S.Peelman said: Actually after Breath of the Wild I find myself trying to climb everything in other games before realizing that's not something you can actually do in anything else.

Yeah.  I think the nearly completely accessible world in BotW was its crowning achievement.  

My kids were playing Skyrim last week. I sent them to bed, then found myself playing it for another 3 hours. I love the game. Still the gold standard for open world games in my eyes.

It aged poorly, especially because it's basically Oblivion, which is basically an easier Morrowind. But it's still a great game in its own way. It was never that incredible RPG to begin with, but the core Skyrim experience (freedom) is going to be there no matter how old and dated it feels.

It feels dated because...it is

give me ES6 plz

To be fair, I'd say ANY game that holds a person's attention for more than twenty hours is a great game. 

I put something like 200 hours into the Switch version, so it certainly still holds up for me lol

There's a lot of games from 2011, and long before that, that I would say have aged well, as far as gameplay goes. FFVII and KoToR both hold up to the test of time IMO. I'm speaking strictly gameplaywise here though, and not graphics. I never played the Witcher 2, but I might one day. Until I do, Witcher 3 is hard for me to follow plotwise. 

Skyward Sword is dated, but in a good way IMO. Nintendo stuck to the same tried and true Zelda formula for decades. Some gameplay like 2D platformers, and turn based combat in JRPGs still work well to this day. 

I would still recommend Skyrim to anybody that hasn't played it. Still a good game, but just not as good as it used to be. At least without mods. But then again, maybe I just have Star Syndrome. Maybe I've played this game thousands of hours, collecting all 120 stars fifteen times over, and now I'm just burnt out on it? 

Oh, I didn't say BotW isn't a great game, I'm just saying I like Skyrim more.

It was dated on release, Bethesda animations were the worst, idk if they finally updated them in Fallout 4?

They were improved, but probably still regarded as fairly mediocre.

Visual quality seems to have stagnated with Bethesda titles since Oblivion dropped in my opinion... Before they were pushing boundaries with stuff like dense foliage in Oblivion, pixel shader water in Morrowind. It really set them apart from other games like Two Worlds, Gothic, Witcher etc'.