I've seen a lot of people post about having 500 hour old characters in Oblivion. How can you keep interested for THAT long? I mean, I could probably play for 100-200 before finishing most of the questlines.

Short answer: roleplay.

Slightly longer answer: I don't care much about doing a developer's quests, so there is no such thing as finishing an Elder Scrolls game to me. Up until my current Mage character I never played quests. I'm doing some Oblivion quests now for the first time since the game came out in 2006. Quests are the least interesting part of games to me, and the Elder Scrolls games are no exception. I like to make my own adventures. I play the Elder Scrolls games to tell my own stories, not to be told a story by a developer. I make up my own dialogue, my own quests and my own stories. I can play happily for hundreds of hours without touching a single developer-written quest.

After a couple years I settled into one character and she has now been playing over 3 years and 1500 hours. She's done a nice handful of quests and about a quarter of her guild's questline (Mages Guild). What makes the game last forever for us is focusing more on things that never end: Traveling with her horse, visiting her friends all over Cyrodiil, clearing dungeons, camping under the stars, playing in waterfalls and maintaining a very detailed Journal of her life in Cyrodiil. Getting close enough to hear the puffing and snorting sounds the deer make, chasing butterflies, killing necromancers, vampires, conjurers, bandits and marauders. . . it never gets old.

Eleanor's slightly different - and younger - than the aforementioned characters. The beginning of her life was heavily quest-based. She completed the main quest before fleeing to the Shivering Isles, and returning to complete the Mage's Guild faction. But then it all stopped ... And ever since she's been rokeplayed.

She visits Mages Guild Halls, dines with the Counts and Countesses, rides through Cyrodiil's forests and enjoys everything the province has to offer. Her companions Fergus and Vilja make the trip even more enjoyable, and other than a handful of ones from mods, she hasn't completed a quest in quite a while!