I feel better now. I actually played Skyrim recently and thought "Man, do I just not like video games anymore?" It's nice to see people describing how I felt and why I stopped playing it.

Skyrim is a fun game to pick up once in awhile, but it gets very easy and very empty quite fast. I should be enthralled by the appearance of a dragon, and it should be a significant challenge to take it on, but after a few encounters, it becomes rote and mundane. There's also no consequence for dawdling on completing various objectives - I took a good few days to go to Kynesgrove after Delphine told me to get there ASAP. Little things, i guess, but they all add up to a pretty hollow experience.

Pick up Witcher 3 - it is excellend and fun game compared to Skyrim. Plus it treats you like an adult when it comes to choices you are given.

Skyrim feels like a boring MMO with no other players. If you have done MMOs, you wonder what the big deal is.

"there are serious rails."

A.K.A. an emotionally engaging story, which would be very hard to do without some sequence of narrative. A complete sandbox is an endless timesink - if I'm building something freeform I'd rather do it using a medium which provides lasting value - art, 3D modeling, programming or such. But these are just personal preferences, I'm not claiming any objective value of one over the other (narrative v.s. sandbox).

I don't enjoy the default Skyrim game all that much. However, the Requiem mod which gives it more of an old school feel allows for more emergent stories. Because it's not on rails and combat is intense you will spend 15 minutes running away from something and not always make it to safety. One of my strongest memory's is a fight that took all of 8 seconds but I was riding the edge of death the entire time. This was not chasing some boss for epic loot, this was just not dying.