A friend of mine who works for a indi video game company discovered I have been wanting to learn how to do things related to video games. While she was in town she showed me that I could get Maya 2014 for free because I was a college student. We downloaded it and she showed me a few pointers on it and it looks really awesome!

The point of me making this thread is I was wondering how good the program really is for modeling, texturing, animations, ect. as it seems this program is a jack of all trades.

I tried loading meshes from skyrim to look at them but it said the file type was incompatible , suggestions?

What I've mostly heard from my 'more knowledgable' friends is that Maya is great for character composition and modelling, while 3dsMax is better for architecture/building/item modelling. But frankly people love and hate both of them.

As for the filetype, you'll most certainly need to track down a plugin that lets you load Gamebryo mesh files. (Nifs)

So Maya cant do it at all and I'd need to find a program, like Nifscope, that can?

You can get 3DS MAX for free as well. I don't know about Maya support but the .nif plugins for 3DSMAX are pretty mature (you need the correct version of 3DS Max though, so don't run off downloading it until you've seen a tutorial). Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BNgJd214eE

Yeah, I recommend checking out the http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/index.php to see which version of 3DS Max the NIF exporter supports. As far as I know, the NIF exporter doesn't work with Maya, but you would be better asking that on the NifTools forums.

Maya is a great program in general, but for TES, you're better off going with 3DSMax. The exporter is more complete for all games, and there are far more tutorials. Since you're just starting put, switching should be easy