I'm playing ME3 while waiting for the next patch to improve my PS3 version of Skyrim, do I hate Skyrim?

No

Am I disappointed that I can't play Skyrim in an exploratory fashion as a quest is likely to break and needs a restarted character?

Yes

Am I enjoying ME3?

Yes

Is ME3 a better value game than Skyrim because it takes up a bigger chunk of disk space when installed?

No

They are both games that I enjoy, hopefully post 1.5 in Skyrim's case but to compare them directly based on the OP's perspective is pretty much bonkers imo.

On PC, Mass Effect 3 looks to be under 10GB. Skyrim, with the HD texture pack is around 8GB.

On Xbox, I believe they needed to add much of the same content multiple times for each disc for ME3. Like LA Noire.

ME3 also has multiplayer and many, many cutscenes,

I like how ME3 natively supports Eyefinity though.....something Skyrim is lacking.

ME3 is on one disk on the PS3, not checked the install size yet.

There IS a lack of depth in Skyrim, there's no question about it. Somewhere down the line, Bethesda will have decide what kind of game they really want to make, a glorified sandbox or a world filled with interesting story and great characters. In Oblivion you at least had some character development going on (e g Martin Septim). In Skyrim characters feel very static, like they were just plopped into the world with a few generic lines of dialogue attached to them.

Irrelevant comparison. What can you do in ME3 but go where you're told to go and do what you're told to do? Nothing.

Anyway, Skyrim is no longer 3gb size it's slightly over 8gb with the new textures packs.

YAWN i dont care, i hate mass effect you could give that game 100GBs and i still wouldn't play it, the same goes for gears of war
3rd person games just dont interest me one bit!

Obvious troll is obvious...

Remove the cinematic cutscenes from ME3 and the size drops dramatically.

//edit

Also my Skyrim folder has 13.5 GB of data.

TES games seem to have a more intelligent rendering engine than other games and therefore can still look good while using less memory.

A low memory profile is key to an open world exploration game, because it loads its data in the background while the player is still able to travel from one end of the world to the other seamlessly. Other games can ignore the memory constraint and make the world look good with only a lot of static data, which then has to be loaded from map to map or level to level.

I think Skyrim is at least as good looking as other games and the memory awareness of Bethesda's developers will allow them to look closer at details, find unnecessary ballast and remove it from the game, and thereby lets them focus on the necessary things. Other developers will tend to bloat their game without thinking much about it simply because they can.

5 full days of gameplay is nothing compared to Skyrim.

Sure. Now tell me the one about the lusty Argonian maid...

Size =/= content

My first character packed in over 200+ hours with fast travel. So I doubt ME3 used all of the 16 gigs for pure content.

I'm sorry considering everything I've done in Skyrim and alll I still have to do. People are just delusional if they think they've done evertthing in that amount of time. For one thing zipping around like that you won't even FIND tons of quests.

I understand. kind of feel that way about first person games. Thank goodness Bethesda was smart enough to please us both.

Might be the dumbest logic I've ever heard. There are RPGs the size of an mp3 that can keep you busy for months.

AFAIK, actual playable content often takes up relatively little space. Sure, there's the new maps, but by and large those re-use the same textures, skins, and even entire layouts; the rest is just some DB code dictating npc behaviors, quest objectives, etc.
Its entirely novel new objects / creatures / npcs with unique skins, bump maps, etc that take up a lot of space, and Skyrim uses those only very rarely, for very special events. Even then, they tend to re-skin existing models and so on.

I've got about 400 hours into Skyrim, and plan on starting my second character to I can do some questlines I intentionally ignored with the first. There's also the 100 or so hours I put into developing my alchemy website, and god knows how many on forums.
I'd say those 3.8 gigs (plus some mods) managed to hold my interest.

lol i love how the op just stops posting after being bombarded with criticism

and indeed its the dumbest logic i've ever read, seriously? i played Napoleon totat war w/c is 21gig 5gig bigger than ME3 so does it mean it has more content? loooool

Okay o.o
Wait..
so you are comparing mass effect 3 with skyrim?

Yes, yes it does. Mostly agree, but empire and Napoleon total war DO have more content than skyrim, in that it's a never ending political/military sim.

Speaking of which, now that Paris has been taken, should I go over the Pyrenees and shoot straight for Madrid while losing thousands of men, pull back to London and recuperate, try to occupy France and deal with dissent and rioting, take to the sea and try to cut into Spain through Portugal (if I can convince the king to allow me military access), or station my boys at the border while systematically taking the Caribbean and destroying them economically? That's freedom of roleplay People. That's also what happens when Spain raids my cotton plantations. [censored]ers.

Well NTW does have seven campaigns. 100+ unit textures, 40+ maps, multiplayer, and campaign map, so it technically had more "content."

ME3 has 3.2 gigs of prerendered cutscenes. Skyrim's entire world takes up 320 MB. You can't compare filesizes in any meaningful way with regards to the amount of content a game has.

I believe PS3 games are on Bluray disks and those can fit a lot more data on them than a DVD.

This guy is just a dunce. I wouldnt even entertain this thread.

dude Rage was like 14 gigs and that game wasnt even that good.

Compared to Skyrim wich has even more content that Rage.

Meaningless comparison is meaningless.

Rage also took up around 12gb on my harddrive, and I finished that game, sidequests and everything, in about 30 hours. File size =/= content, ever.