» Sat Jan 10, 2015 12:04 pm After thousands of hours in Elder Scrolls games on XBOX and XBOX 360, from Morrowind through Skyrim, my biggest pain-point inventory & spells: navigating the menu system, finding what you want, and quickly accessing items during gameplay could be vastly improved in all these games. Please read my suggestions below, and hopefully, implement feature improvements via updates to existing games and/or future releases (especially the "remastered" versions).
Note: All of these suggestions could be added as optional features that could be turned on or off by the player if they don't like it (like you did with the Kinect features).
#1 - Improved Inventory Filters
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The game should have a tree-like structure for browsing inventory, so that inside each category (in particular, apparel, weapons, potions) you could hold down right-button and get a radial menu of filters (see the below list of filters), and you could move the left stick around and press A to activate filters. They would be stackable, so you could narrow down your options. The filters could also be inverted by pressing X to invert them. On certain options of the radial menu you'd have a second radial menu that would come up beside it, that would be a "type" sub-filter, controlled with the right stick (these would be stackable too). For example some filters for armor could be like:
? show only favorites
? show only unique items
- sub-filter: show only items acquired from a regular quest, show only daedric-quest items, etc.
? show only user-created/modified items
? show only enchanted items
- sub-filter: show only certain enchantment types (defaults to all, but can be limited to sub-sets of types, like fire resistance, enchant bow skill, etc.)
? show only improved items
- sub-filter: show only certain improvement quality (defaults to all, but can be limited to Flawless, Legendary, etc.)
? show only items acquired since last save (not counting auto-saves)
- sub-filter: if possible allow a time window to be specified; not sure if the game DB can handle this, but like items acquired between X and Y dates?
In any inventory list you would be able to hold down left-button and see a two radial menus for sorting and grouping options. For sorting, while LB is held down, just use the left stick to choose the options that are available in the Kinect sorting options, except if possible also add "sort by date acquired." You should also allow enhanced sorting by effect strength of particular effect types or damage types, an use the same dual radial menus for this (so for example you could sort potions by the duration of their paralysis effect, etc.). For grouping, while LB is held down, use the right stick to choose from among several grouping options (an item could appear twice if it fit into two groupings; if so, it would be a special color in the list to indicate it shows twice, unless you can think of a better way to indicate that). For example, grouping options for armor:
? group by enchantment type
? group by improvement quality
? group by armor type
? group by body slot
Then when browsing the inventory list, if you clicked down on left stick, it would jump between each group quickly.
#2a - Select All / Multiple Select
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You'd be able to select multiple items or all currently listed items, then drop, sell, or transfer all of them into a chest etc. That way you could offload all your crappy potions in one fell swoop instead of having to go through them one-by-one, which takes forever, especially on the 360, especially when the chest they're going into has tons of stuff in it already because you're a terrible hoarder like me 
#3 - Improved Hotkeys
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The extra hotkeys that work with the Kinect were a much-needed addition, but I found them to be unreliable a lot of the time, and they get confused by external sound sources. People don't play their video games inside an isolation chamber. There are often other people talking in the game-playing space: often times, my girlfriend or housemate would say something that would screw it up, or I'd get a phone call and my own voice would screw it up. Often it did not correctly interpret my voice commands.
So you really need to add other ways to use the hotkeys. The radial menu in Oblivion for quickly selecting things was great, and I'd like to see an improvement to that based on the dual radial menus concept. Rather than just 8 slots in a radial menu, you'd have dual radial menus enabling 64 slots! So like you could have one slot for spells, then when you use left-stick to get to that, you would then have a second radial menu with 8 spells to choose from with right stick. Same with swords, shouts, armor items, potions, etc. etc. Just have it where the player holds down LB (which you don't use for anything else) in order to pull up the quick menus.
Then you could give people the option to replace the existing quick select menu (which I find to be tedious) with the ability to assign four items to "quick use" slots on the ordinals of the 4-way controller, and let the player assign their choice of sorting and filtering to the control so that you don't have to change it as often. Further you should have it where holding down LB (or possibly, certain other buttons) would have different effects. You could also assign a particular axis to cylce through a group, sorted by your choice of sorting options, filtered by your choice of filter "Unequip" would work as it does now, where it restores the previously equipped thing. For example I would do:
Default:
up - drinks the most powerful health potion available
down - drinks the most powerful stamina potion available
right - applies the most expensive poison available to the current weapon
left - equips/unequips the best healing spell available
While sneaking:
up - equips/unequips the most damaging dagger available, among my favorite daggers
right - equips/unequips my most expensive favorite bow
down - equips/unequips my most sneak-enhancing footwear
left - equips/unequips my invisibility spell
While holding down LB:
up/down - cycle through my favorite offensive shouts
left - equip/unequip Aura Whisper
right - equip/unequip Call Dragon
While holding down left trigger:
up - equip/unequip my best favorite heavy armor shield
down - equip/unequip my best favorite light armor shield
left - equip/unequip Dragonhide
right - equip/unequip Ebonyflesh
While holding down right trigger:
up - equip/unequip Paralysis
down - equip/unequip Fire Storm
right - equip/unequip Chain Lightning
left - equip/unequip my most damaging non-AOE fire spell that fits within my current remaining magicka
ETC. ETC. ETC.
So you see the point here is that you would be able to have many different sets of hotkeys that change based on what button is currently held down. This could really work for any of the buttons except for B. Optionally to avoid accidental presses you could require for LB+[whatever button]+[whatever direction] to be pushed to get the hotkey to work. That would give you 36 new hotkeys to work with on the XBOX controller! Players who don't want this level of complexity *would not have to use this feature and could go on with their lives without being adversely affected*. However for power players like me, this kind of feature would make a game like Skyrim greatly more enjoyable, because it just breaks up gameplay too much to always have to stop the fight to go into the "quick-menu" or the dreaded main menu to equip something.
I appreciated the Kinect features but they just didn't work that great. I'm guessing you mainly did that as a favor to Microsoft, but come on guys, why do you have to have a Kinect to use *voice* features when every single XBOX 360 comes with a microphone headset, which would seem (to me at least) to make it easier to distinguish the player's voice from the voices of other people in the room? I mean the Kinect is a camera-based device that I thought is supposed to be used for gestural controls, but you don't use it for that. You just use it as a glorified microphone, which is a flawed approach because the Kinect picks up everyone's voices the same way and is usually closer to the TV's sound system than it is to the player, meaning that you have to turn down the volume of your game and turn off any music that you might be playing in order for it to work. Given that I usually like to play Skyrim to some doom metal, I find the Kinect feature really just doesn't cut the mustard.
#4 - Enhanced follower controls and features
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? You should be able to assign targets, waypoints, rally points, etc.
? There should be a way to summon or find a stuck or lost follower, spouse, or child. Maybe make a special spell or summon for this. Like, summon a dragon that goes and finds who you're looking for, grabs them in its claws, and flies back to you, dropping them. Or summon a hawk that flies out, finds them, then reveals their position on the minimap.
? There should be an optional HUD with all your current followers and their health.
? Maybe use a dual radial menu to select a follower and issue them a command while holding down LB after double-tapping LB.
? Have voice commands to issue commands to followers. This is a much more "roleplay-ish" type of use for voice commands!
#5 - Global inventory log
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There needs to be a way to see all your inventory at all locations in the game. What I envision is there'd be a "Ledger" item in your inventory that, when accessed, would open up yet another inventory screen (but with a different background to indicate it was the "Global Inventory Log"). This global view would let you see ALL the items in ALL containers in ALL of your houses/abodes/dwellings. Don't remember where you stashed that Wabbajack? Now you can find it. You'd have all the standard filters, sorting, and grouping options detailed above, but you'd also have the ability to type in a text string to filter by item name (using XBOX smartglass, or the controller keypad, or an on-screen keyboard, etc.).
#6 - Global junk filters
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A way to define category specific junk filters using the same set of filters, groups, and sorting that are described in #2 above. Basically how this would work is that items in your current inventory or that you pick up, which match any of the global junk filters that you set up for your character, those items would be auto-tagged as junk so that when you get to a shop, you can just sell all junks. When selling all junks you could optionally set it to only sell however much junk the buyer has enough money to pay for. The global junk filters would be configured in the main Start menu, I guess, unless you guys can think of a better way.
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That's all I have time to tell you right now. But if you're hiring let me know, LOL. (I can program!)
-=DG=-
