The Elder Scrolls rather lost their appeal to me. I played Oblivion, and the experience did not encourage me to run out and get Skrim opening night (and for comparison, I did pick up Portal 2 & Arkham City opening night). The world looks good and all the fantasy elements are there, but it really falls flat in the little things. I can't get a feel for individual NPCs like I can in, say, Zelda, combat quickly became boring (First person melee just doesn't work, and magic or alchemy specialization made everything too easy), character creation was shallow (looking over the fact that it's completely unnecessary in a first person game, you can only alter the little details that nobody notices and can only change your head. If you want to make, say, an albino Argonian, their white-scaled head will sit atop a red-scaled body with a very distinct terminator line, like the character was put in the starter dungeon for killing someone and magically switching heads with them), and finally, after doing a million sidequests and reaching level one million I lost any motivation to do the main story line.
In Zelda, Deus Ex, Fable, many others, you still are invited to explore and do sidequests, but the game never lets you lose sight of the main goal. The main goal in Oblivion is lost by opening the entire world at once and giving no real motivation to complete it, as any dosh that can be found on the main story can be found equally or better, in the rest of the world. However, I probably could still overlook all this, but for one thing:
When the HELL is Bethesda going to realize that levelling up the entire world in porportion to you is a crap idea? I want to reach level one hundred in stabbing things and then go up to a demon lord or whatever and oneshot its face! If the number of facestabs prior to death is roughly the same between level on and level sixty three, what's the point in levelling up? People buy this game for the huge, epic fantasy world, and you have that fine!!! Changing this will not ruin your game!!!