I have some points to make myself:
Immersion
- The map, which is a satellite/god view, rips you out of character. Paper maps keep more mystery.
- The quest icons that it relies on should be changed for better quest directions.
- Seeing enemies’ exact health (and name) is also not great for immersion. More visual/audible damaged states is better.
RP
- Very few choices are made in the quests, instead one has to be in character by choosing what quests one embark on. It would be great to have some conversational options with consequences. Relations are important in RP.
- Few people acknowledge you, to the degree you don’t actually feel that you are saving anyone unlike in Oblivion. IDK if it’s the voice actors or characters or that I haven’t got to actively save anyone, except DLC Serana. There’s that guy in the web that dies. In Oblivion there are monks fleeing towards you for help and more noticeably the knight in the Oblivion gate. I miss such moments.
Without mods, combat sucks. It largely boils down to spamming heal and the attack button.
To add to this, the vampire lord and werewolf add some much needed extra depth to the combat, however I do wish they fleshed them out a bit more. Their respective skill trees are very shallow. The werewolf besides being able to transform into one, has little effect on the gameplay beyond just that, while the vampire lord, comes with so many negative effects that it’s almost not even worth it.
The quests also suck for the most part. Besides what you have already mentioned in regards to RP, characters have boring and shallow personalities and you’re often expected to care about people who you barely interact with (Skjor from the companions is a great example of this). The quests are also often exceedingly predictable. It’s such a huge step down from Oblivion.
The random encounters are great and all, but when you keep running into the same ones over and over, it’s a bit immersion breaking. I would have preferred a system similar to RDR2 where each encounter doesn’t repeat itself and they are all unique.
Magic (more specifically, destruction magic) has so much wasted potential in Skyrim. It scales absolutely horrendously, making it nigh impossible to make a good magic focused build.