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.

The people who like the Elder Scrolls games often like them because they're able to immerse themselves in a fantasy world without being forced to follow a narrow story to access most of the places. The fact that the various games have some (minor) reaction to various actions you take help this immersion.

There's also the exploration aspect, where you can go (almost) anywhere at any time. You might discover something neat hidden away in a cave over that hill.

The combat sucks in all the games. The quests are basic, though some do offer hidden alternative ways to be solved. The lore is take it or leave it. If these mechanical bits are what you judge a game on, then the Elder Scrolls games are likely not for you.

Interesting question. As usual, everything depends on your personal preferences and expectations. The TES games are games to be "lived", not to be "consumed" (quest markers being an exception to this statement). Create your personal game, do what you like (and not what you think the game expects you to do), set your own goals and objectives, play different roles in different games - and you can get something you hardly get elsewhere in the world of computer games.

My personal favourite is Morrowind, because of its exotic game world with its diverse and complex social and political structures (and it does react to the player!), its expansions and total conversions. Conversely, I have not yet managed to get a similar feeling of immersion when playing Skyrim.

So my answer to your question would be something along the lines of "depends". Not all TES games are equally good in my mind, and they don't appeal to every one. They share a common (and more or less consistent) game world (including inhabitants, fauna, flora, climate, history, politics, theology, etc.), the usage-based character development system and a certain openness with respect to playing very differently (which gives the TES games a high replay value for people who like to experiment and role-play). For me, TES is the game series with the highest replay value among all CRPG's.

And last, but not least: TES 3 - 5 come with a Construction Set, a tool that let's you create your own games. Completely new games, too, not only modifications of the underlying TES game. Sometimes these new games (called "total conversions"), which are free, are about as big as the base game, sometimes they offer more challenging fights, sometimes more interesting quests, sometimes they are geared more towards fighting, sometimes more towards adventuring, sometimes they play in the TES world, sometimes in a completely new and different world (you may visit http://sureai.net/?lang=en for a selection of total conversions, or read the 2 stickied threads of this forum).

Personally, my favorite aspect of these games is how you can do certain things that would normally be strictly in the realm of the developers.

For instance, in the first 4 games in the series, there's the Spellmaker that lets you make your own spells. Some of the spells have effects you wouldn't typically encounter in an RPG. For instance, in Morrowind I can make a spell that improves my Enchantment skill, causing items to consume fewer charges when used. Another spell might boost my Mercantile, allowing me to get better deals at stores. Yet another spell lowers an enemy's Health, but only briefly (but will kill the enemy if its health goes below zero). Yet *another* spell lowers enemy Strength, preventing them from moving because they can no longer bear the weight of their equipment.

Daggerfall lets you make custom classes with custom abilities. It is possible to create a character with plenty of spell points, spell absorption, but the drawback of taking harsh damage in sunlight.

Of course, the downside of this customization is that game balance is less than ideal. Hence, if you want a reasonably balanced challenge, you probably want to play a different game. However, if you just want to have fun, these games are great, especially when you consider being able to do such things as jumping across the island of Vvanderfell (in Morrowind) (and then having to find a way to deal with the falling damage, of course).

Experimentation and freedom really is the reason i come back to these games, and it's not that I don't enjoy them. I definitely have fun when I play Skyrim, or Oblivion, or Morrowind. The thing is, I feel the game's nature is addictive, as you constantly get small rewards to keep you playing, but no achievement feels substantial. I never felt like I truly achieved anything important, or made any truly meaningful progression. Compare this to Ultima IV, in which every shrine you cleared (and therefore each virtue you mastered) and every dungeon beaten felt like an achievement; it felt like you truly made progress in the game, being far closer to your end goal than before. It always feels like i'm treading water rather than swimming when playing ES games.

Wow, that was a really unfocused point. To sum it up, I always feel that in ES games, nothing I do really sticks with me, and as such, nothing in the game resonates with me long after I beat the game, as opposed to RPGs such as Ultima IV, Chrono Trigger, or heck, even shooters like Far Cry (where I still remember specific encounters in which I was especially proud of my execution).

You may be better off with Arena or Daggerfall and focus on the main quest. There are (if I remember correctly) 8 main quest dungeons in Arena and 20 in Daggerfall. These are fixed, challenging, drive the story and should give you a sense of accomplishment once you achieved the respective goals. You won't find anything comparable in the later TES games.
In Daggerfall, you may have to do additional quests to push your level up, because there are level requirements associated with unlocking the next story dungeon (which also makes sense because you would be unlikely to defeat the dungeon inhabitants without having an adequate level).

Let me repeat that the TES games, especially Morrowind and the later games, are to be "lived" not "consumed", if you really want to enjoy them. Don't wait for the game to give you rewards - set your own goals and achieve them. Become the leader of a guild or a political faction or a religious sect (or several of them), survive the games as a werewolf or vampire, discover all ancient temples or underwater locations (in Morrowind), find the 10 propylon indexes (a Morrowind plug-in), do the pilgrim's path quest series (in Morrowind), free the slaves (in Morrowind), etc. You may not get tangible rewards in each case (if becoming the boss of the mage's guild isn't tangible enough :-)), but to achieve these goals you have to complete a more or less large series of quests which are challenging and quite diverse.
Or follow dtgreene's example: He is exploring the game mechanics (and its flaws) more than the game world itself (have a look at his post in this thread or his many threads and posts in this forum).
Or see what the Construction Sets (in Morrowind and the later games) let you do ...

There are so many different ways to enjoy the TES games (and this statement includes even Arena, although to a somewhat lesser degree), but the games don't tell you what to do.

yes completely overrated.

Come on - whatever Daggerfall is, it's not a rogue-like game. Rogue-likes are generally considered to be turn-based games with an ASCII display (among other criteria). Daggerfall is neither turn-based nor ASCII. You may say It has some elements of a dungeon crawler or a hack'n'slash game, but it's a lot more.

And "RPG system complexity was scaled down" for Morrowind? Well, if this is the case at all, I'm not sure an average player would notice. You could say possibly that Oblivion has been simplified greatly, compared with Morrowind (quest markers, mana regeneration, etc), but this has not much to do with the RPG system as such.

What may be interesting for the younger fans of the TES series is that Arena was marketed from the beginning as the launch of a huge new game world and game series (competing with Ultima, Might&Magic and the later Wizardry games). Whether they seriously expected to be successful, I can't say.
I remember quite well what I thought when Arena was released with such a big marketing noise - I dismissed the game completely because I tend to run away from such hype. Only much later, once I had read several reviews and forum contributions for Arena, did I decide to give it a try. And I was fascinated by this game.

Arena was originally marketed as a gladiator combat game. Only during development did it become a full blown open world RPG and renamed as The Elder Scrolls: Arena, to maintain brand recognition.

shill detected

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.

Aaah, the internet.

And what the parrot is trying to says is that the games are just filled with awesomesauce! Oblivion, Morrowind, Skyrim are my favorites of those ones with oblivion as my best. Its sometimes best not to see why people like games rather as everyone has their own likes/dislikes. That's what makes us all ghostwise in a way. Well...except for TinyE.

No, I don't think TES games are overrated- especially Morrowind. I realize its graphics and combat system aren't the best available, but guess what? There are mods to fix both of those issues, if you really can't stomach the game otherwise.

Perhaps my favorite activity in Morrowind is helping Ajira in one-upping her fellow mage. Why? Because it doesn't just underscore the longstanding feud between Bosmer and Khajiit- it also presents Ajira as a likable, "human" character. Not so much in Skyrim, though; one eventually gets tired of being told to fetch the family heirloom without even being told of its significance.

Be that as it may, this isn't a topic on which game is the best, so I'll leave it at that. Why aren't the Elder Scrolls games overrated? Because they present you with a vast, open-ended world which never forces you to follow the script. They have relatable characters, even if (in Morrowind's case) they aren't fully voice-acted. They even inspire me to write, something noticeably absent when I play a more "linear" title.

Yes, I'm absolutely agree with TS, the Elder Scrolls games (as Bethesda's ones in all) are overrated just because they are overpromoted and overhyped...:)

Graphics is bad (though I usually don't care about graphics much, but nothing I hate more than 3D and especially POOR UGLY 3D). GUI is bad. Item system is bad. Magic system is bad. Skill system is bad. Combat is bad. The game worlds are big indeed but rather empty and boring - so they are bad too.

I never understood people that praise and adore this serie.