A lazy pile of fecal matter.
I really don't understand what makes the Elder Scrolls series so successful when Bethesda continues to release games that are virtually still in beta that often look ugly and utilize a clunky game engine. It is very difficult to actually pin point what is wrong with these games or why they are still popular considering there are much better, higher quality games available. When I play Mass Effect for example, I can't really think of a mod that would improve the overall experience and yet with Elder Scrolls, I can think of hundreds.
My first Bethesda game was Oblivion. At first I was in awe by the massive world, books you could literally read, dynamic world and npc's, and open ended gameplay. I played that game for about 20 hours until I got bored with it because I realized I was spending more time dealing with all the mods required to make the game fun. In addition when I found out that a story in a sidequest (Dark Brotherhood) was more interesting than the main quest, I lost complete interest. Fans complained about this and Bethesda hired the guy who wrote the Dark Brotherhood to have more involvement in the main story and quests for future projects which is why Fallout 3 was significantly better.
Ironically Bethesda also listened to fans when people complained that the ending of Fallout 3 was stupid and basically decided to remove future endings in their games which is why Skyrim has no ending. The reason why people hated the ending of Fallout 3 was that the choices you were given were retarded. Either A. Sacrifice yourself by dying of radiation poisoning or B. Have your friend sacrifice themselves despite the fact there was a character in the party who was immune from radiation.
When people play an RPG, they expect to be able to play a role of their choosing and Fallout 3 forced players into a lame role where you search for your Father and save the stupid water supply. Nobody cares about that. And so Bethesda in their delusion decided to never have another ending in a game again even though all players wanted was more choices that would fit with the character that they had created. That was what made Fallout 1 and 2 amazing. You could play a retarded guy, literally be retarded by choosing the lowest intelligence possible (dialogue options were super dumb), and explore the world as an idiot.
In my opinion Fallout New Vegas was the best Elder Scrolls-type game Bethesda has ever created. And I know you're thinking that Fallout is not Elder Scrolls, but I think Fallout 3 and New Vegas are more Elder Scrolls than they are Fallout 1 and 2 because they stink of all the crap that make Elder Scrolls games suck. New Vegas was the only game to my knowledge that actually allowed you to play a character from scratch and reach an epic ending of your choosing. The most important factor was that quests you did had a weight in the world. If you did something significant, factions would either love or hate you and sides would be drawn.
One of my biggest gripes with Skyrim is that none of the quests have any significance to the world. I can become Arch Mage of Skyrim and nobody really cares or acknowledges this aside from an occasional remark by a passing guard. In fact it's to the point where there are parts of the game that make no sense. For example if I am the Arch Mage, why would I be allowed to join the Stormcloaks when they clearly hate mages and would probably especially hate the leader of the mages guild asking to join them? Even if they did it agree, why not show some kind of disgust with my status? Also your race has virtually no bearing on anything. This is the kind of crap that just tells me Bethesda is filled with a bunch of lazy people.
Speaking of lazy, while most modern games utilize innovative loading techniques to hide loads in the game, Elder Scroll games require you to go through loads every time you enter a house, dungeon, or town. You would think by Skyrim, they would have come up with a clever way of hiding load screens within the world so that you don't have to load to enter a small 10ft by 10ft room. It is said all of the load screens exist because the game was primarily designed for the Xbox 360. While I can understand hardware limitations, I think it's just a result of a crappy development team.
Overall Skyrim feels like a game that masquerades as an RPG. It looks like an RPG, it feels like an RPG, and it sounds like one but so many other games like Dragon Age do it so much better and I never had to deal with game breaking glitches that required me to spend hours looking up fixes. The "ending" was a huge letdown and crappy. I didn't even get to see an epic celebration with people congratulating me for taking down the dragons. It was as dull as the rest of the quests and ended just as plainly.
The biggest letdown was the fact that none of the quests really mattered. They don't connect. They have zero weight on the world. You can be the archmage, leader of the thief's and dark brotherhood guilds, and maybe even Jarl and not a single quest allows you to use this status to effect other quests.
Skyrim is just unfinished lazy pile of fecal matter.