I am just wondering what other people's opinions here are of the UI (User Interface) in Bethesda's games such as primarily the Elder Scrolls series from Morrowind to Skyrim and also the Fallout 3 series of games.

I have to admit despite loving all the games in terms of quests, open ended exploration, items, NPCs, story lines and so on Bethesda's (intentional or unintentional) inability to design a friendly user interface with configurable options and numerous alternative hotkey mappings does frustrate me somewhat and hinders the overall enjoyment of the games I feel. Playing Skyrim does have some UI improvements which I was happy to see implemented but it's still no way to a standard of liking I like to see.

What are your opinions of Bethesda's UI in games (with any suggestions for improvements)?

I take it that moderately satisfied is better then satisfied as it is higher so i voted for that, But IRL it is below it.

Yup my bad, edited.

But Bethesda's UI has changed from game to game. So am I satisfied of Morrowind, largely unaffected by Oblivions UI or heavily disappointing in Skyrims terrible UI?

Didn't like Morrowind's, Oblivion's was better, Skyrim's is great.

Skyrim's UI is an improvement over Morrowind and Oblivion but to call it great I find hard to believe. :mellow:

Morrowind's UI was excellent from a PC user's perspective. You could see all of your major stats and skills, a sizable chunk of your spell list, a major category of your equipment, and a world map, all at the same time, with additional info available by hovering, scrolling, or selecting a different tab. You could resize each of the 4 sections, or minimize them individually if you didn't want them cluttering up the screen. I've seen a lot of fantasy/sci-fi games, and MW's interface was one of the most usable I can recall.

Oblivion's interface, on the other hand, was obviously a console port (probably harder to use with rodent and keys on a PC than with a controller), and you had to select each category, then each page, then scroll up or down in order to see just one bit of information. To get a good overview of the character took 20-30 clicks and 2-3 minutes, compared to 2-3 clicks and 15 seconds in MW. I was NOT pleased.

Supposedly, Skyrim's worse. I don't know, because the Steam requirement means that I have no practical way to play it.

The poll has no fitting choice, because I found one really good and another really bad. Do I call that Average? [ Thanks, the added choice works much better. ]

I picked very dissatisfied. I hated it. I can not play it on my friends PC neither can he. It also isn't very good on my ps3. Though it's a lot better on the console than the computer. It's a shame how poorly it was done. I'm sure they meant well and while it was innovative just isn't practical.

UI design... I've never been fully happy with any of them.

Morrowind had too many quirks (using alchemy was counter-intuitive, for example), and the item icons get hard to distinguish at higher resolutions. Also, you had to mouse-over to get information. So it displayed so much that it didn't display enough.

Oblivion displays everything. in 42 pt. font. It has a lot fewer options, but most of the quirks in Morrowind are gone. So in a lot of ways, the features it does contain are better, but the usage of real estate is exactly inverted: you get the information you want, but only for a dozen items. It needed a smaller font on PCs, in which case it could have displayed even more information on more items in the same amount of space. Other than that, the tabs were at least usable...

Something Skyrim's interface lacks entirely. Usability. Navigation is inconsistant, the mouse wheel only works on some menus, and clicking in the wrong place boots you. Oh, and you have a random chance of picking an option you didn't highlight. I have to use two different menus to see my journal and manage my items, and visit the interface twice if I want to change gear AND magic. "Lacking the basic functionality I expect of a UI" is too kind of a summary for what we got with Skyrim.

I may be alone here, I liked Oblivion's UI probably the best. It was neatly organised into tabs. I only had a few issues with it like the fact that you couldn't use arrows for it on PC when I wanted, that the tabs didn't change over instantly, the lack of a seperate key option, and the size of the items in the list. I don't like Skyrim's very much, it doesn't feel like an RPG and it doesn't feel very intuitive, and it gives me RSI trying to navigate with the mouse (obviously designed for keys/buttons). You have to go through the heirachy to get what you want every time, can't just press the menu button and open the last tab you had. It annoys me that I need seperate menus to check stuff like my stats, bounty and stuff, simply because they wanted that 4 direction menu thing.

Satisfied. Only liked Morrowind′s, but my demands on the UI are not that incredible high.

Mixed, if only because Morrowind has the best UI, and then it steadily went downhill.

Skyrim I don't even need to point out has a horrid UI. It's obviously built for consoles, so my dissatisfaction while playing on PC is going to be more than obvious. Removal of hotkeys for a "favourites" list? Yuck.

Skyrim's user interface is quick, easy-to-navigate, time-efficient and clean-looking. I can't even begin to describe how much of an improvement it is over the UI in Oblivion.

Morrowind - the game has a great UI designed for use with mouse&keyboard; as such, it fails quite terribly when forced to be navigated with the Xbox controller.

Oblivion - the game's UI is quite average, really. It is decent when navigating with a controller, but less than decent when navigating with mouse&keyboard.

Fallout 3 - I love this game's UI. It might be rather similar to Oblivion's in terms of the use of tabs, but I can't help but enjoy its neat integration with the game (the UI being the Pipboy, of course).

Skyrim - this UI is really something. It's cumbersome with a controller, and I can only imagine it being much more cumbersome with mouse&keyboard. It has some nice ideas behind it, but it just doesn't quite cut it in reality.

Morrowind - I thought the menues were fantastic. Best of the last three games. The HUD was uninspiring.

Oblivion - the single worst menu design in any game I have ever played. The HUD, while functional, was butt-ugly. Overall, worst design ever.

Skyrim - Much better than Oblivion, but not as good as Morrowind. To my eye it looks way too modern, as though it belonged in a Mass Effect game. The white fonts are bland. The journal leaves something to be desired, though: there is not nearly enough information on quests, particularly Misc quests. The HUD, on the other hand, is the best HUD Bethesda has ever made. It is sheer genius: the bars appear when needed, disappear when not needed. The compass is the only thing that mars the HUD for me. I disabled mine. 90% of my game time is spent completely HUD-less. It's beautiful.

For PC, Morrowind's was the best IMO. Daggerfall's was standard for its era.

Oblivion was OK on console, but really annoying on PC. Skyrim's is just too annoying for many reasons: too many layers, just as much scrolling as Oblivion anyway, no 3d character model, very minimal amount of information on the screen once you bring up your inventory, etc. etc.

Ever since Morrowind Bethesda has failed to make a UI that isn't consolized. It is getting really irritating using a UI that is designed for a console (not knocking consoles!) on a PC. Skyrims is definitely the worst though

Both Morrowind and Oblivion had decent UIs. Skyrim's is terrible.

This.

I actually liked Oblivion's interface best, though I enjoyed those in the previous three games moderately. Skyrim's is fortunately being reworked, but as it stands, it is the most counter-intuitive, uninformative game interface I've seen in quite some time--and I've been playing computer games since 1982.

very dissatisfied

As a PC user, I I found Morrowind's UI close to perfect. The last 2 are very bad, but I somehow got used to Skyrim's UI relatively fast, while Oblivion's remains hellish to use for me.

Now, if Bethesda could at least fix the consistency issues mentioned above, the UI would be fine by me. (Nothing great, but at least usable)


EDIT : also, I think you guys should mention on what system you are playing because the type of controller is really important for the UI.

Thanks for the interesting replies so far, I like to add one thing that has annoyed me about Bethesda's UI design is the lack of categorization of items and loot, in Skyrim I'm forever scrolling down to find an item or weapon, though the favourites option in Skyrim is a welcome improvement but still needs to be worked on. Plus lack of information on screen disappoints me a bit such as time, power/shout timers, active affects and so on.

I don't know if purists or minimalists will like the idea of on screen button clicking from a toolbar in future Elder Scrolls game?

Satisfied; my only gripe being that I can't hide the compass without hiding the stat bars as well.

How would you go about doing this without deactivating mouselook? This works in MMO's where you */targetlock and spam abilities from a hotbar. But in TES mouselook is a necessity IMO.

Too often toolbars tend to make me feel like a technician sitting at a control panel. Especially at later levels when the number of buttons increases dramatically. I find myself spending more time anxiously staring at rows of buttons, waiting for cool down timers to finish, than I do actually enjoying the experience of playing the game.

I go in the other direction: I disabled my compass in Skyrim. 90% of the time I have no HUD on my screen at all. That's perfect for me. The fewer bars and buttons and icons on my screen the better I like it.

Daggerfall's UI was alright for it's era and that is all I can say about it, since it feels like a lifetime since I last played Daggerfall.
Morrowind's UI was handy at times, especially the item inventory menu, but sometimes it felt like an information overload.
Oblivon's UI was clunky but fun. It had it's annoyances (and looked pretty fugly), but it gave a sense of fairness in mind to both PC & console players.
Skyrim's UI is well.. oversimplified. Design seems to have taken precedence here. And it annoys me that I've got to go to a seperate menu to access quest info.

So well.. I've got mixed opinions on the subject. Overall Bethesda seems to hit the 'alright' mark for UI, generally. They never perfect it though.