While it's less effective for characters that use everything at once, I find being able to equip two spells is a big improvement for mages compared to having two keys permanently attached to weapons and blocking that I'd never use. On the other hand, the next game almost certainly wont have dragon shouting, so that'll leave that extra key. Maybe they'll return to letting you have a quick spell there, and mages could just use three spells.

Good point. For pure mage characters, I'm sure this is an improvement. But even so, why not allow spells to go into the powers/shouts slot? Pressing that button could then work as a shortcut. Ideally, your hand would go down, come back up with the spell, cast the spell, go back down, and finally come back up holding the sword, or whatever else was there to begin with. It would be a very welcome gameplay enhancement (at least by me).

I have never used my kinect (xmas present) until now and I have to say the voice commands really eliminate this issue. Now I can put my clothing choices in the two hot keys and use voice commands for weapons and spells. I rarely have to pause my game anymore. I have to commend Bethesda on this addition. Well done.

I have the console version on 360, I don't have Kinect. My problem is that when you access the favorites menu, the game pauses, you can't switch spells quickly like you could in Oblivion with the Spell Wheel. Is there anyway to switch them quickly without pausing?

^this.

I really hate the whole long pause thing as it ruins whatever I was getting immersed in. I don't mind going through the long loops of menus to change a whole equipment as that's something you generally do while out-of-combat, idling somewhere safe. However, having to click through like 4-5 panels to select one measly weapon, spell, shout or potion then switch back again is tedious, annoying and makes even the quickest battles long-drawn-out. Horrible.

You either pick one weapon combination (be it melee weapon, shield, magic or bow) and go with it for the whole fight which makes playing anything but purist character (ex. pure fire mage, pure swordsman, etc.) annoying or suffer through every fight. The same can be applied to potions and poisons, making them completely redundant. The time it takes me to drink a stamina replenishing potion after a succesful dodging or dip my dagger into a bottle of poison is so broken that killing everything in sight without those things is twice as fast and less immersion breaking.

The Kinect update fixed the issues for me also. Gotta say the topic heading is a bit misleading.

I like that Skyrim at least has a control for sprinting, I threw in my Oblivion disk a few weeks ago loaded up my old character his speed was at least 100 might of been fortified a bit above it was way to fast for me sat there asking myself how I ever played that character. Although it'd be nice if jumping was an option during sprint.