So I usually bore of most titles after 10 to 15 hours of play and by then most are done leaving me with mild disappointment through parts of that experience. Very rarely do I put 20 hours into a game, in fact I cannot remember the last game I put 20 hours in just for the single player.

That said I just checked and I'm pushing 36 hours into Skyrim already and feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I still look forward to playing quite a bit more. Anyone else think this might break some personal bests in time played in a game? I can see this being my first 100 hour single player experience. Not including play times when I was a kid, who knows how much time I pissed away on bad games back in the day.

Same exact thing here. Skyrim is awesome. Easily keep me busy for 100+ hours.

Bethesda have got the sidequest down to an art form. The flow of gameplay is incredible, with there always being something to do and a general confidence that what you're about to do will be enjoyable.

It's completely insane, and I love it. I can see myself spending a lot of time on this game in the months coming, probably well over a hundred hours.

The other elder scrolls were rich too, but Skyrim really blurs the line between main quest, sidequest and random activities, really well done.

I've played like 10 hours, and literally feel like i have done nothing. I like to walk around looting, which takes up the majority of my time lol. At least my breeze home is always stocked with shit :P

I've played over 30 hours, and am at level 30, and I only just got level 2 Unrelenting Force.

the game is so huge! I love it, and will be playing this for awhile.

I have no idea how they got it all into like 5GB.. seriously, The Force Unleashed was 29GB (on PC) and like 8 hours long. They must be working some magic at Bethesda.

While there's a ton of stuff to do, I feel like the ratio of variety vs quantity is a bit too low. While there's more than enough variety for any normal game, when you have like maybe hundreds of dungeons, it's just not enough to only have like 4-5 different themes. By the time you've been through your 10th draugr tomb or bandit fort it gets pretty stale. And it's not like there's a magnititude of varied enemies either. I get that it probably doesn't really fit with the lore or anything, but it would've been nice if the world had a bit more varied environments with different kinds of dungeons.

@TaliciaDragonsong said:

The other elder scrolls were rich too, but Skyrim really blurs the line between main quest, sidequest and random activities, really well done.

Thats the issue (good one I may add). After doing numerous misc quests and a few side quests I almost forgot that I was actually on a main quest mission. There is just so much content and things to do its completely over whelming. Truly an A+ title and I will surly put 60+ hours into this bad boy. Already close to 30 and I feel like I have done absolutely nothing.

Considering I put 200 hours into Vanilla Oblivion and another 100 with the mods and I really had some SERIOUS problems with that game I can easily say that I may never buy another game again.....this year.

Also...How..is this game only 6gbs...just thinking about the amount of Audio alone Blows my god damn mind.

Yep, this game is amazingly huge. The last game with this much content, in my memory is Morrowind. Oblivion and Fallout 3 didn't even come close.

Yup!

At level 27, I feel like I'm at a point where my character is starting to get into the upper levels (mathematically, I know that's not true, but I've got the second-highest tier of armor now) and yet I have visited 4 of the 9 major cities, have no masks, have only leveled up one shout (aside from unrelenting force)... I think I'm going to feel guilty about playing too much of the game too fast before I complete half of it.

The most time I've put into a game was 85 hours in Twilight Princess on the 'cube.

That was after collecting/completing everything possible. :s

There are almost too many quests... 
Only recently have I stopped getting at least three new quest for every one I complete. 

@Ares42 said:

While there's a ton of stuff to do, I feel like the ratio of variety vs quantity is a bit too low. While there's more than enough variety for any normal game, when you have like maybe hundreds of dungeons, it's just not enough to only have like 4-5 different themes. By the time you've been through your 10th draugr tomb or bandit fort it gets pretty stale. And it's not like there's a magnititude of varied enemies either. I get that it probably doesn't really fit with the lore or anything, but it would've been nice if the world had a bit more varied environments with different kinds of dungeons.

sounds like you haven't touched many of the fantastic quest lines.

oblivion kept me busy for well over 400 hours on a single character. i hadn't even completed the main quest by that point in time. this game is very likely going to end up breaking the personal record with a single character.

If you mean the offline content then yes.

Yes, I agree.  Oblivion was the same for me. I spent over 300 hours playing it on one file and hadn't finished all the side missions. It seems that is the case for most Bethesda games.

@CaLe said:

I have no idea how they got it all into like 5GB.. seriously, The Force Unleashed was 29GB (on PC) and like 8 hours long. They must be working some magic at Bethesda.

Force Unleashed was a POS port. It was 29gb because all the data was raw and uncompressed.

Texture size in Skyrim is very small and there are no FMV cut scenes or anything of the like. A lot of assets get reused; trees, stones, enemies. Every humanoid has a male and female model, and that's it. You can generate in game, an infinite number of humanoids, give them stock clothes in the game, and they'd take up a few KB worth of data. NPC Moomoopie has X for facial data, Y for scale, wears Z for armor and uses the following scripts for AI.

Still, there is a -ton- of audio for 5 gigs. I'm impressed by that. I was expecting every NPC to say, "I saw a mudcrab the other day. Goodbye." But, they all seem to have -something- of worth to say. Even if it just makes me want to murder them. Little girl. You -should- be afraid of me!

I will play and replay this game for months to come, and i will start a new playthrough once a year after 2011. That's how awesome this game is.

Seriously, everybody gives you a quest. So many quests, there's no way I can finish all of them. I'm gonna have to go out of my way to avoid people in Skyrim from now on.

If I wanted to be nitpicky, I would point out that Daggerfall has literally infinite hours of gameplay thanks to being a procedurally generated mess of piecemeal dungeons, piecemeal towns and piecemeal quests.

But yeah. This game is big.

Absolutely. And I've got to hand it to them: the dungeons kick ass. Seriously, a few orders of magnitude better than Oblivion. They're distinct, gorgeous, and often pretty damned big. It's easily the game's most significant achievement. I don't dread going into them like I often did in Oblivion. Well, at least not because I'm tired of the same old cave over and over again. I don't mind that there are only a handful of main varieties. Again, far more than Oblivion. Given the constraints, I'm perfectly satisfied with it. I'll be playing it well into next year. 24 hours and still feeling like I've seen barely anything in the game world.

@Axxol said:

I didn't really like crafting before Skyrim, now I spend hours looking for ore and upgrading my weapons.

Wait, there's ore...and you use it to upgrade weapons?

Yeah...15 hours into this and I've barely seen anything.

Game... of the Century.

think it was Todd Howard that said during an interview that they was able to put it all on 1 disc is cuz they have learned and refined the coding that they do with their games since they have been doing this for while

It's pretty unreal that I've put over a full day of playtime, yet I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. There's almost too much stuff to do. Luckily, it's all really good. This is going to be the game that either finally breaks my completionist nature or plunges me into OCD insanity.

Definitely one of the most quality-content rich game I've ever played. I've played 22 hours and feel like I haven't touched it. I NEED MORE.

@Slaker117 said:

It's pretty unreal that I've put over a full day of playtime, yet I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. There's almost too much stuff to do. Luckily, it's all really good. This is going to be the game that either finally breaks my completionist nature or plunges me into OCD insanity.

I have the same problem. I feel like I need to do every side and miscellaneous quest before doing the main one :P

I die a lot so, whatever lol.

One thing I cannot forgive is that they killed my dog named "Vigilance." The creature who killed him was teabagged voraciously for a good 5-10 minutes. Hate hate hate that guy.

I think the reason this succeeds is they are not afraid to reuse assets. What's different about Skyrim is how well they've planned this. The dungeons are no longer limited to a single tile set, and they've done a great job of designing their tile sets so pieces con be nested inside each other in a way that can feel unique and natural. The unique aspects of each dungeon are all fairly marginal (as far as file size goes), as it amounts to probably just a couple game scripts, some text in books or scrolls and a few voice lines. Only the major story quests get so far as creating bespoke props even. 

 The result is magical though. The world is full of lore, every place you explore can expand on something you didn't know or call back to something you experienced in a previous game. The quests do a great job of telling a story, both directly and in the margins, without ever taking you out of the game system.