Hi!

Today I'd want to discuss the presence and lack of 2D menu/inventory art in TES games. I have only barely palyed Arena and Daggerfall, and never Redguard or Battlespire, so I'll focus on main three titles.

Morrowind had countless item icons, tribal-styled skill and active effect icons. All of them felt so "in-place" in the game.

Oblivion had countless icons too, including these guild ranks etc, and the menu itself, while being clumsy when navigating, was eye candy,

Now we have Skyrim, and this game, besides 3D item and spell visualisations, has pretty no menu art. I really miss it, I'm really fond of all these tabs, icons, paper-dolls, stats, frames etc.

Share your thoughts.

Edit: typos.

I miss the paper doll and I like icons for everything too. Too spreadsheety for the marketed audience.

Totally agree. I can't understand what Bethesda was thinking when they ditched the inventory and paper doll for the Aero themed list in Skyrim.

I honestly don't miss the icons in Skyrim. Maybe it has something to do with Morrowind's inventory just being a big two-dimensional array of icons.

Miss my stats and paper doll =(

Edit: Since they took the time to do 3D animation for all your gear, why didn't they do a 3D paper doll as well? Silly.

the whole interface is really atrocious. Art & icons are one way they could have made identifying things much easier, e.g. stolen items in your inventory are hard to see.

I would much rather have an opaque menu system as I think the compositing also causes (or contributes) the delay between menus.

I miss icons for things, but we do get 3d views of everything. One thing I really miss was guild ranking pictures. In fact I miss guild rankings in general. The guilds this time around went to quickly.

There's this mod that adds some icons to the inventory, pretty useful but the modder didn't finish it.. but still, easier to navigate things just to look at icons (with a bit of label of course, not like everything icon like in Morrowind ) I guess they were too focused with everything going 3-D that they sort of forget that 2-D can help too. (e.g. roads on the world map!!! -- thank god for the available mod, modders FTW!)

This isn't an RPG anymore. It's a first person fantasy action-adventure game.


We'll just have to deal with it.

Skyrim's menu's are stream lined. one thing i hated about oblivion was i took forever to go through all the categories and sub categories then scroll and try to find the item you need. That's why Skyrim's menu is like that, so it's not so cluttered.

though sometimes i do miss Oblivion's journel like approach to the menu system.

SKILL MENU! SKILL MENU! COME ON!

Maybe the inventory menus are a little lacking in art, nevermind that they are way more fluid than previous titles, but seriously, you can't have possible seen the skill menu yet. I'm sorry if I'm coming off a little strong, but I was so blown away by that thing...the constellations, the GORGEOUS backgrounds...I can't figure out what else you want man

It looks nice and works well for perks, but it's a bear to navigate.

This is an interesting post because it perfectly describes my feeling but with exactly the opposite conclusion. I can't find jack in Skyrim's menus.

Yeah, I agree with you. In Oblivion, I could find anything.. using alphabet, weight, value, armor/damage rating, and category. In Skyrim, we just have categories.. unless it's in a chest. Then, there is NO organization. How is that better??

I love the inventory/menu system, personally, but I do miss the paper doll.

At least the inventory is alphabetized. If I store my extra stuff in a container, I feel like I have to check every single item to make sure I don't accidentally skip over whatever it is I'm looking for.

whats "paper doll"

Visualization of a character in inventorey, with all his/her armor and weapons.

None of the Elder Scrolls games are pure RPGs. The defining feature of all Elder Scrolls games, from Arena to Skyrim, has been that they are hybrid first-person action/adventure/RPGs.

In fact the reason I like Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim so much is precisely because they are not pure roleplaying games. I find their mix of action/roleplaying to be more interesting.

I think it's due to the fact that these days there are all sorts of crazy screen resolutions, including dual monitor setups. It would be too hard to design 2D art that would look good at all resolutions. Having said that, there is no excuse for not having a paper doll .

I played skyrim before oblivion when I played skyrim the menu i thought was brilliant but on oblivion it was very confusing I like the icons but the rest of it was not as good as skyrim menu my own opinion I liked the skyrim menu more than oblivion maybe if they updated it I would choose oblivion menu.

Having played Morrowind, then Skyrim nine years later, then Oblivion after (just a little bit before I decided to go back and play through Morrowind first), I can say that I much prefer Skyrim's menu system as I can navigate it far more quickly which helps as I'm playing on a console and have to dip in and out of it quite a lot.

I did like the cultural art on Oblivion and Morrowind, but there are stylistic touches everywhere in Skyrim too - it's just that the menu contents are displayed in an opaque list rather than in its own screen with its own background. In case the OP didn't realise, the arrows themselves have a Northern European look (I'd have said Celtic, but as we're in Nord country I guess I'm mistaken) as do all the selection boxes and so on.

I think all three games have beautiful styles, though Skyrim did sacrifice some art for functionality; personally I'm more than happy with the trade off as I found Morrowind's menus to be a bit convoluted (I can understand them, before anybody starts getting conceited about it, but they're not exactly a triumph in design).

Oh, and drop the crap about "the previous games were too speadsheety for Skyrim's audience" - this has nothing whatsoever to do with spreadsheets, you're just saying that for the sake of it.

I fail to see anywhere art was sacrificed for functionality in Skyrim. More the converse is true.

There is nothing you can do faster in Skyrim's UI than you could in Oblivions. I never played MW on console , but still play it on PC, but I know that bartering in OB was way faster & more sensible than how skyrim does it.

There are way to many button presses required to go from the menu areas, and some are impossible to return to the 'core' menu area.

FONV's bartering menu with the PC and vendor inventories side-by-side and sortable were infinitely faster than the tedious in, out, down, in, out, up cycle needed to review inventories in skyrim.

Here is the thing:

in skryim a 5 y/o can learn everything about interface in like 15 minutes. But you can't do anything efficiently with it.

In Oblivion it takes an advlt some time to really remember where everything in the UI is, but once you do you can very quickly switch between your quest log, inventory, map, magic etc etc etc... This works very well for a game where you are going to spend a LOT of time playing it.

I would rather have to learn a bit of control in order to gain efficiency later.

But that isn't just the 'artisitic' limits of skyrims interface its the stupid implementation.