I guess it goes back to the good old days of AD&D. We literally played the same character for years, just different dungeons/scenarios, some of which lasted months on end. So 750+ hours on one single Skyrim character is nothing, quite normal.

As a stealth character everything slows down. Movement is slow. Lots of waiting for the right moment. It's the style of game play that I enjoy most.

My hack and slash legionaire moves at a much faster pace, as does my mage. Not sneaking makes for a totally different pace.

I went 220 Hours on a High Elf destruction mage, and honestly much of the time was spent obtaining different ingredients, do you know how hard briar hearts are to come by?

Then you've certainly missed out on a lot of the fine detail, sights, and nuances of the game. Some rush through the world and just catch the obvious parts, others explore and see and do everything. I tend to the latter. My main char is at around 100 hours, and my stats show I've discovered 114 locations and cleared 54 dungeons- a drop in the bucket

I methodically explore each area I encounter, sneaking up every canyon till I can't climb no more, or get a 'You cannot go this way' message. Swim every river and lake and bay looking for hidden chests, delve into every canyon and hole, and peer out over the beautiful world from every awesome vista point along the way. My biggest problem, is that no matter which direction I choose to explore in, there are 3 other directions I'm neglecting!

I'm sure once I finally explore every bit of the whole world of Skyrim, future characters will not be spending so much time with the exploring part. But until that point, probably another 200 hours or so out... I'm lovin' it and takin' my time. I can't even fathom how people can rush through this game in less than 100 hours, and think they've actually come anywhere close to really experiencing it.

Agreed. The Elder Scrolls games are about exploration and simply losing yourself in the game. It's much easier to feel like your character is an extension of yourself. If you rush things, then you are truly missing out. Skyrim isn't a game that you complete, but one that you experience.

That's not funny at all man, it actually offends me man. But I forgive you, and anyway the medicine never helped me at all, just made me really really really hungry all the time, but also made me have no appitite either.

You just lose yourself in the game. I can't explain how I log 250+ on average per ES character aside from that

Different playstyles, I guess. Some people are more goal-oriented, and just focus on completing stuff as fast as they can. The kind who play games for fastest times, most kills and headshots per match, etc. A-type personalities who are competetive above all else. Then there are the RPG'ers and flower-sniffers like us.

Then there are those of us who are role-players but find Skyrim to lack in the depth required for immersion. We see every static NPC, every canned response. We notice the lack of choices in quests, the missing interactivity between factions and holds. We can see how it should have been.

I blame tabletop games. The mechanics of this game needed to be much stronger to overcome the inability to provide an immersive experience like you can have at the table. It just comes across as a pale imitation.

How do you check how many hours you have played?

Since I don't use Steam, I wonder if this is a Steam type of thing. If not, where in the Skyrim views can I find out how many hours I have in the game?

Steam keeps track of your play hours, but only when playing in online mode and signed in.

1 to 3 seconds? I have found myself spending 5 or 10 minutes sometimes more admiring the waterfalls and scenery in Skyrim. I have even done that in Oblivion and Morrowind, and that's vanilla (no mods). Sure, the Morrowind graphics are dated, but there is great artwork in it as with all TES games.

As for spending a lot of time eating, sleeping, etc. well I try to do that and sometimes I really enjoy just spending time in an inn in Skyrim and listening to the music and conversations. But, my character often forgets to eat or sleep if I am really into what I am doing with him. Not unlike how I am in real life, sometimes skipping meals and sleep if I am really into a project. But then I will slow down and stop at an inn or by a scenic waterfall and just smell the coffee so to speak.

320 hours so far. Here's how I spent them, approximately:

• Loot everything and everyone
  
• Enjoy the views
  
• Explore all boundaries - even on the micro-map
  
• Be a sneak-thief/assassin
  
• Don't ever buy/ride a horse
  
• Manually work out all the alchemical ingredients
  
• Ghost run as many dungeons as possible
  
• Never get jailed
  
• Mine all the iron ore you can find
  
• Transmute all the iron ore you can find
  
• Build Skyrim's first Wall of Gold

If you play on console, your savefile will tell you how long you have played. This won't count time spent with multiple reloads after getting killed of course. Don't know if PC savefiles have this info in them or not.

lol, no way.

Well. Yeah, I mean, it's a waterfall, once I've acknowledged that and that it looks purdy I move on as it doesn't give me any entertainment value.
I rarely (if ever) stop to stare at something for it being pretty, and if I do it's at most 10 seconds, and that's very very rare.

while i haven't gotten to the 200+ mark yet with Skyrim i can see how it's easily possible. after 1.4 came out i started a new character and immediately after escaping helgen went to riften to join the TG. Just doing TG quests/side quests and the occasional random quest or city related quest i've racked up 30 hours and i'm still only 2/3 done the TG. that's with no MQ, no other guilds, no off the beaten path exploring other than for specific quests. I also spend time fishing for river betty around honeyside and riften every time i come back from a mission as it helps my woodelf unwind from the stresses of the job. if i didn't use carriages i could conceivably be at 60 hours for the same output.

my original character is on vacation, but is 90 hours and that's companions completed, thane of each city and all but 2 daedric artifacts, but nothing else.


some prefer to take their time and soak it in, some will run and gun and just speed through. the beauty is there is no wrong way to do it!

having played 500+ hours of morrowind and 300+ hours of oblivion i fully expect to be somewhere in between when all is said and done with skyrim.

She sits in my bedroom in Breezehome and fantasizes about me doing terrible things to her with no armor on. And when I come home and go upstairs with my new companion (Annekke), she seriously gives me this eye/dagger look and I see lightning flashing in those black nordic eyes.... I best not leave Annekke up there alone with her, I'm thinking. Could get ugly.

I've only played one character and I've logged over 600 hours.

I spend a lot of time trying to shout horses off high cliffs. And drinking in the pubs.

Well me I can't say how long because the highest I've got upto with any of my characters is 66hr, but he's not retired, I just have like 8 characters though a couple are retired. I had one character at the 60hr mark and I decided to restart her as the exact same character only with wiser perk choices so upto 40hr with her clone. I would guess it'll take me 200-300 hours to finish with one character. If it was my first then add fifty hours at the beginning I spent just exploring and running around.

Those who take 100 or less must not bother with misc quests, go direct through a dungeon following the quest marker at all times and must not be interested in playing around - messing about with different weapons, testing all the cool spells and shouts (getting all 60 words takes ages man), playing with different armours, fiddling with smithy and enchanting, all can be big time sinks.

I'm speeding up now as I fast travel all the time now, but still some stuff is just a major time sink, selling all my junk off after a dungeon crawl was taking me over an hour going from shop to shop so I've stopped picking up anything but gems and gold. I always fully explore every route in dungeons though.

I also explore cities and villages properly, by this I mean when I go to a village I go in every single building and talk to every single npc, this alone takes forever, never mind all the quests you get from them. When I say I talk to them I do mean I talk to them properly and explore every dialog option them have.

You do all that and there's no way on earth you can be done in under a hundred hours, I don't role play, my latest Necromancer Eric the Wrathful doesn't have a story about why he's so Wrathful that stuff doesn't interest me, as my playstyle won't interest some but surely you can see how easy it is to spend hundreds or hours in this game if you don't blaze a trail straight from one main quest to another main quest.

A good measure of a casual gamers play time is a let's play that I watch in YouTube he is upto around 130 hours, still in first act on main quest, halfway through most guilds. Because its a let's play he does little crafting and fast travels everywhere, so I would say on average if you only have one character which your done with after a hundred hours that's a very short play through.

My main character is at 160-ish hours and semi-retired. I've got about 6 other characters, and I try to build as unique a story as possible for each. I don't know if I'll ever get a single character to 200 hours.

After completing the "main" quest for that character (which may be the college or the DB or the actual MQ), I start to feel that that character is done. I spend a lot of time wandering and exploring, too, and tend to delay the later quest stages. The other issue (for me) is that for a marathon game I'd need leveling to be slower. After a few skills reach 100 I start to get the itch for a new build, partly because I feel like there's nothing more to accomplish.

Just won the thread.

I'm somewhere north of 220 hours on my Elf girl, w/ very little of MQ or CW done; also I have virtually no guild quests completed (couple o' bard quests is all, I think).

Sometimes I go days (real-life) without doing any quests at all; generally, I end up getting a hankering to do something scripted so I will do some of the miscellaneous quests or a MQ/CW, but then I always end up doing several days of random adventuring. Occasionally, I decide to get a room at a tavern and I drink and eat and read some of the millions of books I've collected.

This is all helped out, in part, by the fact that my game is very heavily modded (12+gigs); mods like Warzones: Civl Unrest and Wars in Skyrim and Deadly Dragons, etc. make the game much more difficult and time-sinky as well. The combination of these and similar mods w/ my playstyle virtually guarantees that my Elf girl will be adventuring for a very long time to come.

I level up really fast. I've put 10-15 hours into one character and am already level 27. For me, I plan out what I want to do for a character as well, but I'll explore to find dungeons and guardian stones. I also do most quests for merchants and townspeople.