/u/Thallassa: I think a lot of it is how open world it is. There are a lot of open-world RPGs out there, but most of them don't allow the same level of "go anywhere, do anything, in any order you like" that Skyrim (and other TES games - people still play Morrowind!) does. Some games have level zones that mean once you out level an area, it's not any fun to fight in anymore, whereas other areas you can't survive in until higher level. With Skyrim, any zone works for anyone at any level (while still giving you a feeling of getting stronger over time). Other games might be mostly open world but have a very directed story that sends you to particular cities in a particular order, rather than sending you all over the map at random the way Skyrim's story does.
Another thing is the level of detail in the game. A lot of the gameplay can be really repetitive after hundreds of hours (and that's where mods come in), but every day on /r/Skyrim there's a new post "400 hours and just saw x new thing!" and it's always a different thing, some of them really cool (like the headless horseman, which I still haven't seen in my own game).
Obviously modding is a big part of it too. Modding (making mods, altering them, building a modlist) can be a huge time drain and very addictive itself, but actually playing the game with mods massively adds to replayability. The existing mods for PC add hundreds of hours of new quests, some of them higher quality and more in-depth lore-wise than vanilla, increase the amount of world and number of events to explore by at least a factor of 10, add new gameplay mechanics that both make existing gameplay more interesting and involved and can add entirely new ways to fight enemies, roleplay, and build your character that weren't available before. And also making the game look better which adds to the replayability. Most people don't want to play a game that has terrible visuals; Skyrim's base visuals were pretty decent especially for people who aren't hardcore into gaming/RPGs, but it's one of the few games where the graphics have massively improved over time thanks to mods.
/u/Dave-C: Bethesda's style of game design is different than any other, other companies do the same concept but Bethesda does it in a way that makes you really feel like the game is "open world." The sheer size of the world and the amount of content they are able to pack into a game makes it difficult to 100% the game, even after that 500, 750 or even 1000 hours in-game there will still be stuff you didn't find or quests you never started. The idea that there is always something else to do combined with quests that could be completed in different ways gives a great deal of replay.
For PC and now consoles the modding community adds to this. Did you finally complete everything in-game? How about you download one of the few dozens of quest mods that could be considered DLC size. How about you download a mod like Interesting NPCs which adds in more quests and new characters than any other mod for Skyrim. There are mods for anything you could imagine and they can appeal to a wide range of gamers, this keeps people interested.
For me personally I keep myself interested in the game by how much I enjoy the community, Large groups of people working together to make something we all enjoy even better. I also enjoy learning more about modding the game, just a few years ago I had very little knowledge about how game development worked but now I can at least grasp the concept of everything that is required to make a game like Skyrim.
/u/TerrorFox1234: I think that modding is the appeal that keeps people coming back after 5 years. Yes, there are quite a few people that still play and replay vanilla Skyrim, but I think the bulk of player, at this point, are people who mod the game.
As others pointed out, however, it also has something to do with the level of detail that Bethesda puts into their worlds. There's just so many little things to discover and interact with and they've always done a fantastic job of injecting little stories and humor throughout their games. I remember when I was using Frostfall and other survival mods to do a wilderness survival roleplay. I decided to scope out a nice spot in Falkreath hold to make my main base (using Campfire to build a large campsite). After wandering a bit I wound up all the way at the southern part of the map and noticed a big flat rock about halfway up the mountain side. Now, normally this area is inaccessible...but I had a mod that added climbable rope arrows. So I fired one up and climbed up onto the ledge and there, right at the edge, was a skeleton laying next to a backpack containing some minor loot. It's a perfect example...no one, within the normal game mechanics, should have ever been able to see that...but they decided to put something up there anyways, knowing that someone would find a way. Even more importantly is the little story that unfolds from there. How did he get up there? What was he doing? A survivalist like myself?
In the end, though, you can eventually see all that the base game has to offer, and that's where mods come in, adding hundreds and hundreds of hours of new quests, NPCs, locations, etc.
/u/Nazenn: So my fellow moderators pretty much covered a lot of the reasons I see in the community for people to like Skyrim as a whole and why it's still so popular, but for a bit of a different perspective, I'm in the camp where I don't enjoy vanilla Skyrim so mods are all that keeps me coming back.
For me personally it's the fact that when you have such an expansive collection of mods available for a game as we do for Skyrim (49 thousand mods on the Skyrim Nexus and counting) for the people who want to approach it that way, Skyrim can become less of a game and more of an engine to create your own game. When you look at it from the perspective of someone who wants to try something totally different for their next playthrough, there's at least three major game overhauls available, dozens of perk overhauls, multiple options for combat mechanics, hundreds if not thousands of mods that can completely overhaul the look of the game and more. People have made their own games in Skyrim with new mechanics, and there's efforts to rebuild old Elder Scrolls games in Skyrim as well. When you have that level of freedom it really opens up a lot of choice for people. You don't have to play Bethesda's Skyrim, or my Skyrim, you can play a Skyrim that's completely and totally your own and have an experience that no one else will get to have because of your unique choice of mods and that's really special. I think the low entry bar for mod creation really helps with this as well. With other games you have to work with all sorts of wacky formats and compilers and injectors, with Skyrim it's in built data loader really helps smooth the way so you can learn as you go.
ここには何もないようです