That's true, and people did complain about the original Oblivion interface...

I can't say the screenshot is really my ideal interface to the game, honestly, I mean, yes, the stars are pretty, but is that really what we should be emphasizing in interface design? I've always been of the belief that video game interfaces should focus on being practical while at the same time being unintrusive first and foremost, with style following behind that. Now, this isn't to say that developers should not try to design attractive interfaces, just that it shouldn't be their top priorty. I'd gladly sacrifice the fancy interface design shown in that screenshot for something that gives me quick and easy acess to all the information I need, presented in a clear faction, and doesn't get in my way when I don't need it. Take Morrowind's interface, for example, with the press of a button, you can see windows for your inventory, character stats, spells, and map. It was certainly pretty plain in visual terms, but it did its jobs. Now. I'm not saying it was perfect, I'm sure there are ways it could be improved, I'm also not sure how well it worked on the Xbox version, but, as a PC game interface, I think it's a good example of the direction I'd prefer with interface designs. The developers should focus on making the interface work good first, before worrying about how to make it look good.

Now, I wouldn't say I hate all that Bethesda is doing with the interface in Skyrim, I do like the idea of having the health, magicka and stamina bars only shown when they're needed, because that fits with the part about making the interface unobtrusive, but I do have some problems with what can be seen in the screenshot in question.



And the part about "an HD TV screen" is what bothers me, really. It seems like a very console oriented interface, which, since I plan on playing the game on the PC, I don't want. Of course, since I understand that the screenshots show the Xbox 360 version of the game, it's possible that this is just the console interface and the PC version has a different interface, but I wouldn't be confident on that. People complained about the lack of a PC interface on the PC version of Oblivion, yet Bethesda showed no intention to change it in Fallout 3, so why should I believe Skyrim will be different?

i swear to the gods, i have never seen so many whiney, ungrateful little brats in one place... except maybe on gamefaqs.

"i hate everything new and interesting, i want the same exact stuff i already experienced to death!"

seriously, am i the only one getting excited over skyrim?

people complaining about fast travel, and wanting to mod it out, despite that being completely pointless on the PC version due to the console commands always being there...

hating the UI because its AWESOME AS HELL, and instead wanting the same old "bleh" paper sheet showing skills, etc...

i just cant help but sound harsh... im actually holding back alot of stuff i'd like to say, because what i'd like to REALLY say would get me banned in a heartbeat!

how about you atleast wait until you experience the game before you say you hate everything about it?

i know theres not much to talk about until we start getting more info, or the game comes out, but does every other topic REALLY need to be about guns, cars, turning TES into star wars because a couple hundred years passed by, wanting to mod out all of the devs' hard work without even giving it a try, and basically hating EVERY SINGLE DETAIL about the game before seeing what its like?

if you people hate bethesda's work so much, why are you even here? go play dungeons and dragons if ya want sheets of text to flip through.

obviously, im talking to everyone who hates the UI...

But what they are saying is that they don't want sheets to flip through. They want it in one convenient page.

IIRC, the whole point of the new interface was so move away from the "spreadsheet" feel of the older games, therefore (theoretically) making the game more immersive. So I assume the interface, in light of the levelling and perks systems, will make more sense in context. Also, it was stated somewhere than the removal of classes was inspired by the tutorial sequence from Oblivion, and I don't recall having checked my skills every often during that. So if you're not counting multipliers, and it's become more important to track perks than numbers, I can imagine the new interface being rather sensible.

Ireally wonder why betthesda dont adopt the simpler and easy mods improvement, and continue in the same mistake so someone have to change things so they look and feel smart.

I like it.

From what i understand from reading interviews from todd howards, the whole constellation thing are the perks you can get for each skill.
sort of like mini skill trees from Diablo 2, but you get a skill tree for every single skill, and at each level up, you can pick 1 perk from all
of the skills. Thats what it looks like if you look at the screenshot, and i think that would be pretty sweet.

It seems they might, but think of it like looking at your pip boy in fallout. You had that 2 second animation which really screwed you if you didnt have stimpacks hotkeyed. I personally
think thats better then just pausing the game when your almost dead and fully healing yourself. Perferably, id like it so the game didnt pause at all when you went into inventory and stuff,
sort of like diablo 2 or Resident evil 5 (if you played the rest, it paused going in inventory) which made you have to be on your game, and be in a safe place when you start sorting through
your stuff.

With the removal of a class system, and the alteration of leveling a more visual interface is going to be great.

you aren't counting skills, your skill levels don't matter. Its gonna be perks and level that matter, and the latter is IIRC very clearly displayed. While perks will likely be the up-down scrolling of skills.

I find what you described so sad and depressive.

On another note, if would be awesome if for once world wouldn t stop because you re shuffling your pants eating an apple or reading a book.

Didn't know what I was missing until I used Darnified. It was great!

But Like I said in the quote, I'm in the wait and see crowd who doesn't want to scroll through many pages or items. I'm for practicality over prettiness. My wifewould agree :rofl:

edit: ack, looked at the spelling; my appologies, but it's not going to get fixed. Took too long to post it anyways (twice :brokencomputer: )

"Go play X" is the least constructive advice I read in these forums. People are here for a reason, they played and/or are going to play games made by Bethesda and the criticism does not imply they hate Bethesda.

While I agree it's a bit too fancy-flashy for my tastes (eye-candy animations and shiny stuff gets old very fast), I must admit I kinda like the looks of it personnally. Getting a bit away of the pen-and-paper character sheet sounds rather good, it might help "individualizing" the skills themselves, instead of reducing them to plain numbers/ progression bars.

BUT what I'm really worried about with this, is the moddability of this system. Doesn't look at all like they consider the possibility for modders to add perks and skills... How the hell will this be easily doable? If the little stars represent the perk trees, will we be able (and/or HAVE TO) remap the whole constellation to add a perk? Add fancy (or ugly) pictures to accomodate for the additions? Have to create pictures, or even animations, for any change/addition to the character skill/perk tree? :ahhh:

If they kept it the old way they could have just had the left side show the skills (How it was in Oblivion) and when you moused over or selected a skill the tree would show up on the right side, just like how the description did in Oblivion. That just seems like a much easier way to look at things.

I found the information regarding the UI to be a bit meh. From what we've seen it looks nice and though it sounds like it might be a bit fiddly until I get used to it I'm not fussed or worried about it. I see why they did the skill screen like they did, because of the perk trees above the skill etc, and it looks pretty good. The new 3d map you can rotate etc? Well I'm sure that's going to look cool and I'm not going to judge it until I see it, but personally I'd have liked a map that looked like a real map, a paper map that your character holds out in front of them perhaps, a paper map that looks like real paper, maybe browned with age and frayed at the edges. But these sort of things aren't too worrying for me, I know I'll get used to whatever UI ends up being in the final game.

I like it quite a bit actually; and it seems Smithing is definitely a skill (far right). Perhaps there is no more repair.

I wish it would look more like this (I just whipped this up in Photoshop over the last 20 minutes, just a rough cut, and missing some features):

http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/9295/111ks.jpg

Edit: Uploaded Wrong Picture lol

A horizontal list is astoundingly inefficient at displaying information. I hope what we saw was just the perk tree submenu and that you can still see your skills in a more clear vertical list.

As it stands, it seems the menu puts flash (quite literally) before functionality. Just like modern webpages overuse Flash (literally) to a ludicrous degree sometimes, hopefully this flash based menu system actually manages to work well.

I have this horrible feeling that we aren't going to see even a practical quick loading web page like Oblivion had, instead yet another bloated looks before function flash monstrosity paralleled both in game and out on the game's official site. I hope I'm wrong.

I was mildly worried before, but with Gawker's http://www.kotaku.com I'm reminded about how much I hate the supposedly better design trends that I see as annoying, unintuitive, and just plain inefficient. I thought the horrible death of the efficient file menu: its being replaced by the gaudy graphical only "ribbon" was terrible enough with Office 2007 (I now prefer Open Office for its traditional "easy to find stuff I'm not familiar with" menus), but I had no idea that was just the tip of the iceberg of form over function to overtake computer interface design.

I really hope my worries are unfounded.

Exactly. Any game or movie preview website can look just as good as HTML instead of flash. Sure it won't have slide transition effects but who the [censored] cares? Why do you go to a preview site? To see the trailer and look at features. You don't need special effects to do this. Frankly that is why I go to forums or wikipedia instead. I can get all the info on the site without having to wait for each tiny little graphic and animation to load. I liked using Office 200 that was on my school computers in high school. It was sleek, and efficient. Now I practically need to alt tab between all the options because the menu bar was too "old school".

One of the recent FF games had this problem as well. Everything looked pretty but there was basically a loading time for EVERYTHING! Even changing menus. It svcked. It wasn't fun and it seriously detracted from the gameplay experience. Why give my characters new gear or heal them when I have to spend 5 minutes sifting through bulky, slow menus to get to what I need?