Having only 2 hotkey slots in Skyrim for XBOX seems rediculous. I mean, if you equip a shield and sword (to be used as your main weapons and defence) and need to use another weapon or magic quickly, you need to make sure you have hotkeyed the shield and the secondary item - so really you can only switch to one extra item quickly, and then back to the shield.

Am I missing something here? The up button on the D pad may bring up a little menu but it pauses and breaks the flow of the gameplay.

I'm only aware of the "favorites" menu.

Its an RPG, not an action game. I don't understand why "flow" is so paramount.

I would say that Skyrim is more of an RPG/Action hybrid, so yes the flow is important. When you are in the heat of a battle and need to use magic and spells instead of a sword you need to go into the menu (pausing the action), equip the magic/spell, use the magic/spell, and then re-eqiuip the sword (pausing the game again).

Hotkeying items has been done before, and more effectively (see Oblivion).

wait, you can hot key?

How do you do this? I feel like such a noob.

I agree, Oblivions did work a little better.

But I still maintain that it isn't important. One could argue that you should have decided what was appropriate prior.

Don't worry, it's not very obvious at all. You highlight the item in your favourites menu, and hold D-pad left or right to assign it to either direction.

Be advised though, it does act a bit funny when you start hotkeying dual-wielded spells, and then you change to a different spell.

I have to agree w/ the OP. It doesn't seem like too much to ask to be able to hotkey more things. This should definately be patched.

on the favorites menu hold left...this will mark a favorite as 1. hold right to mark on as 2. in game hitting left activates 1 and hitting right activates 2

for example as a pure mage

choose Oakskin and Flames as favorites from spell menu
hit up or down on touchpad to activate favorites
hold left on Oakskin
hold right on flames
exit favorites

tap left for oakskin to appear in left hand, tap left again for it to spread to right hand
tap right for flames to appear in left hand, tap right again for it to spread to right hand

this is the best case scenario....different item and spell combinations make things more difficult

There isn't really a huge amount of room on the D pad though. The diagonal hot keys in Oblivion were a bit hit and miss for me.

It's a love/hate question this one. In oblivion I loved the fact you could put 8 hotkey items on the D pad, but hated that in the heat of battle I could sometimes fumble and hit the wrong option. It made it so easy to switch quickly between spells especially, but 8 was never really enough and I always had to compromise between spells and weapons.

This new system has little room for error as it is almost impossible to fumble your choice which I love, but the start-stop aspect can be annoying - especially as it seems you can only have your favourites in alphabetical order and not list them in the order you want, which I really hate. I want to be able to list all my powers at the top, all my spells at the bottom and all my weapons together, rather than having scroll up and down just to get an iron dagger and steel sword equipped.

they should at least give us Down as a hotkey as well... I can't remember the last time I accidentally hit Down instead of Up

Heh. Well, it may not be important but it makes gameplay a LOT more fun. I played a mage in Oblivion and depended on the hotkeys for having a full range of spells available for combat; healing, conjuring, destruction, etc. and having them allowed me to continue combat without having to pause the action. Right now, to do more than two different things in one combat session I have to stop combat to go into a menu (favorites). That's not fun. It's...amazingly NOT fun. It's a bad set up and if I don't go into the menu my character tends to die a lot or I can't cast a full range of spells during combat. It would be fine, I suppose, if all I was doing was carrying a sword and playing melee, but I want to play a mage that does all kinds of fun mage-y type things without having to go into the menus.

Yeah im not really a fan of the favorites menu and having 2 hot keys svck for mage/stealth hybrids. I dont understand why they only allowed us to use left and right and not down; and why not instead of just hotkeyin one item, they make it a swap key instead.

example, they could make left and right buttons be the hot keys for each coresponding hands but the way it would work would be you have a fireball in left hand but sparks in reserve on the left button so when you pressed it the first time it would swap to sparks and put fireball into reserve and the same could be done to the right button/hand.

I just use the favorites menu and manually pick and choose when to equip and what to equip.

It's stupid and completely ruins a lot of encounters and immersion by jumping in and out of the game, but it just works better.

Thanks everyone.

I will do this for my bow.

I dual wield swords so thats not and option.

The "Favourites" menu is your best bet.

It can be a little confusing at the beginning and you may suffer the odd cheap death as you accidentally equip the wrong items to the wrong hands but that's ok. It's just that the system is simple enough to be used easily but complex enough to merit getting used to.

Azrael
The Nord with the Sword

One thing I have yet to hear anyone mention in response to this, is there are new controllers out w/ the elevated dpad. So maybe 8 on the dpad should come back.