Here are the things wrong with Oblivion's UI in relation to mouse and keyboard use, with the most awful listed first in each section. I hope that Bethesda has learned since then, and will endeavour to provide a gret UI for Skyrim. Yes, there are mods to fix these problems, but it would be better if the developers didn't need modders to fix their game's UI, wouldn't it? Literally half of my mod list is plugins and OBSE scripts to fix Oblivion's awful UI.

UI Controls

• No Autoconfirm Single Item key. For picking up and selling items there is no way to autoconfirm a single object. You click the item and a popup menu appears, and the game doesn't even move your mouse pointer to the Okay button. Most games let you Ctrl-click.
  
• No Autoconfirm Stack key. Ditto, except there's the added inconvenience of moving your pointer to the slider and dragging it all the way to the right, and then clicking Okay. Most games let you Shift-click.
  
• No Map key. The shortest way to get to the map in Oblivion (and Fallout 3) is to press F4 to bring you to the quest log, then move your pointer to click the Local Map or World Map button. Other games let you press M.
  
• No standard Exit Menu button. Pressing the inventory key, the use key, or Esc should get me out of any menu, container, book, or scroll. Also a problem in Fallout 3: sometimes E would get you out, sometimes it would be X.

Exploration

• Information too far from crosshair. When hovering over something, it does me no good to have the information down in the corner of the screen. Moving my eyes back and forth wasn't worth the eye strain until I switched to DarnUI.
  
• Default FOV too low. What's appropriate for a widescreen TV a few feet away is not appropriate for a high-res widescreen monitor an arm's length away. A higher FOV displays more of the game world, improving playability while also reducing motion sickness in players prone to that kind of thing.
  
• HUD too chunky. Compass was too tall (and not wide enough), icons were too big, text was too large. Again, a high-res widescreen monitor viewed up-close doesn't require things to be that large to be visible. Keep buttons and sliders the same size, though, to avoid pixel hunting.
  
• Location information should be near compass. When moving to a new area, the location name was displayed above the health bar. It should be displayed above the compass (since that is likely where you will be looking while navigating). It is not a problem if the UI text is appropriately sized.

Inventory

• Not enough items displayed. Another result of the giant text and icons was that a grand total of six items were displayed per screen. Useless, too much scrolling.
  
• Amazing waste of screen space. I have calculated that the entire inventory UI takes up only 48% of the screen. That's more than half the screen being wasted on either empty space or a useless giant player model. If you ignore the window border and chrome and just take the real inventory display area into account (the part of the inventory that changes, from the top border to above the Weight icon), then less than 30% of the inventory screen is being used to actually display the inventory. NICE ONE.
  
• Current spell effects not readily available. When in any journal page (except the map, obviously), the current spell effects should remain on-screen so that you can hover your pointer over them and see what they are. Presently they are hidden in a tab in the Magic page.

Talking and Bartering

• Conversation topics not numbered. Most RPGs number the conversation topics so that the player can select them by pressing the corresponding number key. This reduces mouse movement and makes everything easier.
  
• Pointer too far from conversation topics. When starting a conversation, the mouse pointer is placed in the center of the screen instead of being moved closer to the topic list.
  
• Too much scrolling for topics. Because of the giant text, there was too much bloody scrolling for conversation topics. Meanwhile, the rest of the lower screen was wastefully empty.
  
• Switching between player and merchant inventories svcked. Why require players to click an extra button to view their inventory while bartering (after putting their pointer far away from it, of course) when half the screen is going unused? Put the player and merchant inventories side-by-side.

Map

• Cannot disable undiscovered location icons on the compass. This was half-fixed in Fallout 3 by only telling the player that there was something in that direction, and not that it was a town or cave or encampment, but it's still a bit spoilery and cheaty, and we should be able to turn it off if we want. The proper way to learn of new locations without hoofing it around yourself should be to go to inns or bars and ask about them (as indeed you can in Oblivion), or ask the local animal trapper etc.
  
• Annotations would have been nice. Sometimes you stumble upon a location you don't have time to look at (or if you're running Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, you've just fled a cave with a quarter of your health and no healing potions). It would have been very nice to be able to add a note (or even just a special mark) to several locations to remind you about them.
  
• Map had too little information. Topographic information, landmarks, and indications of the terrain (like forest, plains etc) were missing from the map. Would be nice to include that kind of thing for players who prefer to navigate by their own gumption instead of following a magical arrow.

Not to give them an excuse to be lazy but this isn't exactly top priority stuff, and a lot of those things were easily fixed by mods. The DarkUI mod + Elven Map fixed a lot of that...

And things like conversation topics aren't numbered is being a bit nit-picky. I've never had an issue clicking on the right topic...

They shouldn't have to be fixed by mods.

I disagree; It is absolutely top priority. Since the player interacts with the world through the user interface, it makes sense for it to be as usable and intuitive as possible, don't you think? As for being nitpicky, any improvement to a game's UI can only be a good thing for its gameplay.

But it's really not. Just because there wasn't a button for every possible menu doesn't mean the game had a bad UI. Everything was no more than tab+2 click away.

I'm lost because everyone says tes on pc is better than ones on console, or it's mainly because of mods?

Mods, better graphics, less glitches(due to fan made patches), better controls, AND QUICK SAVE. My god I love quick save

Great list, I agree 100%. Nothing you've named is nit picky, and in this day and age is totally expected and reasonable. The more things Beth gets right with the ui, the less things modders need to fix. I'd love to NOT have to DL a mod to fix the ui, something we will be using for hundreds of hours. Little annoyances really pop out when you play a ge for as long as Tes, and you've listed a lot of them.


It's been said that the pc ui is getting special treatment, and I hope they have a check list as thorough, or more, as you've just made. Thanks!

Aside from not wanting to get Repetitive Stress Injuries from using my computer, the entire point of good UI design is to require as few clicks as possible to get to the information a user wants, don't you see? The rules of UI design are the same for every software application: show pertinent information, show enough of it, and make getting to it as easy as possible.


It was because of the mods. The UI svcked on PC exactly because it was made for consoles; there's little wrong with it when playing with a gamepad. When a popup appears, you just press the same button again etc. Having to move the mouse around is what ruined it.

I agree with most of the points made in the OP. Oblivion's UI could've been a lot more PC friendly. At least it was a big improvement on Morrowind though - I still cringe at the thought of Morrowind's awful, awful inventory.

wat

The big issue I had with Morrowind's inventory was that you needed to hover over item tiles to get their names and stats. I liked the rest of the UI, though. Map could be toggled as a minimap and zoomed, spell effects were right there, character data was displayed automatically, and all of these windows could be hidden or resized to suit your preferences.

I think the best arrangement would be Oblivion's list approach (I use Details view in Windows for a reason!), but with smaller text and more of the screen space actively used so that more things can be displayed. Lots of sorting options would be great too; sort by most recent, by value, by attack power etc etc.

I used to play oblivion on my old 4:3 monitor, and the ui was annoying when selling/selecting items, but I'd position the mouse on an item that was directly where the pop up confirmation was, so I had only a little mouse movement. That was annoying, until I bought my 16:9 monitor, then I had to constantly drag my mouse back and forth etc, all while constantly clicking! Drove me mad!

Fallout has shown they've fixed this problem slightly, by having a key stroke to select all/cancel, that's good. Still needs a bit more work.

Also the fact they went from poi icons in oblivion for town dungeons, to tiny triangles in fallout was good. Now they've gone back to icons for skyrim! Bye bye surprise in exploration!

The whole ui is going to be terrible if it's anythig remotely like what the xbox one is. I've been saying this a few times in other threads, the fact we see info for ONE item!? Whoa! Talk about giant leap backwards! Give me spread sheety please! Give me ways to compare all items through different stats, please! Give me more then 50% of the screen used! Let me use as little mouse clicks as possible, with as little movement too! I have a keyboard where my other hand is sitting, let those five digits gracefully navigate this menu! It's so much easier! That ui looks cool I guess, but I'd take oblivions over it just so I could see 6 items stats at a time! Please Beth, read this op, and read it well.

Well it was [censored] awful. Tons of items represented by tiny icons, and the only way to actually see what they were was to select and drop them individually onto your character even if you had no intention of wearing/using them. It was a complete mess. Skyrim's inventory looks a lot better - you can actually get a look at every item without having to equip and unequip from your character.

Fallout 3 was much worse compared to OB, you could barley even mod FO3's. FO3 had no hotkey for map/journal, only used 50% of the screen and had a load time(animation) whenever you had to go in to it or out of it. At least OB you could mod much more. So you could display far more info than FO3 and bring it up much faster.

I thought MW UI was the best, because it was instant, you press the button it was there and it diplayed everything at once, now some people don't care for the grid view so it could be even better if like Windows you can do a list view or a grid view. And it had a journal hotkey. Why OB and FO did not still baffles me(and annoys the hell out of me when I play).

Forcing the mouse to a button would be one of the worst things they could do.

Please don't give them ideas like that...

Skyrim's is the natural progression from Morrowinds. I could gather more info about what an item looks like from Morrowind's inventory than I could from Oblivion's.

:blink: That's certainly part of why it was a bad UI.

For OB I use numerous mods just to make the UI somewhat usable with a keyboard/mouse but when the vanilla UI is so bad and lacks so much basic functionality it is hard for mod'ers to work that stuff in and takes quite a long time. The FO UI seems like it was basically a lost cause. I don't even remember many mods even attempting to add some of that stuff in.

They definitely need to put some effort into the PC UI and controls this time around. Not getting my hopes up though. :glare: OP was a nice start on the things that were missing.

How is having to let go of the mouse to hit the M button any different than quickly hitting tab and clicking on Map

Why are you letting go of the mouse?

If I had the choice between hitting M and instantly seeing the whole map pop up or hitting tab, then dragging my mouse down to the Misc Tab of the menu, then dragging my mouse back across the screen to the Map tab of the misc section, then only getting part of the map on my screen and having to drag the map around to find what I want, I know which option I am taking.

I should be able to hit M and have the map pop up. I should then be able to scroll wheel to zoom in/out, I should be able to drag the map frame around the screen, I should be able to resize it, I should be able to adjust the transparency and leave it up on screen if I want, I should be able hit another key to switch to local map instantly with all the other features still there available.

And this is just the map we are talking about. If I have to tab, click, scroll through list, click, scroll through list, click, scroll through bigger list, click, etc., etc. as what we have seen of the console UI looks like I'll have to, god, what a completely crap UI.

It may be perfectly fine and work quite well on a console with a game pad, but I'm not playing on a console on a TV with a game pad. I want a UI that works perfectly fine on a PC with hi-res monitor with a keyboard/mouse.

I think it would be easy to make the PC gamers happy, and it's probably not too difficult to add from a development point of view.

Make each portion of the UI moveable and scalable. Have a hotkey to unlock the UI, then the user can drag and drop UI elements wherever they want. Also, add the ability to scale each UI element individually. Maybe even add the ability to turn off certain things such as the compass, or at the very least, quest/POI markers.

That doesn't solve every possible issue, but adding that simple ability would resolve a huge number of potential complaints.

Press tab, go to map screen, press tab to exit. Now if you press tab you'll be instantly on the map screen! Tadaa!

And you could already zoom in and out with the scroll in Fallout.

And why wouldn't lists work for mouse and keyboard?
You use the mouse scroll to scroll up and down select the thing and done. Windows do the same thing.
Even with the perk screen which *gasp* scrolls sideways (oh my), I'm sure you could just click on the inactive ones to select them.

The biggest issue in Oblivion for me was always the awful need to confirm every single item you wanted to sell. Even Morrowind did it better.

Thankfully, Fallout 3/NV fixed this and most other UI-related grievances I had in Oblivion, so I won't complain if the stick with FO3-style UI.

It should not require moding to get an usable interface. Moding is to adjust thing so they fit you better.
Yes they should adjusted the font so it was smaller as default, add an extra configuration file to use if you want to play on a tv console style.

Two other things: shopping charts like in Fallout 3. Very nice to be able to buy or sell a heap of stuff then verify once. I guess this is inn.
Show number of items, weight and value in inventory list, this was in Oblivion and Fallout 3 but was missing in New Vegas and apparently in Skyrim, this makes it far harder to manage the inventory, that to drop or store and that to carry. And yes let you sort on this.
Hate how you have to hover over different sorts of armor to see its weight and value.
Lots of customizable shortcuts 8 is a joke.

Or, you could not deal with a crappy, unintuitive UI and just press M whenever you need your map. Or I whenever you need your inventory. And so on.