I'm a PC gamer and hear nothing but complaints about it.

The mouse is fine; I have it set to high DPI and get very little lag.

I can hotkey everything I need to; I only ever have to go to the favorites menu in combat to use potions since I won't waste keys on them.

The game UI is very unintrusive and the menus work great.

It would be nice if I could bind more than 8 keys but that hardly justifies the ridiculous amounts of complaining I've seen. What EXACTLY is the problem with the PC UI?

People just need a reason to whine.

If my wife (who's never touched a PC game in her life, let alone a Bethesda game) can figure it out, I'm sure anyone can.

Oh, the minority always yell, stomp and march. For the large majority of folks the UI is great.

I agree. When it comes to menus and HUD I'll take Skyrim any day over Oblivion. I thought Oblivion's tabbed menu system - with its tabs within tabs - was the most horribly-designed PC UI I have ever seen in a video game.

Many people don't realize that you can hotkey items in the favorites menu, and this has resulted in some of the griping.

Speaking personally my problem isn't with the interface itself, but with using it. It's annoying that some places you cannot use the mouse, for example - generally any buttons appearing at the button cannot be clicked, and while the local maps can be dragged with the mouse the world map cannot. The interface also has problems if you reassign some keys. I always use [tab] as my use key, but if you do this with Skyrim there are a few places where it can't handle it: if you read a book, for example, you have no option to take it.

Thankfully these are problems that can all be patched. Looking beyond it I like the UI quite a bit.

Theres nothing wrong with it, and mods will make it perfect, like they do for every game

Yeah, I'm not sure why there's so much complaint about it, only thing I would have loved to have is a character portrait like in Oblivion. Other than that I really like it, it's clean, it's simple and works wonders!

for the world map, just dragging your mouse to the edge of the screen should move the map in that direction, no reason to click and drag. at least that's how it works for me.

i'm OK with the whole set-up. i'll probably make a few tweaks after playing for a bit more but we'll wait and see what mods come out. really mainly interested in where certain things show up...like active effects on the magic menu...things like that

Actually, just moving the mouse off the edge in any direction moves the map...

I guess it's not some huge over-reaching problem I'm going to run into; just some people being dramatic about small things.

So far I'm loving almost everything about the game. I kinda wish companions could be killed, though. I like having them but even playing on Master it feels like I'm cheating. I guess I'll just stick to summoned companions.

I'm sorry, but you don't magically not have input lag when everyone else does, and the fact is you know this or you wouldn't have had to admit to there still being a little. There shouldn't be any, especially when not everyone had a high DPI mouse, let alone the fact that many generic (and the most prevalent) mice only have one setting.


Yes, in your magical world the issues with the menus don't exist. I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. Even reviewers have noted that the menus will exit out or select the wrong option when clicking on another option entirely, others have noted that something the menus selections fail to change or get get stuck on a selection refusing to move from. I'm so happy that you and a few other people magically don't experience the various very real issues with the UI that even professional reviewers have outlined in detail, not even counting the forumites having issues with it.

What exactly is the problem with it? Read a review. There are entire lists.

The game is great, but pretending that the flaws it does have 'don't exist' does help anyone. It's a great game with a few flaws that Bethesda need to know about, and that are likely quite fixable, but they are real and well documented flaws at this point.

I love the game, but only a mindless fanatic can't see that it has its issues. Instead of going, "You guys have problems? I don't so there must not be any problem." how about just lending your support to the people that do have actual technical problems instead of just making it harder for them by lending support to the idea that, "If it's broke for you, it's fine as long as it doesn't affect me."

My problem is the hotkeys glitch out sometimes. Think it's buggy, Bethesda needs to fix this.

You can hotkey spells and weapons? probably just one at a time right

how do you do this? I only see options to hotkey general commands

For a PC game it boggles my mind that you cannot navigate the UI with the mouse alone.

There are plenty of PC games out there with moderate input lag; it's hardly anything to get bent out of shape over. If you can adjust the DPI in your mouse, like most people who game on PC, it's a COMPLETE non-issue.
Those sound like MODERATELY annoying bugs that many people obviously haven't been experiencing. Do they warrant mentioning? Yes. Are the ridiculous dramatics and crying necessary? Not in the slightest.

I'm not pretending the game is flawless; I've run into a few bugs myself, they just haven't involved the interface. I'm saying I expected much worse considering the extent of the outrage. I guess people are just really dramatic or want to seriously overstate this issue for some reason.

I love it. Simple but beautiful. And functional.

The PC UI is far more clunky and awkward than it would be if it had been designed as a PC interface, not a console interface.
It works ok, but you can see how much better it could have been.

In my opinion it is not that big a deal, but typical of a console orientated development that occasionaly makes things more difficult than they need be to match the console controller button mashing instead of a more logical PC mouse click interface. Why try to shoe horn a Console interface in when a PC interface would be easier to code.

It's not horrible, but there are some obvious places where it's clear it was designed for a console controller and not a mouse. Things that would work much better with the "push the thumbstick to move" vs "click and drag". Stuff like that.

It's like you're not quite using the right tool for the job - you can get things done, but they don't feel like they're working quite right.



(Beyond that, I've got some little issues with the keys assigned for certain actions, and how they change in some cases. Like the container interface. You click on items to remove them from the box. But if you click on items you're carrying, instead of them going in the box, you "use" them - I've lost a number of good potions & alchemy ingredients that way. And then there's how "R" is "put one item in the box", but also "take ALL items from the box." Yeah, that's lead to a few cases of having to shove a whole lot of crap back in the container.)

No major problems on my end. Nothing I'd feel like really complaining about. The only thing I noticed is that the mouse feels a bit clunky, I guess that's the "lag" that people are referring to? My solution to that was to use the WASD keys to move about the menus, instead of clicking on everything. I actually prefer to use the direction buttons anyway.

Moving about the perk trees is kind of annoying at times too. Sometimes it jumps to another tree when you are trying to click on a certain star, or when you press a direction button it skips across a few stars to a different tree.

Besides the minor bugs and glitches (to be expected from a TES game) I have exactly zero complaints.
I love the UI, and I love the way favorites work after I figured them out and it was really easy to do so.
The game play is good, the quests are normal I suppose with some nice story to some. The combat is good for a game of this nature and the level of detail is also great.

I honestly think this game is way ahead of oblivion and feels more like morrowind than oblivion. I love it so far.

I use the mouse for everything when I'm in my menus. I use the scroll wheel to move up and down and select with my cursor. I do not use the keyboard to navigate my menus at all.

I'm sorry it apparently isn't working for you. If some players are experiencing legitimate glitches with the interface Bethesda should fix it. But it's simply incorrect to imply that everyone is unable navigate the menus with the mouse alone.

The "drop item" command is tied to the "sheathe weapon" button, but this isn't clear anywhere. Not long into the game I did a take-all and accidentally got over-encumbered. The on-screen display in my inventory told me to press 'R' to drop an item, but this didn't work and there wasn't an easy way for me to figure out what would work. This made the game mostly unplayable (because you move so slow) until I was able to research it and figure it out. Very frustrating when I stayed up past midnight to decrypt and play right away. Not the end of the world, no, but considering that keymapping ought to be a rather simple UI element, it's a bit frustrating.

Also, annoying that the controls for interacting with a book are different when you access it fro a table vs. from your inventory, and this is not on purpose but is again a keymapping bug. If you use a gamepad or default keymappings, and have a halfway decent rig to avoid the mouse lag, then the interface is probably fine. The only remaining annoying part is the obvious console design that pushes you through awkward steps to navigate the UI that shouldn't be necessary from a keyboard/mouse.

Oh, just remembered the by far most annoying thing I've come across. Not sure if it's interface related necessarily, but:

You have the option the poison your weapon in Skyrim. I usually hold a sword in my left and magic in my right. And when I try to use a poison on my sword it says "Must equip weapon first" as if I didn't have my sword equipped. To poison my sword I have to put it in my right hand, poison it, then switch back to my left.

Am I correct in that this is a bug? or am I missing something?

I use a controller too on my PC so.......yeah.....I love the interface now. Works smooth!

Why is there no quick text showing which favourite you selected? I press 6 it would be nice to see a quick text stating what you just selected, then let it fade away in 3 sevonds or so.

Why does inventory say I need to press E to take items when I remapped Activate from E to Spacebar?

Why are items not categorized inside containers like they are in inventory or on traders?

The UI is simple and clean, but could use improvements.