Fenixp: Elder Scrolls games are special, and more importantly, utterly unique. I'm not a big fan of those which came out before Morrowind, but Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, I love all of them. Thing is, as opposed to most other open world games, there's an insane amount of depth to them. Now... This is where their design gets complicated.

Problem is that for most players who specialize on a specific kind of RPG, Elder Scrolls games are going to feel shallow and boring every single time. How is that? Because Elder Scrolls offer insane amount of varied skills, abilities and mechanics, but when, say, a player who greatly enjoys RPGs focused on stealth, all he'll ever see of the game is combat with daggers, possibly bows, some alchemy and stealth mechanics. All of these mechanics are quite simple and shallow in and of themselves, the point is how much of a selection of them there is. Name me a single other RPG which allows you as many gameplay possibilities as TES games while keeping them all viable:
- Bow-wielding thief, killing only when he must
- Fully fledged warrior, cleaving his path trough his enemies
- Sneaky vampire, using his powers to survive
- Brute werewolf, rampaging trough the wilds
- Peaceful alchemist, surviving on selling herbs
- Powerful mage, allowing his minions to do fighting for him

You really are only limited by your own imagination and by how and what do you wish to roleplay. Problem is that most people only grab whatever they enjoy in other RPGs and go with it - naturally, an Elder Scrolls game will never stand up to a direct comparison, so you'll always have people saying how much do its mechanics suck. But there's no single other RPG which would allow you to realize whatever you want, and the way how Elder Scrolls games achieve this is by giving you shallow mechanics, but an insane amount of them. However, none of this would function without good lore and very well designed world - luckily, TES has both.

I could go on and on about how incredible gameplay design of TES games is and how it achieves sparking our imagination, but... I'm not going to do that for the sake of my own sanity :-P Long story short: No, TES games most certainly aren't overrated. TES games are only ever what you make them into.

Fenixp: Aaah, the internet.

thewitcherpotion: aaaah, the shills

pseudonymous: Are you sure? He could just be nursing an illicit drug addiction. That's the only possible explanation why anyone would call Oblivion great. Even BGS admits they screwed the pooch with that one.

dtgreene: Addiction to what? Skooma?

Incidentally, I watched an Oblivion speedrun, and the strategy was to use an early version of the game, duplicate a bunch of Skooma, and play the entire game under the effect of 8 Skooma, frequently stopping to drink more.

Koalaman108: I would like to propose a question, and open it up for discussion.
Are the Elder Scrolls games actually good? I say this because as much as people praise them, and as many hours as I put into Skyrim, trying mod after mod, looking for something I could truly praise the game for, I keep feeling like the games are rather mediocre.
So I'll briefly tackle each aspect people like about the games, so as to allow discussion.

Combat: The combat in all the Elder Scrolls game is repetitive, slow and extremely shallow, with nothing to really make it interesting.

The huge world: Yes, the world is huge, and yes, there is a ton of things to do, but are those things you do actually interesting? I can only think of a handful of quests I truly enjoyed in Skyrim, as most were simply a tedium of 'fetch this', 'kill that', 'talk to this guy' affairs, with barely any interesting backstory to make the quest engaging. Furthermore, the world never truly reacts to what you do in the games, apart from a few altered remarks from villagers, breaking the immersion of the game.

The Lore: Okay, this is a personal point, but I find the lore of the Elder Scrolls games to be rather boring, and I'm not even sure why.

So um, discuss away, I suppose.

LiefLayer: I think Bethesda games are just bad games, but many people seem to like fooling around on that kind of games.... but you can fooling around in a MMO if you want.

LiefLayer: I think Bethesda games are just bad games, but many people seem to like fooling around on that kind of games.... but you can fooling around in a MMO if you want.

dtgreene: Here is the thing: In an MMO, the developer generally tries to keep things balanced, which limits the fooling around that you can do. In Morrowind, on the other hand, you can do things like set your Speed to 6000 and start running really fast, clipping through walls. (This can be done with cheats, but there are other ways, like Alchemy, to accomplish the same thing without them.) Or you could jump from one side of the map to the other in a single bound, and then take negative damage when you land (because your stamina is far above its maximum). Can you name any MMO that lets you do this sort of thing?

Rusty_Gunn: One of the things about Bethesda's games I love is that the main ES games are basically MMO's without the MO. Plus I'm in charge of my game, with MMO's I'm playing what the company wants/allows me to play & with Bethesda I can change it up more be more what I want to see.

Rusty_Gunn: Actually, I do like a challenge as well, that can be modded in to for example in Fallout 3 I often used a mod that reduced the SPECIAL points especially when playing a "child" race. So modding isn't only about making it easier it's about my adventure, not necessarily the one the devs expected. And that wasn't the only difficulty adding mod I used either.

LiefLayer: you can mod many games, but you don't have to mod many games.
I always play games without mod (I just patch to translate it).... I paid for a full game, I don't want to waste time on mod, I just change game.