Sometimes mods can fix these issues, but Skyrim is really boring in general. The landscape is surprisingly small and empty, and the towns are barren too.
Every play Morrowind? You might like that one better--loads of quests and content that doesn't always step over itself. There's like, seven main plots of quests you can follow, and then there's like, what, seven more guilds you can finish? A shit ton of content, and not much repetition outside of basic gameplay. All the different stuff helps the game feel more populated and active.
Morrowind has aged rather poorly. Even with the extensive mod makeover, it still doesn't fix the poor dialogue system and the combat is horrific. Dice-roll combat is just really dumb, especially when it involves stabbing madly at a stationary mudcrab and missing more than half the time.
Plus the mod lagged everything to shit. I thought it was just my low-grade computer specs but my friend, with much higher specs, says it lags for him too.
I'm going to retry playing Oblivion though, I hated it the first time I gave it a whirl but maybe the second time around it'll be a bit better.
But in all honesty you should probably just play New Vegas. I enjoyed Skyrim in a sort of mindless repetition sort of way but it has one overwhelming flaw, and that's every mission basically being the same thing. It's always just going somewhere and killing something. It works fine in Dragon's Dogma and, to a lesser extent, in Kingdoms of Amalur where combat is a big focus (Dragon's Dogma does have some of the best combat in a RPG period), but in Skyrim, where the combat is pretty bad, having every mission involving killing the same enemies gets a bit dull. I've probably clocked over 100+ hours in the game and I'll probably end up playing more someday but the flaws become rather evident if you step away from the game for a second.
Many people have told me the second is much better. The Third is still worth a shot though.Just completed Saints Row 2. My original impression that it was a desperate GTA wannabe changed as I played it and towards the end I was rather enjoying it. Looking forward to playing Saints Row the Third.
I'd say The Third is better but it fell a bit short for me. Like it's nice that they made it more silly but they didn't improve the game as much as I would've wanted. A better hand-to-hand combat and shooting system would be better. The Godfather has a surprisingly solid hand-to-hand combat system so taking a bit from that would be good and I'd think some type of bullet-time Max Payne style action would work with their whole run-and-gun approach. But it still feels very much like the same engine and I also found the side missions to be dumb (I hate escort missions and like half the side mission paths were escort this person to there).