I feel very strongly that Skyrim is not a good game, but I do understand why so many people like it. The quests, the lore, the dungeon design, and the sandbox nature of the game are all great, but I think basically every piece of the gameplay is actively bad at it’s intended purpose. Oblivion is the same way. It’s very frustrating to me because I would like to play these games as first-person dungeon crawlers, but they just aren’t designed for you to think about how the game works, so any build is either extremely overpowered or hopelessly useless.

For example, two-handed weapons are inferior to one-handed weapons in every way. You have less flexibility, you can’t cast spells, you do less damage per attack than dual wielding, and you attack slower. Also, not only is blocking less effective, most of the perks in the Block tree only work when you have a shield equipped. I like big swords, I want to smash skeletons with a big sword, but the game heavily punishes me for trying to use a big sword, so the only option for playing that way is to turn the difficulty way down.

That said, this is one of my most played games and the above complaints make me spend a lot of time trying to download mods to "fix" the game.