I find the ui a bit clumsy in the heat of battle sometime on xbox so I can only imagine what it must be like with mouse and keyboard, but if the op hates the whole game for this flaw then this is not the game for him/her.

Is there a way to see if you already own a spell when buying books?

I could be mistaken but I'm pretty sure that I'm seeing books come up that which I've bought in the past and have the spells memorized in the spells section, but I'm not always sure since I have more spells than I actually use, and don't want to buy the same spell book twice.

I keep looking for some marker to tell me that I already know such and such spell when I go to buy books but I'm just not seeing it. Am I blind, or does such a system not exist?

Thanks

Oh and am I the only one that left clicks on a spell but it gets marked with the R icon, and the same in reverse?

i actually like the UI as a PC user.

He is drama queen, didn't you read the OP?

Besides, if few self made changes within INI makes you feel you're doing Bethesda's job you better ask for a refund. I certainly would.

And please dont remind me of the old days when there was no means of patching. Some games worked others crashed and were unplayable, it was on case to case basis just as most bug nowadays are. Im 30 btw, playing since Spectrum 128.

I really dislike the UI, it's annoying to use and has some bugs. But it's not a deal breaker at all, it's manageable. Plus I know we will have UI mods soon enough people hate it that it will be a top priority for some.

Yall cats drive me nuts i have the game for the pc it does not bother about the UI you know because the rest of the game is good it has flaws yes but is it the end of the world hell know maybe its be but i rather enjoy playing the game with out complaing about the UI i dont really care i really dont some company made a game i like if its good its good just cause some things dont go my way in that game am i going to [censored] and complain about no, there are worst things out there than the that they gave people a great game to play i most people can tell that they made this game with love and care, and what i mean by that they made this game cause it is a game they would want to play, yes it was made for a console the UI i hate that myself but i look at it like this, gaming is in the buiness of making money if they are catering to the console is cause they want to eat to live take care of family. As a PC gamer i want the best PC experince possible but i know buisness they in it for art first and then money. UI get the hell out of here.Enyjoy the game and being that i am 30 years things like that dont get to me like that anymore, how i look is was this game worth my 60 bucks yes it is will i enjoy this game like other Elder Scrolls game and play damn near forever yes.

took me 10minutes to get used to the UI, I suggest you to take a break and relax because you seem way too upset about it imo.
Im sure mods will fix that first and foremost anyway so why bother ranting?

It's not quite unplayable, but it's close thanks almost entirely to the UI. I'm 18 hours in, and I'm not really enjoying the game. I'm forever exiting the game so I can search online for solutions to no end of problems, or I'm machetteing my way through the convoluted mess which is the barely-functional UI. Playing Skyrim is not fun, it's just frustrating. What a waste.

Additionally:

Re-mapping keys doesn't work properly. If I re-map keys and accidentally use a key which has already been assigned to something else, the 'something else' just gets negated and can't be manually re-mapped to another key. I spent hours unable to exit menus, drop items, give away items, etc etc until I figured out what the hell was happening. Keys once re-mapped do not update in the UI, either... so I'm forever being told to 'press X to do X', and nothing happens There's no workaround for this, and god help you if you want to re-map R (drop, give, multiple essential uses suddenly gone).

Also, I like to use the arrow keys on my keyboard to control forward, back, left right. However, because tab is the ONLY key which can be used to exit menus, I have to stop and move my hand ~30 centimetres every time I exit a conversation, exit from something I'm searching/looting, exit from the map, etc etc etc. It might not sound significant, but in fact it slows many things down to a painful crawl. I just end up avoiding searching/looting/conversing. After 5 hours of this stupid feature forcing me to use WSAD, I gave up and went back to the arrow keys, deciding instead to just put up with turning on the lights in my room so I can see the tab key (and thereby avoid bringing up the damn console, which is so, so irritating). For about 20 minutes I thought the game was tolerable again, but then I realised that several of my chosen keys were reserved for other things which couldn't be re-mapped, so now I have to spend half my life reaching for obscure keys. It's about as fluid and smooth as dying in a volcano.

I can't use dragon souls. I have two 'shouts' which I've learned, I have two dragon souls available to spend, but hovering over the inactive shouts and pressing R to 'buy' it, gives me a message saying that I need dragon souls in order to activate shouts. Well, I have 2, but they won't work. The shouts are rendered unusable. It now seems pointless fighting/defeating dragons. All I get is whatever pittance of stuff it is they're carrying, new shouts are out, dragons are pointless.

Changing spells or weapons, or even using potions or items is just too clumsy and [censored]. I use a couple of spells and gave up with spending 5 minutes changing to bows, swords or other spells. I spend most of my time avoiding any kind of conflict, because fighting/healing requires me to use the menus. I have very little left to do in the game.

I can't tell companions to carry items for me. I've dropped dozens/hundreds of items which I wanted to keep because the R key doesn't drop them. I can't give gifts, nothing happens when I press the button indicated.

The map is clumsy and confusing, the compass is a nightmare compared with Oblivion's. I often end up walking miles in the wrong direction. I feel disinclined to check the map frequently because that would mean using the hellish menus.

Clicking on an item sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, sometimes selects something else completely and sometimes does nothing at all. I must have wasted thousands of gold and hours of time on accidentally using items, saying things, accidentally dropping things, equipping things, selecting incorrect spells/armour, buying things I don't want, etc etc etc etc. Awful.

Steam. Oh god, why. It's unbearable. My net connection went down for 5 hours yesterday and as such it was impossible to play Skyrim because steam wouldn't launch in offline mode. If you want to play the game without a net connection, forget it. Offline mode can only be enabled while online. On restarting steam it automatically goes back into online mode. (I will never play another steam game. It ruined HL2 for me, Skyrim and HL2 are the only steam games I've ever played, I've always avoided it like death, now I'll avoid it at ALL costs and with all games, even if it is something as huge as a new elder scrolls game)

There are other problems... I should probably write them all down, but there are so many that I forget them. It's unusual that I can play for ten minutes without something going wrong. The whole game has been destroyed by the constant irritation of knowing that I'm soon gonna have to delve back into the festering pit which is the game's menu, and by steams total failure. All steam does in it's efforts to stop piracy, is to render the game unplayable to people who've legitimately bought it but can't go online 24/7.

I think Skyrim is otherwise sublime, but the enjoyment has been ruined and tainted for me. I'm 18 hours in so I may as well carry on, I've seen loads now so I don't want to wait for a mod then re-start the dame. Until now I'd hoped that I'd just get used to it all or I'd realise that I'm at fault in some way, but you can't read a single PC thread online atm it seems, without people complaining about the bugs and the horrific UI. It's a disaster, almost as if Bethesda built the UI at 23.45PM on 10.11.11. Surely it's not possible that they bothered to test it, no sane person would knowingly release something this bad.

I'm sorry that I bought the game and I wouldn't recommend that anyone wastes their money, their sanity and, most importantly, their experience of an otherwise excellent game, before all of these issues are out of the way and stop tainting the whole experience.

Agree with OP. Loved Morrowind, the game itself, the menus, inventory and so on. Oblivion started to give me headaches, completly felt like a [censored], like playing on a [censored] console with mouse and keyboard. And now Skyrim, the menus are completly horrible, as long as i don`t have to deal with the inventory i REALLY enjoy the game, but when i have to, i could throw up. The devs let us PC gamers down, FACT.

I love how console kids are quick to jump at PC gamers throats for complaining without even knowing the extent of problems for the PC.

20+ year long PC gaming only vet. I love the new UI and love the game overall.

Some things seem counter-intuitive, but overall, I'm fine with it.

You're not alone.

Yeah, the UI isn't really PC-optimized, and some of the actions are a bit awkward. Which is a shame.

But it's usable.


(The one that really gets me, and would even if I were using a controller, is the container interface. Every game I've ever played, you click on items to stick them in the box you're using. In Skyrim, I'm guzzling down potions, eating food & ingredients, equipping weapons & armor...... AAAAAARRRRRGGGGG! Seriously, who had the bright idea to let you USE things in the container interface?)

No beth is not jocking

I myself am playing on the PC and am loving the game and the interface. I play with a controller. Yes to some that is heresy, but the interface is really tuned for the controller. So the benefits to the PC player here are mods and better graphics. I disagree that the UI is an essential feature of RPGs. Roleplaying is an essential feature. Get over it, Bethesda is a multiplatform developer, and it just isn't cost effective to produce a specific UI that is totally different on the PC. Deal with it already.

Would anyone here really rather have Morrowind's PC-focused UI? I hated that damn UI. Yes it worked like desktop windows, but it was slow to do anything. In Skyrim I can click i and then s in quick succession to change my weapon. I love the speed of it.

This your first console port to a PC? They are all like this. Way Borderlands turned out a case in point.

The console market is much larger than the PC market. That's the way it is. Lucky to have a PC version.
There is no anti-PC conspiracy. Consumers prefer consoles by a great majority. So single player developers target consoles.
MMO games remain PC oriented at present for the most part. Check out Guild Wars 2.

A Possible Solution: Play Morrowind with a graphics update mod. Google around.

Or, play any other game made for PC. There are many of them to choose from.
Gog.com has a huge selection of older RPG games. And see the RPG category list
on Gamespot or IGN. No shortage of games out there.

And you can try to get your money back of course.

You honestly dont have a clue - I'll guess that you've never owned nor tried to use a 360 controller on the PC at all.

There are many games that function better on a controller, and Skyrim just happens to be one of them. The only people that disagree are those that are too elitist to even give using a controller a try on the PC.

Brainwashing? Tell me one other game that is better than TES on its release

When I come across one, I might change my opinion, but so far there havnt been any other games in this genre that come close to matching this series.

Why would I ever use a controller on a PC?

If I was going to buy a controller-based game, I'd get it for my console. I bought a PC game, it's not unreasonable to expect that they'd adjust the UI to work with the PC's interface devices.


(Beyond that, I'm absolutely terrible at first person games with controllers..... they're great for sports, arcade/action, platformers. But not first person stuff.)



....why do people keep mentioning Borderlands? Only problem the Borderlands UI had on PC was that the gun text font was a bit too large. Everything else worked fine with a m+k.

Whereas in the Skyrim UI, there are a number of places that it's obvious the scrolling behavior was designed specifically around "push the thumbstick to move in that direction" rather than "click-drag" or "scroll wheel". The skill & perk interface, for example.

ui is something u have to use constantly throughout the entire game, not so minor/

The UI is pretty [censored] for PC. The skill list is so [censored] annoying there is actually no optimal way of navigating it. Oh you want to see the next up skill by rolling middle mouse up once? I guess you want to see the 3rd highest one. Ok, now hit down once. Oh, I thought you meant you wanted to see this skill on AN ENTIRE DIFFERENT SKILL PAGE. It's [censored] gay.

The UI is what it is. Have they ever made a substantive change via patch to the UI of one of their games? Not to my knowledge. It is a shame and I don't understand the need to reinvent the wheel from previous games. Having a minimalist UI is one thing but compromising information relevant to the player for the sake of it is just stupid. Hot bars with icons, and timed notifications of buffs and debuffs are not a bad thing that needs to be relegated to some cryptic hidden tree. They should be on screen for usability sake. No sense in wasting one's breath though - the development team (or lake of it) had their priorities and there's no going back now. Again, the UI is what it is (short of modding).

As a console gamer, I respect what you've written here. The only PC player comments I've read so far are juvenile whinges aimed at the UI.
I have to disagree with you on one point, though. I think that consoles are limiting in their graphics, but that's it. Skyrim was changed to focus more on upgrading weapons and unlocking perks, and acrobatics and athletics were arguably just skills to spam to exploit the levelling system in Oblivion. I can't speak for Morrowind as I never played it, but it was a design choice for the series and not because of the limits of the consoles that these changes were made.