With Skyrim you will definitely get your money's worth for entertainment, because you can easily spend 100+ hours playing. However with all that content there's a lot of missed opportunity to really create anything tangible. If you're familiar with the last few Bethesda games (lets say from Oblivion onward) that there are particular habits they never grow out of (characters all being voiced by the same 3 actors, for example). The main story is pretty mediocre, but there is really a lot of room for you to really create your own character and have them forge their own story. I started in July and I easily put 88 hours into 1 character, who went from being a mercenary to being the leader of the thieve's guild and the Dark Brotherhood, with stealth skills up the butt. All my choices were really based on the personality I had crafted for him, and he had a really neat character arc.
Basically the bottom line is you have to put some work into the character and story part of the game, and it takes some real imagination. Basically it's a giant sandbox, filled with things to do, but none of it really matters that much. It's kind of sad because I'm playing through The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and it has a lot of similarities to Skyrim, but it does it a lot better, and it's 11 years older. (I'll elaborate on that later).
Okay and for Grand Theft Auto IV, here's my opinion. It's a fucking great game, if you don't mind that a lot of the wacky humour is gone. There's still some funny radio stations and tv commercials, but gone is the real funny moments in the story. Instead the game takes on a very serious role, and I think plays it out pretty well, it's certainly one of the better adult stories in video games this console generation. It's a lot like the TV show The Wire if you're looking for a frame of reference, a lot of reflections of the failures of institutions. Everybody is corrupt, and nothing ever fucking changes, the game is the game.
So yeah the game is a little heavy handed in the story department, but I think it makes up for it in the gameplay department. It never gets tiring plowing through a crowded sidewalk and watching these bodies ragdoll over your car's hood (bonnet) in a realistic fashion. Also the cover based mechanics work really well, probably the best at the time next to Gears of War and Uncharted. There's some new mechanics introduced like the ability to become friends with the various contacts you meet across the game, usually people who give you missions. If you call them up and hang out with them, they begin to like you more and will do certain things for you. It's also cool because you get to learn more about their personality, like how this bulging steroid abuser dudebro douchebag was really fat when they were a teenager and had super low self-esteem problems.
So the game has a pretty interesting story and a lot to say on the matters of dysfunctional families, the '90's wars in Eastern Europe, the "American Dream", and depression. Definitely a win in the story department, and really something memorable if you go to the trouble of getting to know the characters. It also gives you some interesting roleplaying moments because you also have some moral choices you can make, like not killing a character your boss asks you to kill, only to have them show up later in the game. There's also random strangers you can meet on the streets between certain hours of the game's schedule.
So Skyrim will net you a nice return of investment with time and money saved, but Grand Theft Auto IV has the better story.
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