In OB you can be in the middle of a battle, in the middle of swinging your sword, pop into the inventory screen, drink five healing potions, pop back out of inventory, and finish the sword swing you were in the middle of. Time literally stands still while you are drinking your potions. Granted this has saved me many time, but it is rather lame and very unrealistic.

If I cast a healing spell while fighting my weapon goes down, I raise my hand and cast the spell. The whole time I can still get hit by my opponent. This is realistic.

Yes I know that if I do not like it I can just not drink potions while fighting, but the opponents are also doing this. I will have one of them down to almost dead, then in the middle of battle I see the blue mist surround them and their health jumps back up. The whole time they never stop attacking me. I would have liked to have gotten a shot at them while they drink that potion. Or better yet, I would have liked for them to have not been able to drink it and I could have looted it off their body.

I do understand that if you can not drink a healing potion while fighting then they are basically useless. No one would bother wasting a potion after the fight as you can take your time and get healed up another way. But to think that you can drink five healing potions without even hesitating during a fight just is not right either.

I think there needs to be a potion drinking animation, just like there is for spell casting. This would still allow you to drink a potion during combat, but only at the risk of opening yourself up for attack, which really makes sense.

Does anyone know how Skyrim does this yet? What do you think about it?

adding an animation that took say 2 seconds to drink would be farely nice.

Potions that heal over time combat this somewhat, if you get hit after you come out of the menu you are still going to die.

Totally fair question - they should add a brief animation

Albeit now given the two handed approach it shouldn't stop you from using one of your hands

I hope it is like OB, where you can open you inventory and use one or just put it on the hotkeys and use one straight away.

My guess is that it would be just like oblivion, it would be a nice touch to see you actually consume it, but it all comes down to how quick that animation should be.

adding an animation would be good, then if you start drinking it and get hit you should drop it and have a certain amount of the potion spill out on the ground wasting a portion of it.

they should add animations for eating other food too like meat, bread etc.

I totally agree that you should have an animation for drinking the potions. It would not only make it more realistic, but it would bring more difficulty to the game, even if only a tiny bit. It annoyed me when I was fighting an enemy on a Hard difficulty, and they drank their potion to heal to nearly max health, in an instant. It would also make the game a tad more challenging for me as a player, and for others obviously, due to giving the combat more strategy, where you'de have to acually run and hide for maybe a few seconds to drink your potion, then come swinging out again with your blade, or fireball'ing your way out.
It would be a very nice touch indeed.

Though I agree it's not as realistic, I think the way potions were handled in Oblivion (and likely in Skyrim) is more of a question of balance. You can elect to use magic, which is "free" as magicka replenishes itself. But as you said, you can be attacked when cast, and you're also not attacking yourself. The other way to heal is through a potion while paused, which is instantaneous and doesn't impact your combat ability at all. The limiting factor is that you must have potions in inventory, they add to your weight limit, and you can only drink four or five of them in rapid succession.

It's far from a perfect system, but again, I think they were going for a balanced option rather than a realistic one. Adding an animation for potions would look cool, and would certainly make more sense from an immersion standpoint, but it would also make them far away the worst option for healing. If they take just as much time as casting a healing spell, there's no reason to even have them taking up weight limit on my character. Unless of course you're playing a character with absolutely no restoration abilities, which may be the case.

I don't know about the dying part, but heal-over-time would be nice. Either two different sorts of potions, or one that has an initial boost of a given number of hitpoints and then the rest as h.o.t. Hope that makes sense. I also wouldn't mind some kind of animation - but that would be just a bonus.

I hope potions heal over time, rather than instantly. Maybe rather than 50 hp instantly make it 5hp for 10 secs.

Heal over time would also make sense. While it is believable that a spell could instant heal, you would think that drinking a potion would have to take a little time while your body absorbs the potion. Say something like:

5 HP per second for 7 seconds.

Course you would still have the problem of being able to gulp down 5 of these during 'Freeze Time' and have 25 HP per second healing for 7 seconds. That would make you about invincible for a short time.

I noted that in Skyrim time does not stand still while you are in dialog or lock-picking. Does it stand still while in inventory I wonder? If it didn't then that just by itself would help a little bit.

I picked Other:

I do not like the idea of an animation, because that, to me, would get annoying in general play. I presume you would drop what is in your hands, and then have to equip afterwards, while the animation of a potion in your hand plays. Otherwise you would be stabbing yourself in the head a lot It just seems like to much hassle to make potions appealing in combat.

What I would like would simply be a requirement of no current action (i.e. like jumping, sprinting, attacking, blocking) and a very small delay on the application of the effect (like half a second) and the effects being applied in sequence, rather than at the same time, when the menu is closed. So you are getting pounded on by a frost troll, run back a little bit, open the menu, choose/apply your three random potions, exit, then the blue mist engulfs you once, twice, thrice. For enemy NPC's they'll simply need to be standing still briefly.

You got off lightly. I made a thread months ago, saying maybe potions and the like should be equipped to hands, with an animation. Got totally ripped apart, even got told I was trying to take the fun out of the game. Inventory is time stop, same as the favourites list.