not quite so; compare it to another FPS, say, gears of war. or serious sam. or max paine. alan wake. whatever you prefer.
in those games the 3d shooting is the core of the game and it's been balanced to give you a challenge; be it the number of medikits available, respawns, weapons available, etc...
in skyrim you can recover full hp everywhere. cast stun + damage spells. hide right in front of a mob. quaff potions instantly. use powers (berserk is sooo OP). use the voice. and so on. at level 1 you already have berserk, flame, a bow and sword, and the stunning shout. plus the potions you make from the stuff they practically throw at you.
see i started playing videogames when videogames first started existing. yeah i was alive well before pong and space invaders, and have lived through the era of really difficult gameplay. when i try a game, i will do my outmost best to beat it. if the game lets itself get beaten too easily to me, the game mechanics are broken.
there is a classic argument on minecraft after beds were made available. before, you had to endure 8 minutes of night each day, and while you could just stay holed up and wait, if you got bored or impatient and went out, skeletons and zombies kicked ur butt.
that was essentially 99% of the "survival" in survival mode. with beds, click on bed, perma-day.
so, people say, "if you don't like the bed, don't use it", and here is the beef. i am a person who does not accept that as a valid reasoning. it's in the game, i am meant to use it, i will use it to beat the game. in fallout, i will try to get a strong character and i will not instead get random perks .. because it's a game, and that's what you do when you try to beat a game.
Stuff that doesn't need "beating" ... isn't a game, to me. Not anymore than those hentai games where you watch the girls pose in bikinis, like DOA beach thingie what was it called.
look, half of the people here got me wrong; i love the exploration, to be able to go into any cave i want. what sucks is my interaction with the cave, what's in it, and how everything is just the same. all mobs are the same. yeah right, some breath fire, some move faster, but they all just do hp dmg; no rust monster is going to break my +1 sword. no curses. no diseases. (yeah lol, once. ) no stat affecting statuses because there aren't any stats. honestly gameplay wise Oblivion was better, you actually had to watch what you said to NPCs to not piss them off. thievery was a viable option. Athletics was great. custom spells!! weapons were well, already OP, but not so OP as to be ridiculous.
design choices are what makes a game or breaks it. most fantasy games will have you wearing one armor's texture or another; so if you are going to code in a loincloth, ffs can you take 3 sec to code in cold damage?
FYI there's a 3d game made by a bunch of bedroom coders which is like, 10 years old called Mount & Blade which although butt-ugly has far superior 3d combat to skyrim. AND it's got horses. and lances.
Skyrim's game experience for those who love it is primarely visual; sort of like Rez, but fantasy; and 3d. People like the way it looks, people even gimp their characters pretending the game has classes, so you'd have the thief who runs in light armour when he could just wear daedric. Fallout 3 has hordes of people who chose their armour based on what looks cool :/
Hey Crysis was great but the game was about killing stuff using your guns and your suit powers. It wasn't about walking through the jungle looking at the pretty flowers. Sure you can do that, but that's not what is called "core gameplay". That, assuming people like fetch quests ... then sure, they cal call sidequests "gameplay"; Summoner 2 had a lot of sidequests and you had better do some if you wanted to beat the game. I'm not calling for every game to be linear, but there needs to be linear sections enclosed in the free roaming to have any sense of time. Like GTA, which is far superior to Skyrim. You can wander around and postpone your main quests, but when you do start the missions, you're in a box, albeit large. you have goals to achieve. Namely, the defeat of Alduin and the fate of the Dovahkin;
and to all the people who have 100 hours and 30% completion .. WTFLOL? my skyrim ran out around 50 hours of game, with all quests done, all guilds beat, 100 in crafting, enchanting, magic, full daedric gear, all daedric artefacts worth having, etc.. get quest, fast travel, spacebarspacebarspacebarspacebarspacebarspacebarspacebar through the talk spacebarspacebarspacebarspacebarspacebarspacebar it's not like i actually have to pay attention because all i frikkin have to do is follow the arrow and kill the mob. spacebarspacebarspacebarspacebar fast travel kill mob get new quest. i did the whole college of magic quest in maybe 2 1/2 hours. am i going too fast? sure, i'm going as fast as i can. i'm here to beat the game, not collect flowers.