[Dominic Vaughan]

This update still doesn't sit well with me, even after Gstaff resolved all the issues... might have something to do with saying "took inspiration from Apple"

It's not a bad thing to take inspiration from what succeeds, I just hate Apple. it's like buying a car with the hood welded shut.

[Skivs]

So my map will be cluttered with all active quests? Wow that's worrisome. I hope we can toggle active quests but even so if we have thirty quests I have to hover over all of them until I find the one I'm looking for?

Yeah, it really seems that way. Replying to "what journal?" - your map now IS your journal, only once you click a marker you get a list of all the events that occured for that quest.

So we can assume that destruction has 12 perks? (picture info)

I only counted 10 - one in the root and three on each branch.

[Kellymarie Heppell]

Have you ever seen a real-life star-chart? The zodiac signs are by far not the only constellations there. Same thing here. Everything will be like before - the three "guardian" nebulae will still have the 12 birthsigns (note the distinction between birthsigns and just constellations) that were always there. The only thing new is that the other constellations (note the distinction again - they aren't birthsigns) in the nebulae will, for the first time, hold significance as well. In past games, these constellations were omitted simply because no one cared about them. Only the constellations trough which the sun passes were of interest to anyone.

PS. before anyone comments about the missing Serpent constellation, I didn't goof up - it doesn't belong to any of the guardians.

There is no mention of birthsigns in the article.
From the article:

Bethesda is preserving the player’s ties to star signs.

I understand this to mean we now have a connection to the stars through skills instead of through birth signs, though this is most certainly not explicit in the article. Given the information provided, it remains to be seen whether birthsigns will be included.

[Kill Bill]

Your sight will be moved to the right or left so you'll see more constellations...

What?

[Lloyd Muldowney]

I wonder how the hotkeys and favorites list will work with the dual wielding system. Will we be able to assign weapons and spells as pairs, or what?

The thing that grabbed me the most in the article actually had nothing to do with the UI; it was that line about "finding or buying" spells. There was something of a lack of "finding" spells in Morrowind and Oblivion, except for Oblivion's spell tome DLC; makes me wonder if somthing like that DLC will be part of Skyrim.

[Samantha Jane Adams]

How do you "find spells"?

[Josh Trembly]

How come to the left of destruction I see conjuration, illusion, and alchemy bit only two xonstellations?

I expect the stars will scroll left and right at a faster rate than the skills scroll. Perhaps the nebula (the one pictures looks like a mage, appropriately) will move also in order to create the feeling that you are rotating as you look at the sky.

[Claire Mclaughlin]

PAUSES THE ACTION? :banghead:

That might be fine and dandy for some characters, but what if my warrior just wants to switch to my other weapon, or use a potion mid battle?

Imagine:

warrior: "my battle-axe is not effective for this troll"

[pauses action] manually selects enchanted battle-axe [unpauses action]

warrior: Slash, Chop

warrior: "my health is low, LAME!"

[pauses action] Manually selects potions [unpauses action]

:brokencomputer:

I think there will be some kind of direct shortcuts.

[Charlie Sarson]

Link?

[kennedy]

What?

Think of it as two wheels. When one moves, it pulls the other along with it, like a gear. The skills are on one wheel and the constellations on another. Where the two touch each other, the constellation and appropriate skill line up. Also, the constellation wheel is tilted somehat, and we can only see the side of the skill wheel.

[Tha King o Geekz]

This update still doesn't sit well with me, even after Gstaff resolved all the issues... might have something to do with saying "took inspiration from Apple"

It's not a bad thing to take inspiration from what succeeds, I just hate Apple. it's like buying a car with the hood welded shut.

They were inspired by Apple's UI's, not the company policies. :pinch:
We'd still be clicking on a hundred tiny windows in order to find a file, if Microsoft didn't copy everything from the Mac. And still doing a terrible job:

"Would you like to move this file in your own computer? Oh wait, you're not allowed to. Boo hoo."

What Bethesda is trying to do is to make things more easily accessible and less cluttered, which is all good, as long as it works without a gamepad.

[Elea Rossi]

How do you "find spells"?

Probably through tomes or scrolls.

If you don't automatically start with a couple basic spells, I'll be very happy. I want to be able to role-play a pure warrior who has no spells at all.

[noa zarfati]

How do you "find spells"?

In the Magic Items menu. This is similar to what was in Morrowind where spells, scrolls and enchanted items (actually using them) were all on the same panel.
If you meant how do we learn spells, there's no info on that yet.

[Rich O'Brien]

What?

Since the sky is big, you will have to look more right or more left and therefor you'll be able to see other constellations... etc when you move to Conjuration (left) your sight will move and it's constellation will be in the middle of the screen, you'll then see some "new" constellations (that you did not see while you were on destruction) to the left but some of the constellations you saw to the right while on destruction will disappear to the right.

[Sophie Louise Edge]

^^ one of the things that made me go "wait... what? This is improvement?" I dont want to have to scroll to my fav spell or name it AAALIGHTNINGBLAST simply cause I want my most used/useful spell up top of the list <.<

Overall, I'm totally psyched about the game, and will be building a new rig for it, but for items you want to equip quickly and change frequently, Alphabetical is the worst possible sorting scheme....

It seems to me that the "Apple inspired" design philosophy (which I applaud in general*) has led to the no-manual-sort decision. But in that case, the Favorites menu should be smart - the game should at least arrange favorite items automatically by frequency of choosing (some recency weighting would be good too).

[editing to refine the idea - ] Better yet, when you add an item to Favorites, it goes to the top of the list - presumably you want to use your new favorite often. If you don't, it drops lower and lower over time pushing the items that are in fact most used back to the top.

It's early days still, so I'm hoping this will be fixed, but if the game ships with alphabetical sorting, I'll definitely look at writing a mod to do it myself.



*Any chance the game's going to come out for OS X? 10.7 Lion is probably going to have OpenGL 3.x

[Dina Boudreau]

I think there will be some kind of direct shortcuts.

I certainly hope so. Apparently 'UP' is for the pausing action favorites. That leaves three other directional keys. Hopefully they can be mapped with a weapon/potion/spell for easy access, without pausing the game. :shrug:

[Jordyn Youngman]

*Any chance the game's going to come out for OS X? 10.7 Lion is probably going to have OpenGL 3.x

No. They'd announce it if that were possible. Plus, Skyrim is not developed on OpenGL. And no, making a port from DirectX to OpenGL is not easy IN THE LEAST. It would mean rewriting 70% of the game engine.

[KiiSsez jdgaf Benzler]

I certainly hope so. Apparently 'UP' is for the pausing action favorites. That leaves three other directional keys. Hopefully they can be mapped with a weapon/potion/spell for easy access, without pausing the game. :shrug:

I'm pretty sure it doesn't pause the world. From what we've seen so far, BGS has eliminated any pausing of any kind other than the menu. I mean, the conversations don't even pause the world anymore, hurray!

[Catharine Krupinski]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't pause the world. From what we've seen so far, BGS has eliminated any pausing of any kind other than the menu. I mean, the conversations don't even pause the world anymore, hurray!

The npc's aren't frozen anymore but the player still is.

[Czar Kahchi]

I'm pretty sure it doesn't pause the world. From what we've seen so far, BGS has eliminated any pausing of any kind other than the menu. I mean, the conversations don't even pause the world anymore, hurray!

"...pressing up on the D-pad pauses the action and pulls up a favorites menu."

Gameinformer explicitly says "pausing the action." I don't know how else to take that phrase.. :shrug:

Unless, of course, GameInformer uses a different definition of 'pause.' :dry:

[Davorah Katz]

I am not very impressed. they should have posted some more screenshots for us to understand how this would function. As I imagine it, it is very clunky as the mo (all the more because I don't play on a console, so multiple button presses seem redundant to me).

[matt oneil]

No. They'd announce it if that were possible. Plus, Skyrim is not developed on OpenGL. And no, making a port from DirectX to OpenGL is not easy IN THE LEAST. It would mean rewriting 70% of the game engine.

No doubt... but since Bethesda wrote a new engine from scratch for Skyrim and other future games, I was wondering if they might have built in the capacity to port... Macs are increasingly becoming attractive gaming machines (capacity as well as installed base)...

Does anyone know the breakdown of PC vs. XBox sales of Oblivion?

[Tracey Duncan]

From what I understood we'll ahve even more page switching and scrollling this time, GOD DAMMIT >.< this is the most depressing piece of information. :S I would like easy and quick access to stuff please, just swap to a new screen everytime I wanna find something.

[Stephanie I]

Does anyone know the breakdown of PC vs. XBox sales of Oblivion?

Was it not released on ps3?

[Amy Gibson]

No doubt... but since Bethesda wrote a new engine from scratch for Skyrim and other future games, I was wondering if they might have built in the capacity to port... Macs are increasingly becoming attractive gaming machines (capacity as well as installed base)...

There's no capacity to port to mention. Releasing a game for both the Mac and PC required that you plan to do that from the very start. And even then, it's @$$-hard. I've seen both DirectX and OpenGL on the inside. Trust me :shakehead: