I've never played, but this is a hell of a thread.

Everyone I've meet who really enjoyed it said they ignored the main quest and just dicked around.

Similar with Fallout 3.

I played it that way and enjoyed myself.

I really enjoyed my first playthrough, well after launch. I hadn't played an ES game before so I got to enjoy a lot of things for the first time. Especially the worldbuilding. Towers and so on.

I also didn't know you could fast travel on my first playthrough and in retrospect I think that made it better. Quests were more organic in that it was annoying to go all around the map, so I'd clear regions more than with fast travel. I also encountered more random-ish events on the road and they were more novel because basically none of them came from chasing down quest markers. Walking into and between areas also created a sense of scale and made it easier to appreciate the characters of different regions.

On that playthrough I ended up as a two-handed mace Nord, real basic B hours, and it was very fun to go through a good set of side quests, some secondary storylines, and the main questline.

Subsequent playthroughs were nowhere near as good and I think I only completed the main questline on one of them. I got small reminders of the fun of the first playthrough but mostly felt the grind. And discovering fast travel, in retrospect, sucked a lot of fun out of it. I did resurrect my first character's saves to play the expansions and preferred the one that takes you to the island up north.

I'd say it was a pretty decent game for its time that benefitted heavily from the worldbuilding of Morrowind, some nice vibes (nighttime sky and music), and hype. Oh, and being a dummy that didn't know how to fast travel.

PS there are thousands of bland Skyrim listicle videos on Youtube that are great for mild insomnia. Nothing more somnorific than a nerd talking about the top 10 most drunk things about skyrim vampires or whatever.

Clockwork worlds are fun to get lost in. It's a great mix of comfy and sweaty. I'd love to play a better one of these but there aren't a lot of options.

I really don't fucking care. When I originally torrented it and played this I burned through bunch of story. It seemed fun but tedious. I have never used or played any mods. I still only play generic.

When I played it originally I just wanted to cheat and fuck around. I just gave skill points to whatever magic thing and just did the magic school missions. With some of the magic it just becomes dragon ball z.

After a while I stopped playing. I haven't played in like a long time. I'd rather play saints row 4. I guess.

I'm more of a shitty old shooters person.

I played about an hour of it and I knew it wasn't for me. Still gotta try out Morrowind.

I played Skyrim up until the quest where you had to unite the leaders of the warring factions. I got bored, haven't picked it up since. This play through was this year in 2024, it was the anniversary edition, first time I had played it. The combat is boring, the armor got too good too fast, and it wasn't a challenge, so then go back to story, the story is not good either. Just not a fun game, no reason to keep playing.

They should have enforced a much more rigid class system, warrior, ranger (or thief), or spellcaster, and not allowed you to be anything you wanted. Elden Ring suffers the same, you can start as any class, but become anything you want. It defeats the purpose of class based systems. Also, there should have been much more armor and weapons choices for each of the classes.

Path of exile excels at class based choices and goes even further with ascendancy, so much more replay value.

A big part of all good fantasy games is the specialization and discovering new gear, abilities all the time, and fighting bad guys, not running around all the time doing boring quests, and then fighting boring dragons.