I am just interested in learning more about game creation and design for games like Skyrim, but I am also curios if is even possible to learn this completely on my own.

It would be very time consuming, and you'd need to learn a lot of skills... but it's certainly not impossible.

Very hard, and not so much impossible but impracticable for one person. There are a wide range of skills involved in game design and development, while it's not impossible for one person to have all of those skills the time it would take to acquire them would be considerable. There are many books available on game design and coding if you're keen to start developing a skill set appropriate to game development. The best thing is to find something that you love doing and apply it to games. That could be music, art, publishing, coding, de-bugging etc etc -- it's a long list.

Nope.

Just for starters, nobody can both program and 3d model and sound design and write interactive stories all the while actually running management (management is the real problem for most...unless you've been taught how or been under a good manager before you wont be able to plan out a project).



A small team (such as 5 or so people) could make a small sandbox game, but nothing on Skyrim's scale....there is a reason it took millions of dollars to make Skyrim and many people....it is a big game.


EDIT:
I am personally working on my own game engine, though even if you use a pre-built engine like Unity or Unreal, it is still lots of work to actually get a game out of it. 'Game Design' positions don't exisist (don't get a degree in games design, it is worthless) what you need are skills, either as a 3d Modeller, a software engineer, a project manager or other....you'll find the best way to get into games development is to do stuff that is related but not aimed at. There are very few people in industry that ever studied 'games', they would have all done something much more useful.

I study/work as a software engineer, I want to get into games development, but in the mean time I do various things as a software engineer.

I would suggest finding some "co-workers" rather than trying to take on all of this by yourself.

No. Impossible.

Creating Skyrim requires not only madz coding skillz (well, for creating the toolset), but you also need to be able to create 3D models, textures, deal with interface design (which the PC team lack extensively) and most importantly have the creativity to create those ideas in the first place.

Even if you simply want to recreate Skyrim's functionality (graphics and QA department can be ignored) it's still hard to do. It's tedious, if one thing.