I loved Skyrim. It feels as if they were drawing some inspiration from Gothic 3 when they designed it (which is good, because Gothic 3 had a lot of great stuff Oblivion and Morrowind lacked). Plus they did more to appease the lore enthusiasts, gave more diversity in armor types, improved combat and stealth, improved the leveling mechanic, and vastly improved the AI.

Almost all of what has been already written sums it up well. I will just add my two cents for the heck of it.

Skyrim looks amazing and plays amazing, which is arguably its two biggest draws. The game has a solid story and lots of stuff to do, moreso than any of the previous console Elder Scrolls, but even with all the stuff, it feels more shallow. Attributes have been removed and the magic system has been stripped down heavily, which isn't a big issue for some, but the things they did to replace those omissions were horrible. The new perk system is a trainwreck in my honest opinion, compared to what they could have done if they would've kept attributes or even compared to what they should have done regardless of having attributes or not. Also, I am one of those guys who gets annoyed by power being relagated to items as opposed to being innate to your character, which is basically what the new crafting trifecta has done. For those that don't invest in one of the three crafting skills, you will be severely gimping your character. For those that invest in all three, you will quickly find you break the game by becoming absolutely too powerful. There really doesn't seem to be a happy medium or way around these facts, except for carefully spending perks and not being too greedy with crafting.

Outside of that, I find it kind of depressing that the game hasn't really added anything to the core gameplay elements. Sure you have sprinting and shouts, but neither of those really change much. It is basically Oblivion, stripped down, given a fresh coat, and repackaged for sale. The game still contains many of the same types of bugs that all the games in the series have and again, in my honest opinion, I would say that the bugs in this game are more pervasive and more detrimental to the overall experience. With ALL of that said... I have played the game for well over 300 hours and have loved every minute of it. Bethesda did a good job, but after you have put in a solid amount of time, you will start to notice all of the stuff that isn't up to par with previous experiences, as well as the overall feeling of "been there done that". Essentially I would say it feels like the series is coasting on the high standard it has set with its previous titles. This isn't a wholly bad thing, but they need to step it up greatly for the next game and I hope they get over their fear of numbers that a lot of RPG makers seem to be running into lately.

FAR worse than Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion - but still a pretty good game when you take into consideration the cost and the standard of modern games.

I can get some serious bromance going with Ghorbash on my orc character.

Yep. This is me. I like it just about as much as I like Morrowind, possibly even more than I like Morrowind.

But then again, it's been over two years since I've played Morrowind. It might sink below Skyrim in my affections if I actually played them side-by-side.

In and of itself, Skyrim is a good game -- I can count on one hand the number of games that I've sunk more than fifty hours into, and I'm already at 150 with Skyrim. However, a number of those aforementioned games are previous installments in The Elder Scrolls saga, and I've put more time into Oblivion than Skyrim, and more time into Morrowind than that. Perhaps I'm just jaded, but Skyrim lacks the replayability of those older titles, and it seems to me that it is the least engaging of the three I've played. I'll admit, In my 150 hours I haven't finished a single major questline, but there's nothing calling me back to finish them. The Main Quest? Unengaging. The Companions? Mundane, even with its lupine twist. The Civil War? It falls far short of its potential. The College of Winterhold? I was on my way to retrieve a certain artifact when I realized that I really didn't care. And therein lies Skyrim's major failing.

I put down the game before I got around to the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood, but I fear that they suffer from the same disease that afflicts almost everything else in Skyrim: It all seems so superficial, and I can't bring myself to give a damn about the guilds or the people in them (or people anywhere for that matter) or whatever ends they're trying to achieve. Simply put, I'm bored after only 150 hours, and that's never happened before. When a game becomes a chore, you know its time to shelf it for a little while, but even after a two month hiatus the idea of starting a new character seems distasteful. Now, keep in mind that I still managed to sink 150 hours into this game in spite of its flaws, and that's something very few others games can say. It's a good game, great for a ride or two, but it's lacking that something, that depth, that made the previous Elder Scrolls installment so enthralling. In my eyes, this is probably the most damning of Skyrim's flaws -- anything else might've been overlooked, but in the end, Skyrim proves that pretty is only skin deep.

Edited for eloquence.

My opinion: Fun when it works, severely lacking in a lot of aspects, but it does more things right than it does terribly, horribly wrong. Magic could use some more love, combat's not very challenging because the AI's so thick, and the storylines for most of the quests are not very well paced, and overall the game seems to be shallow in most aspects, but at the same time, I quite enjoy playing it (again, when it works).

Picture a puddle the size of the Pacific Ocean, but about as deep as a thimble in most places. You can have a lot of fun splashing around, but if you want to go into the Marianas Trench, you're going to have a bit of a challenge.

I love this game.

What? In which departments? Gameplay mechanics? graphically?! Story wise? Normally, I'd recognize skyrim's and any series' predecessors for what they are: Predecessors, old husks... I dont get how people can conclude that the much older videogames in a series can compare to and out-perform their new and improved variants; aside from feeling a strong sense of nostalgia or if the developers truly are simply selling the brand name and not putting much effort into their game. Like with most starwars games.

Not true for me.

I see Oblivion almost like a middle-ground between the open-world RPG feel of Morrowind, and the sandbox action-adventurey feel of Skyrim. I would place Oblivion a lot closer to Morrowind in terms of style and overall feel than Skyrim though.

Terrible boring game ... 634 hours

To me, Skyrim is a fantastic game and I'd suggest it without hesitation. Without getting too anolytical, here's why I liked it. It's a game that let's me play a way that matches how I'm feeling. If I want to simply explore, there's no shortage of locations, above ground or below. If I want to work on playing with various skills or experimenting with different ingredients or magic, I can. If I want to try something that I may or may not regret later just for the fun of it, I make a save point and go for it. If I just want to run around and acquire loot, there's plenty of that to go around. And of course there are plenty of quests. Lots to do, lots of places to go, and I can play to suit my mood at the moment. Just my opinion, and why I like the game. I hope this helps.

Contrary to what some people might think, game series (or most forms of entertainment for that matter - whether it's a film series, a band's albums, etc.) don't always get better and better over time, even if they achieve more financial success. It would be nice if the world worked that way, but it's just not true. Sometimes they get worse with every release, or peak somewhere in the middle.

A common trend we see in video-games is that as a series gains more and more success and popularity, the developers target their games at a broader audience. And that's the impression I get from Skyrim. Unlike previous TES games, it doesn't feel like a game designed specifically for fans of open-world RPGs. It feels like it's designed for anyone and everyone with a games console or a gaming PC. In fact, if you followed all the pre-release build-up to Skyrim, it's fairly obvious that was one of their main goals given how many times words like 'accessibility' and 'streamlining' came up in their media interviews.

...

Personally, I would say that Skyrim is worse than the last three TES games in most areas except visuals and animations. And even then, I prefer the art style of the previous games.

I found the roleplaying aspect fine. Neither Morrowind nor Oblivion had cooking, smithing, working mills, pushing millstones, playing games with kids, or actually making stuff out of the ore you mine (mining in a semi-meaningful way was put in the expansions, even if you yourself couldn't do anything with the ore), marrying, doing odd jobs for locals, or taking sides in a conflict and determining who rules Skyrim.

Just as fantastic as any other TES game.

You really cannot go by a game forum because they are generally very negative.

This is disturbingly true. Better go find a good non-internet forum. I'm assuming I'll need time travel for this. Maybe Romans could give me a good idea of their opinion on Skyrim. Of course, Romans would be more interested in the Imperials, and tell me they prefer Oblivion.

Well so far no one's been too negative...yet.

It's good and entertaining, fun on the long term when you try different playstyles. it's far from being my fav TES though. What I dislike the most is that they could have done so much better in some departments: quest journal ( ), guild quests (I find it hard to believe the same people who wrote Whodunit, the thieves guild, the DB, Shivering Isles for Oblivion are the same who designed these uninspired guild stories), the magic system. I'm also not a fan of the new "modern" gimmicks like kill cams, riding 3rd person, Apple style UI.

You just dug this thread's grave, I think. Better get the safety coffins!

Where's Longknife when you need him?!

Uh-oh! -dives in safety coffin-
Playing New Vegas?

Forums like this would be incredibly boring without negativity... trust me. Most of the juicy discussions stem from criticism.

This ^^

It's how things improve. Unless I disagree with someone's negative opinion of an aspect, or I'm starting a long critique of something and want to start out vaguely positive, I'm a praiser by omission, meaning the majority of things I think are good I don't talk about, because there's less need for improvement on those ends. I think it's more important to talk about what doesn't work instead of what does, because there's only a finite number of ways to talk about how something is great, but there's a lot of ways to bring up how things can be improved.