Problem with this is the consoles only get TWO hotkeys. How do they play a mage successfully without ruining their experience and having to go into the favorites menu? They can't. You do need your 8 for playing a mage; or most of them anyway.

The UI is not good. It's not intuitive to use and it was not made with function as its first priority. The map is a disappointment. What was great about the old UI in Oblivion and both Fallouts is you could get in and out really fast and it was intuitive. 20 hours in and I'm still fumbling around in the menus and often do the wrong things still (eat stuff instead of transferring it; save games instead of loading them, etc). And, the map may be pretty, but what I want to see is the roads and the trails. With this terrain being as realistic as it is going overland is problematic. I spend half my time doubling back because I get stuck somewhere not being able to go the way I've tried to (water, cliff, etc in my way). I prefer to go off road and never use the map if I can help it. I feel like I'm being forced to use the roads because the map is so bad when I get stuck somewhere I cannot find the closest trail or road on that damn thing.

That's more of a problem with the limitations of a controller. The favorites menu is there to help reduce the amount of times someone needs to go to the full blown menu.

What would your solution be to add hotkeys to the controller?

They made this for console and ported to PC with bare minimum functioning controls. Why put in extra work when people are already buying the game and modders can do their job for them?

I agree with your opinion but I think the overexaggeration on quitting the game due to it is childish. There are plenty of games with bad parts which we put up with and suddenly this game is the "dealbreaker".

The devs should speak up and address some of this stuff. If only to shut up the ZFE and the "deal breaker" crowd.

I didn't say an encounter did I. I said in a series of fights against different enemies. So you might have to use Fire spells in one fight, Ice in another, Lightning in a different one. You can't have all those spells hotkeyed at once and all the other spells, potions, staves you might use in a fight, If there were modifiers you could have Fire spell on 1, Ice on Shift+1, Lightning on Alt+1. Depending on the difficulty level you are playing on you can get away with almost anything.

Obviously it doesn't help the people on consoles, what they need is a properly tested and refined, retested and re-refined, ad infinitum, UI that prioritised function over flash rubbish. It would also benefit those of us on the PC, rather then porting what is at best a half decent console UI to the PC.

I want this http://i.imgur.com/GKuzW.jpg with the following changes:

-Smaller Font
-No need to have "Apparel" listed twice
-All equipped items are grouped together at the top of the list
-Show the characters level, level progress, health/magicka/stamina bars in the bottom.

"...left hand buttons?" THAT IS the problem

did you read all the title of thread? the part that said "PC" ???????

well, let us all know what games you're working on - so we can avoid them! :flamethrower:

Dude. He has a chest. It has 1000 items in it. It takes him a long time to scroll to the bottom. End of story.

This is uncommon in Skyrim, but if you're an oddball book collector, it will happen.

Not like Bethesda committed a mortal sin because, again, the vast majority of players will not have 1000 items in their chest at home, but it's something they could tweak.

There are a dozen minor UI tweaks -- mostly centered on screenspace and scrolling, menu placement, etc -- that would be nice.


Only major issues are the mouse-over desync and the design problem with dual wielding and the hotkeys. The first issue is probably patchable pretty easily. The second one may not ever happen -- most likely they would have to add a completely different hotkey interface (make complete main/offhand equip presets assigned to hotkeys, instead of individual equips) to make that work.

Ps. The kindle comment was funny.

It has some issues but it's far from being a gamebreaker...

I think the UI on the PC is just fine.

What a joke

What puzzles me the most perhaps is that the PC GUI design, in general, is not something that sprung up from nowhere three days ago.

It's a subject that's been well explored, has well-defined conventions and is taught in schools. Whether gamers or consumers of professional applications of any sort, PC users are accustomed to the certain way things are done. The science of GUI design aims to evaluate these needs and habits and then meet them. So the user has the most comfortable experience navigating the interface and, you know, getting things done.

Skyrim's UI breaks so many of these conventions that it seems almost like deliberate sabotage. Which it of course isn't, but still.

If you read this entire post, and some of the others in Hardware/Software forum, you may read something about key assignments not working. So, it doesn't matter how many hotkeys you have, if the assigned numbers drop off for an unexplained reason, it hampers playing this game. I constantly have to go and bring up the favorite menu and either reassign the numbers or click on a spell or bow to have it become active.

So whether God created hotkeys or not, it doesn't matter. The UI doesn't work properly for everyone. You don't seem to have a problem so count yourself lucky.

I'm not a big fan of the UI either (360 version, mind), and this is coming from someone who is an old school jRPG menu master. There's too many steps to get to places. Hitting my 'esc' button brings me to a menu, where I have to select where to go, and I can't even access all the things I might want to from there. Why they put the quests list in with the Save\Load options instead of with the map I'll never know, and why they opted for this 'Compass' screen to get to the rest of the goodies makes no sense either. The 'Favorites' list isn't really much better than the 'Wheel' we had in Oblivion. The whole thing just seems... cumbersome.

It reminds me of what Square Enix tried in their failed mmo. The menu is nearly identical and almost as hard to navigate.

I play with a 360 controller on my PC, connected to my HDTV. Smooth like butter. The controller support is superb, it's automatically recognized and even changes all the in-game tooltips to 360 button labels.

This!! The fact that I can't assign hotkeys to the extra keys on my keyboard DESIGNED for macros really bothers me. The game doesn't recognize them, or the numpad for remapping. D:

I think it is by far the best Bethesda interface ever. I like it, very very much.

Thinks back to oblivion interface...shudder

First, the UI is not a gamel breaker, it's more of a total immersion breaker. You go from playing a GREAT game, to having a bucket of cold water thrown on you every time you have to fiddle with the clunky awful menu system. Not to mention, you have to pixel-hunt to even click on the lines you want sometimes (let alone to grab/pick up objects in the game).

3 things need to happen to help the UI:

The hotkeys need to bind what is in BOTH hands, not just one. And they need a "Y-Axis" toggle equivilant option in settings until they do; one that you can set so the left mouse button activates the left hand; the right button the right hand.

3 Favorite submenus, not one. Spells, Weapons, Potions.

Objects in a menu need to highlight when your mouse is over them so you know they are clickable, and in world, there needs to be a key that "highlights" objects in the world you can click on/pick up so you don't have to pixel hunt (Dungeon Quest 2 anyone?).

Which isn't saying very much.

My two big regrets are that I can't drag items onto my character's paper doll and that the ui is doing its best to turn me into a twitch player.

Sorry to say but Skyrim interface is really illogically organised and makes playing of Skyrim impossible to enjoy.

Regards, Mimes

Second that, I have been clicking away on the options when I loaded Skyrim before I realised it is not my PC / mouse gone mad but maybe UI design team, hehehe :violin:

Regards, Mimes

Are there perks for this? Or a trainer in some city? I really need to know =D