I've been gaming for a long time and I've seen how PC UI's are becoming more and more like console's. That in itself is not bothering me, as I can see the best UI being a combination of both.

But this! Oh boy....!

First of all, I think this game is great. There are many things I like about it, so I do find the game in general worth praising.

But such a UI. In a game that has been in development for so long? I still don't understand the reasoning behind making a PC UI so utterly non-PC. It's like they actually decided to make it as different than what PC players are used to, as possible. I agree, we don't need an Eve UI, with it's countless menus and options and little details. But what we have here is a complete opposite.

- There is almost no information. Even object names (guns) are truncated as the caption field is too short and the only way to see it's name is to inspect it. I guess all that empty space on my screen is reserved for something else.

- Key binds are a nightmare. Reserved keys on a PC!?

- Companion handling is a torture. I spend more time calling my pet dog to me so I could manage our inventory, than I do for killing a group of enemies.

- So many keys used for more than one thing making it look like we are playing on a 10 key keyboard.

- Settlement crafting UI makes you wonder if devs actually used a mouse while testing it

- ... more to follow ...

All in all, it is obvious this PC UI is simply ported from consoles. Not even improved or designed with also PCs in mind. Simply ported. For a game that cost as much as this one, is this really the only thing they could do?

Is there anyone who knows what really motivates developers to design such systems? What is the real reasoning behind this "consolification" of PC UI? I know any design is costly, but is it really so unbelievable to imagine a game that runs on PC and consoles and has two different types of UI? One for each platform which makes both UIs useful and not the topic of debate.

One word -- Money

Exactly, as soon as you accept this life lesson the sooner you'll understand why everything happens the way it does. Bethesda makes more money on consoles so they cater to those platforms.

I'm no expert, but the usual answer to that question would be 'money'

Beat me to it!

I spoke about the UI in another thread ( check my sig ) I think the UI is atrocious. Look back at the days of Morrowind and see the difference in UI; it's night and day. The whole UI was for all intents and purposes designed around a keyboard and mouse. From scalable icons and windows to scroll bars like an operating system would have. Fully configurable UI out of the box and the ability to rebind EVERY key on the keyboard.

You can pretty much guarantee when money and success get involved in game development, passion, quality and making the end user happy fall to the wayside. Developers get complacent and lazy because they are under strict deadlines from the greedy top bods pulling the strings. It stops becoming a passion and just becomes a job. Developers who 20 years ago would of gone out of their way and jumped through hoops to make a perfect product because they would of felt they were letting their customers down nowadays don't seem to give a crap as long as they get their pay cheques, keep their jobs and make the puppet masters happy.

Also, what's the betting they will release DLC before they fix any of the UI and control binding issues.

From developer point of views their action is correct in some way. we often have a joke that e=mc2 "error = (more code)2". the simplest to adapt multiple platform is to design base on the most complicate platform which is console as they have limited buttons.

but once you build your whole system and foundation on top of it then you don't really want to touch it as being afraid that adding stuff such as for PC may introduce some unforeseen bug. it is just nature of developing

Well, at lest it's an improvement from Skyrim. It's uncomfortable, but not outright violent

Well, as long as you use QWERTY keyboard and basic WASD setup

Yes crap GUI seems the norm for Bethesda games. I assume they believe the loss in sales due to the bad interface is less than the cost of writing a PC specific GUI.

Hopefully someone will mod in a better GUI at some point. The workbench's interface is particularly bad. And they really need a tab for mapping settlers to jobs.

The keybinding issue could have been remedied without creating bugs and with relative ease. It's just lazy not fixing it prior to release

The PC master race demanding everything their way for 10000000000 configurations, gotta love it.

Clear case of keyboard envy

I get the feeling you would have similar complaints if a user interface wasn't designed for consoles.

If you look at UI in general, everything is getting more and more simplistic/minimalistic (e.g windows)

More than 400.000 players on Steam at once so its many times as many sales as in more than an million sales so far.

Rather say that they have serious issues making an workable interface at all.

Simplistic or minimalistic isn't the issue. That's just the current aesthetic design trend. The problems are more to do with usability, lots of wasted space and the hiding away of information. As simplified as Window's current design aesthetic is, it still lets me view a list of files with all of the details showing.

can someone point out to me whats wrong with the PC's UI its 80% the same as fallout 3/nv and apart from it can get a tad fiddley trying to trade with comps it works fine?

I feel the main issue with the fallout menu is hampered by Lore. The pip-boy was nifty in the early 2000s, but nowadays, it just does not work as a menu. it being clunky and hard to use may be part of it's charm, but the shortcomings are there.

the locked keybinds and multipurpose keys (granades, workshop shortcut, toggle perpective) are atrocious. many of these I can see fixed by mods, and sometimes i catch myself thinking Beth feels we'd mod it regardless of how hard they tried, but still.

accessing companion inventory IS a pain. if they're gonna make us hold down keys to access other functions, why not have us hold reload on a companion to access inventory? I'd rather a dedicated key to access loot menu, mappable, but either would bebetter than this.

I have to catch myself from Morrowind Fan-boying, but I agree with that. Morrowind's Tabs and world interaction in menu should have been kept in Oblivion and onward. there was nothing wrong with it. If they need to make it flashy, why not have your character look down and open a bag, and have us be able to drag items from the bag to a world surface, then rotate with Havok?

@ROOdy

Hardcoded keys make it very very VERY hard for people that are lefties, handicapped, on a different keyboard version then quewrty, or just plan used to play with a certain keyboard layout and now can't unless installing a 3rd software (thank god free) AND having to learn a whole new bloody language to set that up. Now you want to call all that "fiddley", you're perogative, mine is to not subscribe to it.

From my experience...

PC related issues:

-Hardcoded keys

-Inconsistent UI navigation (you can hit escape to exit lock-picking but you can't hit escape in your pipboy, you have to use tab).

-Menu navigation is one way, i.e. you can't hit M from your pipboy to automatically bring up the map, you have to use your mouse and manually hit map. Going from game -> map is fine, but you can't go from map -> inventory.

-Complete and total loss of key input during build mode in settlements (this is the most frustrating thing to experience, imo).

I've seen a lot of people [censored] and moan about the navigation/menu for build mode, but for that kind of system it works. It's not a robust, top down city/sim building game - it's a system built around the player building [censored] from first person in real time. With that said, the game can benefit from a top down view which lets people build and decorate (think Sims build/buy mode).

General UI issues (multi-platform):

Aid needs to be it's own separate tab from inventory. Rad-away/rad-x/stimpacks get sorted at the bottom, and other chems get sorted all over the place (it's alphabetical). Sorting by value sort of solves the issue but it doesn't remember that selection when you exit the menu. When you have items like corn, mutfruit, and pre-war food in your inventory it quickly becomes a tedious chore to navigate.

So, sorting the aid stuff by: Stims (rad-x, stimpacks, etc) // Chems (jet, mentats) // Food (pre-war) // Agriculture (corn, tato, etc), would solve a lot of the issues. Some kind of nested sub-menu would also work (it would keep everything under inventory). It would look like. Inventory -> Aid -> Specific tabs.

The same thing needs to be done with the misc inventory. That page is, by far, the worst thing to [censored] navigate. It is atrocious design lumping everything from holo-tapes, notes, keys, and magazines all into one category. Why...?

In general, I'm tired of having to deal with [censored] menus with each Bethesda iteration. At this point, I fully expect them to completely [censored] up the PC UI for the next TES game. It's unbelievable that a menu we spend a good chunk of time in, actively fights against you. It's insane.

Bethesda likes to come out and say "yeah we look at mods for inspiration," but it seems really half baked and disingenuous. Skyrim had, by and large, one of the worst menus when it came to navigation and usability, and it took a small team of modders (working for free) over a period of ~4-5 years to produce a complete UI that returned to Oblivion's listed/sorting menu. It's [censored] insane that we have gone from modular menus in Morrowind (great)/Oblivion's sorted listed menus (good/great) to Skyrim/Fallout 4's menus.

Where is the progression in the UI...

I think we do need to make it clear to developers that a non PC UI is unacceptable however.

Mostly it's because they switched their primary development from PC to Xbox. Instead of porting a PC interface to a console like their older games, they're now doing the opposite. Have you played Morrowind on an Xbox? The interface was atrocious for it. BGS was never good at porting their UI's from PC to console (which isn't an easy thing to do in the first place) and they've continued that trend by being no good at porting their UI's from console to PC, either.

It's annoying, but at least it's something that we PC players can fix with mods. Console players were completely SOL back when this situation was reversed.

It's not okay either way, there should be no UI ports at all, the UI should be made for the platform.

I disagree. As someone who plays these games on PC, I find Morrowind's UI to be atrocious with so many non-descript icons, information hidden under mouse-over tooltips, and trying to stuff everything (map, inventory, character stats, spells, spell effects, etc) all on one screen. Oblivion was right to put each thing in its own "screen", and use lists for items instead of a grid (and then messed it up with poor keyboard controls, and a stupidly humongous font that wastes space; problems that continue to this day).

BGS has never been good with UIs in general. I even occasionally read complaints from console players that their UIs aren't good.

I thought i was only one The icons especially in modern resolutions are quite painful.

Best UI in BGS games are the ones made by Darn. Please come back!