumping you straight into a town and forcing you through lots of dialogue just to get started. Don't misunderstand me, I love the dialogue and story elements of these games (I'm one of those whackos who loves to read the books in the game), but I just found the pacing more even this way. I opted to head straight for my destination town with a few little diversions along the way, but other players could choose to just strike out in whatever direction they choose.
- The skies are even more impressive than in Morrowind; stars & clouds are gorgeous, lighting is fantastic. I can't wait to see weather variation!
- The main quest so far is also more immediately engaging and interesting than the previous games, but for me that's in large part because I've played the previous games and find myself very interested to see what happens next. However, I just joined the fighter's guild, and will be working for them for a while.
- The music for the outdoor areas isn't nearly as sleep-inducing as it was in Morrowind.

Cons
- There's a fair bit of chop in the framerate at times, even when not loading areas. This obviously occurs more in areas with complex geometry. So far it's not quite as bad as Morrowind got, but I also haven't been to the Imperial City yet, which I expect could be much worse.
- Those distance textures for the ground (say, early on, when you look across the lake at the hills rising up on the other side) look like Flight Simulator ground textures, as do the trees in the distance dotting those low-res textures. Sure, you can see for miles, but wow... the preview videos and screenies didn't show it to be THAT bad. Reminded me of Asheron's Call. And no, it's not due to my TV. If it were, then I wouldn't be able to rave about how great everything else looks.
- I'm still iffy on the way that speechcraft works in the game. I like the mini-game aspect to it, but I can see it already getting repetitive and rather time-consuming to do this with every person I want to get on a positive disposition with. However, that's not much different from Morrowind, where it was every bit as repetitive. This way just seems more time-consuming.

Tips
- Don't forget to haggle EACH time you go to a shop! That slider resets itself. I didn't notice that at first!
- Dragging dead bodies around into embarassing poses is hilarious and appeals to my inner child. Yeah, I'm whacked.

Yeah, I had actually come to the conclusion that this was going to be a weakness just from looking at the various videos and screenshots that have been made public over the past month or two. The big question, I guess, is just how distracting it becomes. I'm sure it will differ from person to person, though.

Out of curiosity, though, what did you thing about the visual customization options for your character? Do you share Prederick's impression that it was somewhat limited, or did you feel that at least as far as the face went, you could make a character that looked the way you wanted it to look?

Anyway, thanks for the honest impressions; I can't wait for work to be over so I can give the game a whirl myself.

As far as the faces are concerned, you can make the character look pretty much however you want to based on the 'limitations' of the race you choose. The only limitations as far as the face is conerned is the hair (you can change the length of whatever hairdo the race has as default) and eye color. Otherwise, it reminded me quite a bit of the character creator in Tiger Woods golf. The annoying thing about creating a character is that you cannot adjust its other dimensions. So, if I wanted to be a short squat Dark Elf, I could not. That's a small nitpick though since you don't really look at yourself much 'cept on the menu screen.

Yeah, we discussed that in another thread (Prederick's impressions, I think?). Basically, they restrict you to one body type per race/gender combination in order to reduce the complexity involved in modeling and animating the extremely numerous variety of armor and equipment. It's unfortunate that there has to be a trade off, but ultimately I think that I'm glad that they choose to have a greater variety of equipment rather than a fully customizable body type.