Hello, I have never played Oblivion before Skyrim (bought Skyrim on release). After Skyrim released, I played it a lot - up till now I've dumped around 600 hours on it. But IMO - for Skyrim to be enjoyable you really have to mod the crap out of it. What I found quite frustrating was that the game was getting more and more unstable and quite bad performance-wise. Of course I applied all known performance and stability guides, patches and other stuff but between using over 100 mods on top of an ENB, gameplay felt really sluggish (and I don't play on a potato), with the game loading screens taking up to a minute. With frequent crashes it just felt like a chore... I have decided to try Oblivion which GOTY I bought some time ago on a Steam sale. And I'm having a blast with it! Even heavily modded it's very responsive, stable and looks beautiful. It is definitely more on the 'light and colourful' side of fantasy as well (especially the fantastic Shivering Isles expansion) but that's great - personally I like it's bit of a tongue-in-cheek attitude :) TL;DR Oblivion is not a game everyone is going to like (the setting, difficulty, graphics) but I am having a great time in Cyrodiil. Give it a chance, it can't hurt. You can always get back to Skyrim if you don't like it :)