Or does opening your inventory still pause the game? While I like that I'm safe from literally anything that may hurt me or destroy the world while I'm choosing what weapon I want to use for the upcoming battle, I find it to be just a bit unrealistic or ( as many people around here would say :rolleyes: ) to take away from the immersion.

In a real battle, your foe isn't going to stand idly by while you decide what equipment to bring with you. :facepalm:

I doubt the inventory would be easy/quick enough to navigate to make this a good idea. They haven't said anything but I assume the game pauses as before.

In a real battle, you also take out your weapon on reflex, not looking at a list of all the weapons you have.

... In the real world you also cannot equip a set of armor in a split second either. You want to have to wait for your character to suit up? Which in some cases depending on the armor could require the aid of someone else.

There are certain areas where convenience and gameplay should win over realism.

This. With the "flip through 10 pages to find what you're after" chump UIs we get, pausing the game while in inventory isn't "an issue of immersion" but "an issue of survival."

A TES style menu is already too much of an abstraction to run it in real time, that would raise more issues than it solves. Personally I find it easy to rationalise this away. So what, my character waves her hands and new armour appears from her magical dimensional pocket? Well... yeah, it is a fantasy RPG, that's really not that far fetched.

There's nothing more annoying than having 10 guys attack you while you are checking out your loot.

I believe Todd Howard mentioned the action paused when you brought up the menu in either a video or the GI podcast.

Better not be in real time ^^ my inventory is always way to massive... I'd die before I found that last potion I needed.

As with everything number or menu related in the elder scrolls, the menus are simply a way of performing activities. In real life you may think "hmm, I'm going to draw this out of my bag" in elder scrolls that needs to be done via a menu because the game can't read your mind.

To reiterate on a similar subject, skills and skill points are simply a numerical way of expressing differences between people. If in real life you took 10 people and judged them for their strength and endurance attributes, you'd be able to average out such things in a numerical fashion. Just because something has numbers or menus doesn't mean it's not realistic; a menu is a way of expressing action, and player attributes are a way of expressing skill intensity in a non-abstract way.

The important thing to realize is that we are getting a decent hotkey system this time. Didn't it say somewhere that you could potentially hotkey every item and spell you have if you felt like it? So it is more a matter of self restraint. Before you go adventuring take a set of armor, some potions, and a couple weapons. Hotkey things you will need to swap out on the fly.

Anyone else ever use one of the mods that allowed you to equip entire sets of armor and a weapon with one hotkey? That was nice in Oblivion, you bring clothes for moving speedily and then when you find an enemy you instantly have your daedric armor and Akaviri katana ready

Menus in realtime would be crazy fiddly.

I would, however, like it if every action taken in the menu (at least if in combat) took some time to perform after closing the menu. That way, there's a disadvantage to using items / changing armour in battle, and it's more important to plan ahead a bit.

This makes sense. Changing armor really shouldn't be one of those things you can do in combat at all. it should give you the "cannot change armor while in combat" message.

I miss Morrowind inventory (

If you find it immersion breaking, then just rationalize it as magic. After all this is an Elder Scrolls game where magic is all around our character. I don't see why mages would not create a pause time sachel for the wayward adventureror.

I myself like the pause while looking through my backpack system. While this may be immersion breaking to some, it is a necessity of gaming. I have yet to see a system that did the "real-time looking through your backpack" thing properly.

Why are people bringing more than their best pair of armor anywhere anyways? "Hmm I think I'll wear my full daedric, but as it gets closer to the evening I will change into my steel set. And after cocktail hour I shall wear chainmail with fur accessories."

I suppose you might bring some extra gear if you have some reflect spell clothing specifically for mages but I always custom made that on regular clothes lol.

My guess is that it will not be real time like most RPG's. Demon Souls had a real time inventory but weight restriction meant you could not carry spare armour, you limited how many weapons you could carry, and you were limited in the number of speels you had memorised and coudl cast at one time. This meant the inventory worked well. However in TES you can cast any spell you have leanrt and sometimes it takes a while to find that right spell as it is not always hotfixed. I dont think it would work well in tes unless they restrict how much we can actually do so it becomes playable and enjoyable.

There is such a thing as too much realism in a game, and IMO this qualifies

A video game is not real life. Video games are meant to be fun and entertaining.

Menus should only be real-time if the developers want to put extra pressure on the player. Ex. Stalker has real-time menus, encouraging players to find safe places before going to look at their PDA and making going through the inventory more of a panicky moment. But S.T.A.L.K.E.R is also an FPS survival-horror game.

I remember playing the original Baldur's Gate. That had a real-time menu.

Pain in the ass.

i assume armor cannot be equipped during battle, like oblivion----this makes sense.


you should be able to pause in the menu so you dont get stuck in menus accidentally and get killed

I cant remember it. I thought you could pause any time in the game.

Not sure what TES game you've played but I've never had to flip through 10 pages to get to my item. Oblivion was the fastest in fact, with tabs that made the inventory well organized.

Personally, I'm not too concerned about the realism aspect of menus. What bothers me is the challenge-destroying aspect of the ability to heal your character to full while completely safe in a paused menu.

In order to alleviate this problem I'd like to see some kind of animation that must take place in order to quaff a potion or eat a healing item. There must also be a limit of 1 item use per trip to the menu. Drinking 10 potions simultaneously while re-applying poison to your weapon should not be possible, period.



Oblivion's inventory originally displayed a maximum of 6 items at a time. If you had 60, that took 10 pages to get through.

Me too (