Skyim has too much of the same.
The art direction and environments are incredible, there is a wide array of ways to play your character, and there is plenty to do. None of those things are the problem. The problems I ran into were that the game was simply not as engaging as it could have been because it ended up going for amount of playtime rather than quality. A lot of the quests are boring, mundane, or just annoying. There are some, however, that are incredible enjoyable and provide me with hours of fun, such as the Companions or Imperial questlines, they were both a whole hell of a lot of fun because they had some kind of back story to them. Most of the secondary quest lines (faction based more so) are where the majority of the fun is in the game, since they have a mini-story in of themselves, they have some sort of purpose rather than Generic Person A asks you to travel to Generic Place F to kill/steal/plant/distract Person/Object/Item/Person K.
The skills is what ended up being really annoying. Smithing and Enchanting are way too easy, so ending up with the top tier armor in the game can be done in, oh, 2 hours or so provided you know what you're doing. Enchanting might take a couple of days, but it's not necessarily hard to do either. Most of the skills can be leveled up quite easily, save for Lockpicking, Pickpocket, and the two Armor skills. This is where I found my major problem with Skyrim, it was just too easy to level up your character. That way it was done was awesome, but how you actually went about doing it was just too easy, way too easy.
Those two things aside, the game really is great. It's beautiful, it runs well on my system, it's not as glitchy as I would have expected a Bethesda title, and it has eaten up a respectable amount of my time. Definitely worth the price, and definitely worth the time, just not as OMGWTFBBQ awesome as people were expecting and have been saying.