Is the engine that different? I thought it might've shared more technology with it than not.
I'm not the biggest fan of orcs and elves either (but I do like a lot of fantasy stuff). What I'm really a fan of though is chopping off heads. Guns are boring.
Yeah, it's a completely new engine. It looks better, it runs smother, and there are a lot of significant changes to the UI. There are more physics in play in the game world as well, making combat feel a lot meatier and (to use a vastly overused word) visceral.
The game comes with copious amounts head-chopping, you'll also be glad to know.
How is the leveling in this game? The one thing that really upset me about Oblivion was that leveling up your "preferred" skills was actually detrimental to becoming a badass.
As Orangey said, there are no classes this time around. The levelling itself has been seriously overhauled, and streamlined significantly from Oblivion. You can now level up using whatever skills you want, but every skill has it's own talent tree of sorts.
The more points you have in a particular skill, the better the "perks" you can unlock for those skills. These give you completely unique abilities, such as an archery skill that slows down time and improves your chances or critical hits with a bow and arrow, or an armour skill that allow you to avoid damage 10% of the time.
To get the best abilities though, you have to specialise, so even without a dedicated class system, you'll still find yourself molding your character into your own personalised and very specific class.