Okay but when it finally got high enough i could jump on water i was pogging my fucking gourd

LOL my brain

Indeed

The appeal is that these games were made well before Elden Ring and Witcher 3; before 'open world' was mainstream. Every single NPCs had daily routines, quests were dynamically generated, and what you do in the game had consequences beyond pissing one character off. This made triggering specific quests or events difficult if you were just going 'off the hip', and made replayability a big feature. Because of these systems, there were several interesting "game breaking" issues, but these things were charming in their own right due to how new all these systems were put together with almost nothing like it.

In retrospect, not all the "game breaking" issues were truly understood at the time, and most are a consequence of several factors - the most common being that some quests activate behind the scenes and prevent other quests from starting, even if you haven't picked them up and added them to your journal. So it is possible to do mostly everything in the game with careful planning. But at the time, it really did seem like each playthrough was unique.

It is/was also highly moddable for its time. While it took a long time to detail every aspect of the game, today there is nothing mods can't do. Even Witcher 3 mods can't do a bunch of things that Skyrim mods can. And it's a good gateway into learning how to mod, and modding can be just as fun as playing. Some mod guides are so long it takes days or weeks to implement. It can get quite insane, with some people maintaining multiple 'mod versions': one to play (most playthroughs won't let you add/remove mods mid-play), one to test new stuff, and one to keep up-to-date with whatever mod guide/group they are following (you know, for fun....and the next playthrough).

But mostly it's nostalgia, like how some people like older Zelda or Final Fantasy games. Or how you might play that pointless cozy game you played a million times because it connects you to something deeper to what was going on at that time. We know TES games are pretty bad in a lot of regards, but graphics, gameplay, or story isn't what we are after. Hell, there are now adults booting up Minecraft because it's just the game they grew up with.

The openness of it. I can play as I want and go where I want. I’ve played Skyrim since its release and never have finished the main story. It’s not the main attraction. There’s so much lore carried through the games since the 90s , it’s endless.

For me, personally, these games are the closest thing on a computer to a nearly endless sandbox tabletop rpg experience. I don’t like having to do some grand “save the world” narrative that RPGs push you into, and in Skyrim I can avoid it after the intro or mod it out. Then I create characters like a tabletop RPG (I develop a backstory and where I choose to go and what I choose to do is based on the character’s personality in my mind) and essentially play it like it is a solo tabletop game where the engine takes care of a lot of the work.

I haven’t played in years, though, because I can’t get the same level of immersion as I did when playing for 5 hours straight before having kids.

It's not for me either, but i guess not being strung along by the main story line and instead being able to just go anywhere and do whatever is appealing to people who just want to immerse themselves in the games world.

these games

If you're talking about the skyrim/oblivion franchise in particular, it has a wide open feel that many players connect with the first times games gave them real freedom to explore a world and not just throw them on rails to go from place to place. I do think a lot of it is nostalgia. I don't think the games have aged too well from a standpoint of what we expect games to offer nowadays.

Elden Ring was a much more recent attempt at a sprawling game, and had a style of action/adventure game closer to "adult zelda" but also had that feeling of freedom that players liked, and Witcher 3 was just all of that but with a different style and different focus. Witcher 3 was a product of these kinds of games and evolved from them, so it's expected that they would have figured out a few extra tricks to get you to connect, I do agree there was a lot more work that went into Witcher 3 in terms of making a world that felt convincing and solid. Not everyone wants that all the time though.

Also, Witcher was about a dude in a grittier world. Skyrim was about your view of sparkling mushroom caves and dragons from behind a bow. They both try different ways to engage you and they both appeal to different types of players.

You sleep rather soundly for a slanderer.

Did you play it at the time it was released or did u try to go back later? Skyrim was and is a legendary game for a reason, to each their own but in its day it was undeniably the best RPG game in existence and it held that title for years! The story is excellent. Games like this and enshrouded will also never achieve full enjoyment in those that don't bother reading the game lore. If yo skip all the books and never read any I cans see why you wouldn't get as immersed as say in the Witcher 3 story where you have more cutscenes fed to you. And don't get it messed up, witcher 3 is a legend too and probably my all time favourite. But it did not offer me the same replayability Skyrim does. And the last point to Skyrim is it runs good on my potato spec laptop so I can play it on about anything!

After ignoring the TES games my whole life, I first played Oblivion a few years ago, and for once in a very long time, I felt the same feeling I did when playing GTA San Andreas for the first time as a little kid.

I spent the first 10hrs or so just stealing stuff and fighting in the Arena, didn't even touch the main story. In Oblivion, there is soooo much stuff to do, and I didn't even mod it.

Elden Ring is definitely a great game, but it's pale in comparison to Oblivion when it comes to "freedom to do anything". Even Skyrim couldn't top that for me. Don't know about Witcher 3 though, I have yet to play it.

The Seinfeld effect. Today they seem clunky, janky, unpolished or uninspired. Because you have way better modern examples to compare them to. The catch is that when they came out, they were the first. People have said the same about the Beatles, the rolling stones, the og legend of Zelda, counter strike, etc.

Oblivion the original. Not the remaster

Oblivion

Weed.

Butt stuff I assume.