My biggest complaint about the UI is............
4 menu options appear on the points of a cross in the center of the screen.

-UP brings you to a completely different menu with star constellations as your skill trees. Which is cool.

-DOWN is also a separate menu with a cool 3d interactive map. Which is awesome.

-LEFT is the magic menu which appears on the very RIGHT side of the screen. HUH?

-Right is the inventory menu which appears on the very LEFT side of the screen. HUH!?

This makes absolutely no sense. Most of all.. you have to completely exit all of the menus to go into any other menu. Who ever thought of this UI is Well, lets just say they need to find another position in the company. It irks me to think Bethesda actually said they would give the PC its own interface. I guess that just means they would put a mouse pointer in it. Which doesn't work half the time either. Also don't get me started about binding keys to the mouse. Using the side mouse buttons or right and left click on anything that inst default is a pain in the ass because they are bound for you without the ability to unbind them in the UI! For instance, try using activate for mouse 4 (side button) you wont be able to pick up a book.

Other then this major annoyance, I LOVE SKYRIM! Thank you bethesda for on otherwise perfect game!

For those that say the UI is good, it is clear that you don't play many games...and to the guy who says he is a UI designer and loves this UI, I am calling BS (or at least tell me what you design so I can steer clear of your product).

Everything about this UI is wrong. It looks like a pre-release test version.

Let's begin with the inventory. It is simply an un-organized list of items. No easy comparison between value, damage or armor ratings, and the first time I played, I had to figure out how to exit from the menu. Favorites "help" and I have only dabbled with the hotkeys which some people say are broken.

I am shocked that Bethesda is behind this UI. I wish I had my PIP boy back - and that interface was nothing to cheer about, either!

Is it possible that Bethesda could even fix this? I have never seen a patch change a major component of the UI...

R

Its not a deal breaker but I think it should be sorted

Yeah the interface is pretty terrible, I'd hardly say it was a deal breaker though, nobody posted this yet from Reddit/Ars Technica?

[img]http://static.arstechnica.net/2011/11/16/skyrim-menus-reddit-4ec3ddc-intro.png[/img]

When you compare how good the interface was in earlier games it really shows how bad things have got.

Still in spite of this (and the crashes) I'm enjoying the game, mind you, Skyward Sword just turned up for my Wii, so it's got serious competition now

Personaly I like it ... it's fast and for me very intuitive except for one thing ... the bloody popup windows. I don't use mouse when browsing the menus, there is no reason to use it, it's fast and comfortable to just use wsad e tab, but when a popup menu shows I have to use mouse to click on it ... that's the only bother.

Exactly. It's style over substance. Bethesda, listen to our plea! Overhaul the UI. Give it functions I held so dearly; sorting by weight, by value, etc., let me see my Active Effects based on item/buff/debuff not by effect, let me hotkey items to a specific hand or both and let there be more than eight hotkeys. Don't leave this to the modders, Bethesda, take responsibility. I appreciate the aims you had with the UI, why not expand it into something as unique as you hoped for and still retain its glitz and utility?

Says the console player.

For me, the interface was a game-breaker, simply because my thief/assassin primarily uses a bow. After installing the game, she could not use a bow for the first four days because during installtion, the game assigned letters to random keys. Thus, in my game, to draw the bowstring back required pushing the letter R - which has many functions in Sky, but is normally not used with a bow. Furthermore, after releasing the bowstring, the arrow only flew about 4-5 feet before falling to the ground.

After looking at the in-game help file, I discovered that I was doing it correctly - it stated to use the letter R. But, obviously, something was wrong because of the short flight path of the arrow.

Finally, after talking to several people, a player recommended that I reset the keys to default. After I did that, all the keys worked as they should, and the left mouse button worked correctly, pullling back the bowstring to max extension. Finally, my first head-shot kill lol.

I went back to the in-game help section, and it now stated that bow users needed to click the left mouse button, etc. Interesting that the help-file changed as key assignments changed - never seen that in a game.

There's only one little issue that bothers me, and that is that after you designate items as your Favorite, and then assign hot key numbers to them, the numbers don't stay assigned permanently. They keep falling off, requiring me to constantly hit Q to open the Hot Key menu and manually activate a weapon or spell. But compared to the first 4 days worth of frustration, I can live with that.

And for those of you who have had no problems, regardless of what platform you use, count yourself lucky. Spend some time in the Hardware/Software section and discover how many players have problems across all 3 platforms.

I wouldn't call it a deal breaker, but it's extremely clunky in my opinion for sure.

The entire thing screams form over function. It's a total mess. I like the perk trees though, I admit.


While I too largely dislike the UI, you can't present an opinion as fact like you have. Like it or not, some like it and that doesn't make them wrong. It just means their opinion differs from yours.

I think the UI is far more kind to some play styles than others too. As a magician it's a total mess. I need to constantly change my hotkeys depending on what I'm doing. I wish I could save hotkey sets and switch between those too. That would make it more tolerable.

It's still perfectly playable to me, but I liken it to using my feet to control a computer mouse. It's workable but certainly not comfortable.

It is not a dealbreaker. It is simply not optimized for PC.

No matter how much I love Beth, this is the worst UI in TES. Don't blame the designer for this. You know who's to blame for this.