So after figuring out quite quickly with FONV that I just hate the whole damn franchise I moved onto Oblivion. I really dig the leveling system. In Skyrim I always seemed to become the exact same player because you master all of the same things. Warrior with a mastery of archery, destruction magic, sneak, enchanting, alchemy, and smithing. They're all required skills and you improve them with practice. Oblivion's system expects you to specialize. You'll only really excel in your class by concentrating on it. Moreover, that excellence is required since you can't craft legendary weapons and armor and enchant them to make spells dirt cheap.
I think this is a nifty concept and I'd like to play creating specific classes of characters. Unfortunately, I find the rest of the game so extraordinarily boring I just can't muster much effort. I'm going along doing various work for the guilds, but outside of the cities the world is just awful. The landscapes are designed so that you really can't go off road. It's nothing but ridges and cliffs. If I can see a point on the map it shouldn't take me 30 minutes to find it because it's surrounded by impassable hills with only one entrance along an unmarked road that approaches from nowhere.
Worse still are the caves. They're indistinguishable from one another, just like the dungeons. There's nothing interesting about them at all. Worse still, they all lead to nowhere. In Skyrim ruins, caves, and dungeons were all circuitous. Here you invariably come across 20 forks and they all lead to dead ends. I suppose that it's certaily more lifelike, but I want to be a gamer, not a spelunker. I've been trying to avoid missions that involve caves as I find them quite insufferable at this point.
I actually enjoyed the arena fighting. Just completed my first contract and I like the folks in the Dark Brotherhood, so I'll probably work on that for a bit. The fighter's and Mage's guilds haven't offered up much fun, though. I'm trying to play enough to see if having a badass character makes it more entertaining. Not sure if I'll get that far, though.
Also, I can't pick a lock to save my life. Maybe you need young person hearing for that or something. The only reason I made it through the first day is because I cheated and gave myself 1000 lockpicks. I'm already down to about 500. No idea how people are supposed to get started in that. I've blown through 75 on a single lock before.