While I dont think most people "hate" it, it does have a sort of "Dark Souls 2" like backlash to it. In that it was initially very well received, but after some time passed, more and more people seemed to see flaws in it, and eventually got tired of the game. This isnt true for everyone of course, many people can still play the game fine today.
As for me, I played it quite a bit, but after a while I just get tired of it. My main complaints are that
1. the role playing aspects of the game are very very limited outside of combat.
2. The game actively punishes you for focusing on non-combat abilities.
3. The leveling system is boring for the most part.
4. Most of the quests are boring, with many being glorified fetch quests.
5. Combat is boring and feels more or less the same however you play, aside from stealth.
I am gonna extrapolate a bit on each in the paragraphs below. This is just my opinion, not objective fact, so any statements phrased as such are just that, my opinion. You can feel free to disagree, but please keep that in mind.
1. You can play the game however you like, and more or less do a lot fo things, but there are so many walls in terms of what you can and cant do that it just breaks role playing for me. I cant be a suave rogue who talks his way out of every fight because there are like 3 speech skill checks in the entire game( i know there are more, but damn are they so limited that they might as well not exist.). Most situations can only be solved by 5% bribing, 5%talking your way out, or 90% kill whatever it is. I cant kill certain people because the game wont let me, they go "unconscious", or just kneel on the floor for a while, which really kills the atmosphere for me. This isnt even going into some immersion breaking issues like becoming the archmage of the College of Winterhold while only knowing novice spells.
2. The game has a scaling system which actively punishes people for focusing on non-combat skills. I think Yahtzee or someone else made a joke about this before, but if you focus on power leveling a crafting profession like alchemy or blacksmithing without upgrading combat skills, sooner or later you start facing enemies that you dont have a chance in hell against, due to the aforementioned scaling. So this goes back into the first point, in that the game hurts your ability to role play anything but a combat focused character. That isnt to say that you cant focus on those crafting abilities, but the game really hurts your ability to actually do damage, because of how the leveling system works.
3. The leveling system is horribly, terribly boring. If anyone has played World of Warcraft, or a similar mid 2000's mmo, they would know how the talent trees were. Most of your points from leveling up went into a tree(much like skyrim's) that allowed you to become more powerful and access more skills. The problem is that 90% of your points went into skills that were just damage or healing upgrades. 1% extra healing, 2 percent more damage on fireballs, fucking woo. All in all, it was boring. Terribly terribly boring. Since then, it has been revamped, and while many people have nostalgia for the old system, there is a reason why is was put away. The same can be said of Skyrim's leveling system. Skills like Duel casting(a pretty cool skill) seem few and far between, with the game having more of a focus on percentage upgrades on basic skills, or slight differences in how certain skills interact. Its cool that maces can ignore more armor with a skill point, but its boring in it's implementation. Like, if a mace upgrade would allow you to damage enemy armor, that would be cool, you could actually see how you were affecting your foe. Instead most abilities are just static damage upgrades.
4. Skyrim does not have very good quest design. There are very few quests that have multiple ways of doing it, and many of them just boil down to "go here, fetch this thing for me". That would be alright if they were actually interesting, but very few are, with the exception of some of the guild and Daedric quests. I think this may be due to how much the game is focused on combat. because of this, the quest design does not allow too much deviation from "go here, talk to this person, kill this, get me this", and only play it straight.
Hell, in Oblivion there was a quest in the Dark Brotherhood that just asked you to kill everyone in a house,however how you did that could vary wildly. You could talk to them and get to know them, isolate them to kill them one by one, or you could be a madman and kill them all in plain sight. You could kill people in any order, and you could actively pit people against each other by killing them in different orders. There was several ways you could approach the situation, and preying upon their paranoia and personal issues was fantastic. There are literally 0 quests like that in skyrim as far as I can recall. Not even the Dark Brotherhood in skyrim has a quest like that.
5. The combat more or less feels...weightless. You might as well be beating people do death with rubber chickens for all the combat feels like. The weapons feel like they have no weight to them, with almost every match feeling like it comes down to a slugfest rather than any sort of strategy. Compare this to say, Dark Souls, where you can really FEEL the weight of each weapon.
Magic isnt much better, as the spells themselves lack punch for the most part(with big aoe spells being an exception). The relationship between ice magic and its effects on stamina(lightning and magic too) are rather cool, but feel like they are under tuned, like they dont effect those stats nearly as much as they should; It feels samey to use almost any straight damage spell because of this. Summon spells and status affect spells(like calm) seem pretty cool, but feel like they have less utility, and that your time would be better spent just attacking the enemy rather than giving them a debuff or summoning someone. On another note, enemy mages seem to even cheat the game by having a way higher magicka regeneration rate than the player, making them hell to fight against as a pure mage.
Stealth is where the game really shows it's cracks, as you can really see how dumb a lot of the enemy Ai is. Shooting someone in the face and then disappearing only for them to remark "must have been a rat!" is both hilarious and immersion breaking. Until you get high enough level, fighting enemies with a bow in stealth is a huge test of patience due to how the damage multiplier works, as you just plink away at the enemy when revealed and hope they dont close the distance before you are able to take them down. Now, bow stealth becomes EXTREMELY power late game when you have all of the upgrades, but before then it is really just a case of hide, shoot, hide again if possible so that your stealth indicator tells you that you are in stealth again, then repeat ad nauseam. This may be just a case of the game balancing the power of the bow, but it feels too weak in the midgame, and too powerful later on. Granted, your mileage may vary depending on difficulty level. Normal seems to be easy enough, but the higher levels really just feel like every enemy is a damage sponge. I havent played a whole lot with melee stealth, but I often find that there are too many cases where there are more than one enemy in a room, making it hard to try and hit just one before you are revealed.
Now, this only goes over some of my gripes with the game, and some of them could be considered petty by some people. I do still like the game, but it in recent years have shown how flawed the game is in many respects. It will still be considered a break out success for Bethesda and a favorite of many, but as for me, im just kind of tired of it, even with mods. I think people are lashing out more often now because Bethesda keep porting the damn thing to keep it relevant. It's a 6 year old game that has been ported many, many times, and I guess some people are just tired of seeing it and hearing about it. It's a cool game, flawed as it may be, but it's still 6 years old. We have seen it, explored it, we want something new. For those of us not happy with how Bethesda handled the Fallout franchise, all we have had for the past 6 years was skyrim, and I think people are getting tired of it.
