
So far my impressions of Nehrim are mixed but leaning pretty heavily on the positive side.
The biggest oddity with it is just how much is changed but how much is also the same.
The game could do a much better job of explaining it's mechanics especially ones that relate to how stuff was done in Oblivion. Biggest example is the changes to how leveling is handled.
On first glance once I saw I had an EXP bar and was earning it from killing enemies/quests/discovering I assumed that the use-based leveling of Oblivion was stripped out and replaced but that's not quite true.
The majority of your leveling WILL come from EXP which then turns into "Learning Points" to spend at trainers you do still gain skill ups from using your abilities just at an even more glacial pace compared to Oblivion. This means that the attribute bonus problem from Oblivion is still very much present and in fact a little worse.
Now it's easy to level up just from killing enemies out in the woods/quests but it's basically impossible to get manual skill ups in time to be min-maxxing your attributes unless you really want to go full gookslop mindless stat grind. The over all issue itself isn't as bad since Nehrim does away with level scaled content so it's not like you have to deal with wolves turning into ogres and trolls bashing in your pitiful +1 point of endurance per level squish mage but it does still mean you can sort of lag behind in areas that in theory are suited to your level.
Another example is how important fatigue is to spell casting. In Oblivion your spell effectiveness is reduced by wearing armor. It still is in Nehrim but it doesn't matter as much and it's not NEARLY as important as fatigue now is to spell casting. At zero fatigue your spells are about 1/4 as effective. This was not explained and I had to go reading the wiki to learn this.
Besides these I am finding the world quite charming. Everything seems well made with lots of really pretty scenery in the open world and well designed dungeons that don't feel like just going through yet another Oblivion template dungeon. The quest design is a bit of a mix of normal Oblivion quests with markers and some that give you directions without a GPS tracking beacon on where the exact location is. The voice acting is all in German and while that obviously takes a little getting use to the voice acting sounds pretty good especially for what is a 15 year old Oblivion mod. There is a recent mod using community voice actors and AI to voice the whole thing in English but I don't know. Listening to it the voices are a mix of AI dispassionate monotone and awful amateur voice actors doing "I'm VOICE ACTING!" voice. Think of every amateur anime dub and that's pretty much the vibe I got. I'll stick with the Deutsch and force @Finarfin to translate the random signs around the world thank you
