I have to agree, this interface is pretty terrible. First, the keybinds make no sense. Especially since most of us have played Fallout 3 and you changed them for no apparent reason.

- "Esc" is universal for "close this window", not Tab. It's especially confusing since it doesn't even say "Press Tab to close this" anywhere. I was stuck after opening the tutorial container at the beginning for like 10 minutes before figuring out which key to press. It's a tutorial about opening containers... you should at least tell the player how to exit the container afterwards.
- Changing keybinds doesn't work. I tried changing some of my keybinds and half the menu functions stopped working. This was reported in the bugs forum, and the current solution is "use the defaults until it's patched", which is unacceptable. You should have at least done a quick test pass to see if changing key binds worked since you include the option.
- Even if changing keybinds worked, you still display the default key in messages of what to push rather than the bound key. This is pretty amateur; almost every game in existence shows the remapped key (including Fallout 3, for instance). I saw one dev response saying that it would have been too hard and used too much video memory to display the correct keys, and frankly, that's [censored].
- Too many random functions are bound to the same key when they should be separate. For example, it would make sense to press the "Favorites" button in the menu to set something as a Favorite. But instead you have to push the "Change to 3rd person view" button. Why?
- I can't help but think there could be a less confusing way of showing what's equipped in your main hand and off hand than using R/L when you push L/R on the mouse in the menus. Seeing "R" makes me subconciously want to push the RMB, not the LMB. I'm sure I'm not the only one. It kind of makes sense that you made the actual combat buttons backwards, but I feel like the menu issue could have been solved by using "1" and "2" icons or "Main" and "Offhand" instead of "Push L to set R" and "Push R to set L".

Other annoying keybinds:
- My super duper pet peeve so far: E is used to activate something AND to grab something. If you press E slightly too long when trying to read a book or open a container (like half a second instead of a quarter of a second) you end up grabbing the thing and moving it around instead of using it. In all previous games, you used Z to grab... why was this changed? Most of the time, you don't notice you grabbed it, so it looks like nothing happened, and you sit there pressing the button over and over to try to get it to work. PLEASE change this.
- In Fallout, E was open and close container, which was good. E as open but Tab for close is annoying.
- In Fallout, you press Forward to lockpick, in Skyrim, you press Left (which inexplicably turns the lock to the right). Why change this, when it's the same exact system? It just seems designed to confuse.
- In Fallout, you press A to loot all, in Skyrim you press R. Again, why change it? "A for All" made sense, what does the R stand for?

Next, the mouse:
- No hardware mouse support. Really? Is this 1982?
- For some reason inexplicably fails half the time when trying to click on things, and requires scrolling with the middle wheel to move around menus that should be clickable.

The menus themselves:
- There's some annoying buginess in the side menus where the word that's "big" and highlighted isn't actually the thing that's selected, or sometimes one thing is "big" but a different one is highlighted, and sometimes niether of those actually correspond to what is selected. They also seem to drift off-center after a while, where the menu will be in the top half of the screen and not want to come back down.
- The skills menu is pretty but confusing to navigate around in. Sometimes you have to click the mouse and sometimes you have to drag, and you can't see what you're clicking on so you sort of random click in empty space to try to see what the other perks are.
- Related to above, but Esc should be "Close window" until you have no windows open, and then it should be "Open system menu", like in almost every other game. It's dumb to open the main menu on top of a different window like a container or the inventory, especially since if you do that you can't even use half the things in the main menu (no saving while your inventory is open?). If you're going to disable half the menu if you open it while something else is open anyway, it seems like you know the player isn't going to purposefully do that, so why make it so confusing? Just have Esc close the current window like in your previous games.

Anyway... I think I'm all ranted out now. It's a really good game otherwise; it's just so disappointing that it's hamstrung by such a clunky and confusing interface.

It's surprising because it requires such minor changes, but the lack of hotkeys on the console versions of Skyrim is crippling. At an absolute minimum you need to have a melee weapon, ranged weapon and heal hotkeyed. You have 2 hotkeys. One key is bound to a redundant action so it would have been trivial to get 3 hotkeys, if you were going with 2 you could make them toggles to get up to 4. You could very easily make the run button an alternator to get more hotkeys which could get up to 6 and getting 8 would be easy enough if you dropped one of the 4 different menu keys. Playing with a mage on the consoles just wrecks the atmosphere completely as you need to pause constantly to keep up with all the spells.

I completly agree and having just read hrough some German forums I think that the majority of players would agree as well. This is definitly the worst interace I've ever seen. To be honest - the intercace is so anoying that I even don't feel like playing anymore. What the hell did you think when you were designing this?

I have to agree that the interface in this game is lacking. In an apparent effort to streamline the look of the menus, they have failed to include a whole lot of functionality. Menu screens have minimal text and options to click, but take up the entire screen. It's a huge waste of space.

Clicking the item menu and getting a simple, singular list of objects that takes up 60% of the screen is totally ineffective.

Members need to stop flaming each other in this thread.

I havent yet even found the button to hotkey things in hands

Morrowind all you had to do was Left-click once, and you had access to everything. Map, Inventory, Spells, everything. All with one click. Morrowind's interface was fantastic on PC.

I miss the 'paper doll' - seeing my character equipping armour, etc - though you do get a view if you go to 3rd person view before entering the menu.

I found the chargen a bit fiddly but quite happy with the in-game interface.

What about using the favourite system? I much prefer it to oblivion and using the D pad. It pauses gameplay but you can pick your stuff quickly, very handy.

My experience with the mouse has been this, it seems like in some menu items, like FOOD for example, when you click it to open, it closes the menu instead of opening it, it is almost as if the FIELDS that you click in are not complete, yet if you move the mouse arrow over slightly it opens the menu when you click as opposed to closing it. This is probably the worse thing I have seen in the game. I had 2 CTDs are well once when fighting a dragon.

Mouse works but the Ui is atrocious... no character doll, I have to backtrack to go from one section to another, and I'd like a proper hand drawn map.

Thats so funny because all you PC gamers were like OH ITS MADE FUUUR DAH PC U CONSOLE GAMERZ CNT HANDLE DAH POWER..... lol owned.

I'm really enjoying this game, but the UI can really be frustrating to use. As others have said, instead of clicking on something in the menu, you need to use the wheel mouse and hit enter to select. Also when using the wheel mouse, you don't know exactly what you're selecting sometimes because it's not highlighted on the correct item. Having to switch between mouse and keyboard really slows down your gameplay, especially when you're in a tight squeeze.

Yup. Worst interface ever made. There is no challenger, Skyrim has toppled them all.

Giev me mods nao!

The interface is wonky on PC. Clearly it was designed with consoles in mind. It's obvious why, and it has little to do dumbing down content. Fact is that we PC users are infinitely more flexible than a game pad. So I'm willing to put up with it. Bethesda does need to look into some mouse support though. I'm using a logitech and it's not always responding to the left or right click. As far as worst UI ever....I think the original Gothic game still wins that award, and let's not forget Fable 2 either lol.

Lol what?! If no one ever criticized anything how would ANYTHING become better than it originally was. They would just keep all the flaws in everything if no one ever mentioned them.

And tbh i prefer morrowinds ui...using a mouse and keyboard id rather have all info in front of me at once.

Also i think op mentioned the game was great.

If you are using a 360 controller then watch this video:

Even though it has me showing and verbally explaining the problems, I do explain how to set things in it:
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=ePVVERC_nvs

You can do most everything you need to do in the menus using 100% keyboard. WASD to navigate menus, E to select (when it says Enter to accept, you can still use E). This is much faster than using the mouse. Don't believe me? Anyone familiar with the Linux operating system will have heard of the many window managers that are designed to be used sans mouse (ie. everything is done via keyboard shortcuts). Why? Because it is FASTER, aka more productive. Example:

I press T to wait. With the mouse, I have to clumsily click on the tiny bar and drag it to the right until I am at the right spot, then click on wait. With the keyboard, I simply strafe right, then press E to wait. So much faster and convenient. This was not an option in Fallout 3, and I hated it; the pipboy is an atrocious user interface. Of course, there are some aspects of the interface which clearly svck, such as the hotkeying (why can't we hotkey sets instead of individual items?). No arguments there.

Those of you complaining about the interface, forget about the mouse, and practice using the keys. You will thank me later.

Bogus link, just fyi

Eric here,

Download GlovePie and use this code (if you use arrow keys)

Key.A = Keyboard.LeftShift
Key.R = Keyboard.NUMPAD1
Key.F = Keyboard.NUMPAD7
Key.Q = Keyboard.NUMPAD4

Morrowinds ui shows infinitely more information at once...you would rather have less? You say several exactly the same icons like it would be impossible for bethesda to update it slightly to make them more unique looking?

I like the interface its the crashing and spazing out textures i dont like

Umm... you know we paid $60 for the game. The only thing we can do now is warn other's from buying it or get Bethesda to patch the game. You can't return games like you can other commodities that fail to live up to the hype.

Aww, I just started using the hotkey in oblivion! Oh well.

Warn others from buying it? I hope you mean buying it until it's patched.