Its more a testament to recycling assets then a testament to their skill if you want my opinion. The game will be good anyway though.

Fallout 3 and Oblivion were both glitchy as hell on launch.  

Fashionably late to the topic are we. Speaking to the issue at hand. I applaud the developer for having the incredibly good common sense to clean up their code before they shove their product out the door. That is the real culprit in most large installs the sheer volume of garbage code. Just a lot of lines of legacy code from the development of a game that wasn't erased even after it was made redundant, or was decided to be excluded in the end result.

It might be hard to see in console games, but tear down a old PC game to see what I am talking about. You will find all kinds of goodies that were left on the cutting room floor. After I had uninstalled one old game. I found a folder for that game that had over a hundred pieces of concept art. None of which were used in the game along with alternate text game manuals. I was slightly amused until I saw how much space that folder was eating while contributing absolutely nothing to the finished product. All told I had stumbled onto half a gig worth of totally useless crap, and I am not sure there wasn't even more worthless crap underneath all of that.

It's a 3.8GB install.....but is it Mandatory? I install any game I play for improved performance. It's usually anywhere from 1.5 GB (ie: Dance Central) to 7+ GB (Gears 3) but it has always been optional. Even when games ship on multiple discs, I've never had a problem playing them off the DVD if I didn't feel like installing.

I doubt that a game as big as Skyrim will only be 3.8GB so part of me thinks that, if you install the whole game, it will be considerably more. And if it's a mandatory install, people that own 20GB, 4GB, or the old Arcade 360's are not going to be pleased.

--upon closer inspection, it appears the whole game is just 3.8GB. That is sorcery, plain and simple. No big budget game is that small!

This.

@AaronSOLDIER

All signs point to that not being the case. This game is using a new engine. They are touting the fact that all of their dungeons are hand crafted. That there are over a hundred of them, and that they have individually rendered every single item in the game. It is just hard to see how repetition can be the root cause when all of the leading culprits are all accounted for. If you are going to place it at the feet of repetition you need to explain how that is the case.

I can see where you might think that given Oblivion, but from everything they have said, and more importantly all of the things the gaming community has seen of the game. It just doesn't look like or smell like a recycling job on their part. They have been pretty adamant about the fleshing work they have put into this game. Like I said in my previous post it is probably just a good clean up job on their part. This isn't a game exactly being rushed to meet a deadline. The game has been basically finished for months. More then enough time to clear out vestigial code, and so forth.

Anyway care to provide any evidence beyond a base impulse?

They are most certainly reusing a lot of textures for such a size.

...it's easy.  you just focus on copying and pasting the same thing over and over and over and over and over again as opposed to creating unique content.

Content is a bad word to use. Because we both know Bethesda RPGs games have plenty of content, more than most games. Even if there is some texture recycling to fill those large worlds. No using up tons of space on FMVs either.

Rage apparently didn't recycle textures. Yet you're left with a huge game that has little depth.

Excuse me? Have you played Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggerfall and not to mention the latest gem they published; Rage?! Most of their blockbuster titles are quite broken at first but they get around to fixing them and the games turn out very well. Piranha Bytes suffered from much the same with the Gothic series.

I'm not going to argue the rest but you can't possibly suggest that Bethesda aren't known for glitchy and bug-ridden games. Its a hallmark of the open world/sandbox genre. GTA games are the same way, it is quite simply inevitable with this genre.