Quote Originally Posted by Pike View Post
Okay so. Skyrim is honestly better than I think people give it credit for. Sure you get to a point where you get tired of it but it's usually not until you've dumped more than your money's worth into the game.
To be fair, I did get my money's worth out of it (60 or so hours, so $1/hr, not bad). I take some issue with judging a game solely on monetary worth, though. No other medium really gets judged using that as a metric so I don't think it's fair to write off complaints just because I did put a lot of time into it.

The shallowness comes from the characters inhabiting the big, pretty world Bethesda made, and the quests you're tasked with. Everything is gorgeous in the game. I loved exploring the nooks and crannies and walking through the cities. But no quest or character grabbed me. I did a significant chunk of the main story and stopped after capturing the dragon and flying away because I realized I just didn't care. It felt like a grind to advance the quest marker without anything really interesting happening. I also had done a lot of random quests and finished up the Mage's Guild on this play-through and felt they were the same.

I rerolled a totally different character after that, hoping to get more out of it by taking a path I don't typically play. I stopped the main quest and got caught up in the civil war, went through the Fighter's Guild and Dark Brotherhood, and still... nothing compelling. More grind for checkboxes in my quest log.

I can't tell you exactly what it is that the game is missing for me, but Oblivion really did have it in comparison. I think Oblivion felt more like a living, breathing world with characters I enjoyed compared to Skyrim. I liked seeing their little schedules play out and the kind of mischief you could get involved in with them. There really weren't any characters in comparison that gave me that same level of engagement and satisfaction. It had the same emptiness that MMOs have for me; it stopped being fun as soon as I stopped caring about the little bars going up every time I handed in a quest.