You could conceivably beat Skyrim's main quest line, maybe 1 or 2 or the other large quest lines and plenty of short side-quests in 50-60 hours. It's not that the game REQUIRES that much time — it's just really, really easy to get lost in the world Bethesda created for Skyrim.

Great response. I'd done something similar to myself with shooters and hack-n-slash dungeon crawlers. Then Skyrim came along and suddenly I was back in 1994, playing Ultima VII for the first and doing whatever I want in a game world that felt open and mysterious. Fantastic.

Have you played Dragonborn? Solstheim is pretty large. It might not be quite Shivering Isles big, but it's still really, really big.

That's almost exactly my experience except (and I freely admit I might be in the minority on this), new playthroughs seem to almost rekindle the magic for me. I'm working on my third, maybe fourth character. I try to make sure to do completely different quests, mostly stay away from crafting etc.

Skyrim is a…

I hope you skipped Morrowind, my friend. It's a piece of gaming history, a great game and an amazing achievement in it's own time, but is not for you, good sir. It's a whole Skyrim-sized, "rude mushroom" kingdom.

This.

Sorry in advance to some of the Skyrim detractors; you all have some good points — points I've made myself before — but there's never been a prettier sandbox. Better? Arguably. Bigger? Almost certainly. But none lately and none that captured the imagination of the gaming community quite like this. It's not quite a…