My recent gaming itch has seen me back to playing one of my favorite games of all time, Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls world is filled with people who will readily argue that Morrowind was better - to each their own, but for me Skyrim was the right game at the right time scratching the right itch, and while other games have come out in the many years since it's (original) release, including some very good ones, none have quite hit the mark like it did for me.
Skyrim In The World Of Tamriel
The Elder Scrolls lore is complex, deep, and generally fantastic. Lots of people have great videos covering it, and Skyrim occupies only a small corner of that lore. First and foremost, Skyrim itself is a province on the northern edge of Tamriel; it is quite literally on the corner of the world. But more abstract, the story told in the game takes place several hundred years after the events which encompass most of the mainstream lore to date, so Skyrim is an outlier in that the people, places, and factions of the game are different than what most have been hearing about.
For example (spoilers ahead, but come on - it's an 11 year old game), the Dark Brotherhood questline in Skyrim sees you assassinate Emperor Titus Meade, who is decidedly not a namesake of the reknowned bloodline of Tiber Septim who founded the Third Empire. The empire itself is weakened and barely keeping hold on the province, having recently engaged in (and more or less lost) a war against the Thalmor, resulting in the White-Gold concordat, a treaty that imposed unacceptable limitations on the worship of Talos (Tiber Septim) throughout the empire. The Talos-loving Nords of Skyrim naturally dislike this limitation, and that leads to the Stormcloak rebellion, an attempt by Jarl Ulfric Stormcloak of Windhelm to overthrow the Empire and establish a free and independent Skyrim.
It's around this time that the Dragonborn (you!) enter - after a failed attempt at your execution, you set off on a journey through Skyrim engaging in warfare, subterfuge, and general shenanigans as you try to stave off Alduin the Worldeater, a dragon born of the god Akatosh who sees Tamriel as his birthright to rule or destroy as he sees fit.
I'll stop short of saying Skyrim has the best story of any game ever, because there are some out there that really hit home better, but it is a very good story with a lot of depth, complexity and even some choice. There are little details such as the Legat serving General Tullius of the Empire being a Nord, how Ulfric wants the Dragonborn to be the one to deliver the final blow if you side with the Empire, or the times you'll pickpocket someone and find little trinkets of Talos worship that could get them in a lot of trouble.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Skyrim is wildly addictive as well in general; only combat leaves something to be desired, but I can live with that because the sneaking, lockpicking, spellwork, enchanting, and crafting make up for it. Skyrim's Alchemy system is my favorite system of potion crafting in any fantasy game - it lends itself to experimentation and tinkering with recipes for potions in a way that most other games don't even come close to. You can change the ingredients you craft with to produce potions with different effects, or different magnitudes of effects. Depending on your expertise some potions you craft may have side effects of varying strength, and they'll almost always fluctuate in value. For an added layer of complexity (and fun!) you can enchant gear to increase the magnitude of these effects further.
This all leads to a system where you have a preparation stage of selecting enchanted gear for crafting, and then tweaking recipes until you get them just right, crafting potions that will give you the effects you need, and then heading out into the wild for adventure with them. It's so much better than the traditional "open interface, click craft button" style of crafting we usually see.
Enchanting has a similar setup, though with a little less depth. As you adventure and find enchanted gear, you can research it's properties (by disenchanting it) to learn how to craft that enchant on your own gear. Once you've done that, you head out and collect filled soul gems which power the enchants; by combining a piece of gear, a desired enchant, and a soul gem, you can put a particular enchant at a particular strength on your equipment. You can adjust the properties of the enchant by selecting different soul gems.
The interplay between these systems adds yet another layer of fun; you can craft enchants which make your potions stronger, and potions which make your enchants stronger. Admittedly this can get a bit game breaking if you take it to silly levels, but it's great fun to feel your power grow as a direct result of crafting, something that a lot of games don't have.
There are other great gameplay elements too, but they're far to many to list here. You can sneak, steal, explore, you can change the outcome of different situations based on whether you kill someone or spare them, and so much more.
Playthroughs
I love immersive games. One of my favorite things to do when I get the itch to play Skyrim is to start a new playthrough that has some kind of idea behind it; the baseline for this is almost always that my character is an inhabitant of Skyrim and I want them to experience the world as an inhabitant. That means, for example, no fast travel. I add mods such as iNeed which add the requirement to eat and sleep. I usually play on Legendary difficulty, and in my most recent playthroughs I've embraced mods that add complexity to combat, and systems for incurring and managing wounds and diseases.
These are all things that drive the feeling that Skyrim is big, it's dangerous, and if you're not prepared you're going to have to deal with the fallout when you try and fight a bandit twice your level and he breaks your shield arm or something. But they also add a sense of beauty. Disabling fast travel means you have a reason to think about the world, and to experience it; for example, when it's time for my character to sleep I often find myself thinking "I have a long ways to travel tomorrow, maybe I should get up earlier and get a head start so I'm not traveling in the dark". Mods such as graphics overhauls and immersive patrols/citizens mean that your time on the road is almost never dull and straightforward - you're bound to have tons of little interactions along the way with guards, travelers, and more and all of it together makes Skyrim feel alive.
Future Playthroughs
I've recently embraced the idea of no-death mods, and I'm thinking I'll try them out in future playthroughs. The idea is fairly simple: when you are defeated you no longer are sent back to your last save. Rather, you black out, some event happens (such as your valuables and equipment being stolen, or a traveler taking you to a temple for rescue) and you start from there, often with a little bit of recovery time ahead of you as you mend broken bones, cuts, and other injuries.
This seems like a lot of fun to me - certainly better overall than simply reloading and trying again, because it increases the sense that Skyrim is alive and dangerous, and if you're unprepared it will chew you up. I don't necessarily want things to be hardcore and unforgiving, just for them to be meaningful and thought-provoking. When you go to fight a dragon - a creature that you're told in game is a deadly and terror-invoking harbinger of the end times, it should probably burn you to a crisp if you didn't think to bring fire resist potions. When you're heading into a fort filled to the brim with bandits, you should have a plan to sneak around otherwise when they outnumber you five to one it seems sensible that they'd run you through.
So future playthroughs will probably see me add more mods that increase that level of thought and engagement, and add meaningful (but not strictly hardcore) consequences to failing to prepare. But ultimately it will always be about wanting to go and spend time in Skyrim, traveling, trading, fighting, crafting, and generally doing cool and fun stuff that (almost) no other game has quite been able to touch.