I've played over 100 hours of Skyrim and never bothered to finish the main story. A year has passed and with the sale of the DLC I started playing it again. I maxed out destruction, illusion, smithing, enchanting, sneaking and speech. I'm level 66 and pretty close to maxing out single weapon and archery.

Anyway, I'm going to keep playing. I've been spending a lot more time building a house than questing though...

@dusker: I have started numerous new characters on Skyrim, and I'd say the best way to ensure that you will be quickly bored out of the gate is to do what you're suggesting and make the same character a second time. It's true, you could do totally different quests, but the fact of the matter is, if you're a thief you get things from the thieves guild that make your life easier, and redoing guild quests is the worst. Personally, my feeling is that the best way to get a different experience from the default from Skyrim is to go mage.

Another big help, if you're on PC, would be to download the "Live Another Life" mod, which will allow you to skip past the intro cutscene. Still, it's not til you've seen that 2 or 3 times before that becomes a deterrent all on its own.

So, I played ~200 hours, and I maxed out Archery, One-hand, Illusion, Alchemy and Light Armor (maybe more, I can't remember). I finished the main story quest and a good portion of the side quests (all the guilds). Unfortunately, I had to reformat my harddrive and lost everything.

My question is, should I purchase all the DLC and start a new character? Or am I going to be bored before I get to any of the new content?

Another consideration is that I don't really have any interest in playing any character other than the thief archer that I created before, so I will probably not re-roll.

Thoughts?

Been waiting to play the game until a GOTY edition comes out. Heard rumour that June is possible release, I hope so even thought I never got into Oblivion I wanna experience the game everyone was flipping out about.

I'd definitely get in on the DLC as soon as you can. I did pretty much everything you could in vanilla Skyrim throughout my 260 hours with the game. I tried to play dawnguard, but I the magic was gone, I was burned out. Unfortunately, I'll probably never play Dragonborn.

hmmm. I'll wait for DLC pack to get discounted and will get back to play southern part of it on hard ;)

I hit 164hrs pc version n got burned out...I'm back playing fallout 3, but plan to return to skyrim when another dlc comes(I have both dlc but like I said I did everything I can in skyrim vanilla) or else I'm just got to mod it it like crazy

Just don't get burnt out. Do quests at a time or else you'll end up 40 hours in and bored.