At this point, the number one complaint for Skyrim on the PC boards (besides crashes) is the User Interface. A fair deal of the problems can be attributed to bad porting, but that's not what I'm here to discuss. However, after taking a look around at some of the constructive criticism I've seen on the UI, I have concluded that the problems stemming from it are not entirely from bad porting, but from straight-up bad design.

What we get in Skyrim is a sorry, sorry excuse for a UI that is trying (very badly) to pretend it's a super-slick Apple-esque inspired design. Trouble is, the guys who were trying so hard to copy Apple's visuals forgot one very important thing: ease of use comes first. Here is where things went horribly wrong:

- Very little information displayed on screen at once. Take the inventory, for instance. Instead of giving us quick info on the fifteen or twenty items that are currently displayed in the list, we only see one. The rest of the space is taken up by a "OHH EMM GEE LOOKIE WHAT WE CAN DO!!!" 3D model of the item in question. I have never seen such a waste of space in any UI ever before. Half the screen for one item? Seriously? Same goes for Spells.

- Scrolling required where none is needed. The category filters and item lists for Inventory and Spells are primarily to blame here, but the Skills menu commits the same crime, too. Factoring in every sub-category available for the inventory and spells lists (weapons, apparel, destruction, restoration, etc.), no scrolling should even be needed, it's not even necessary to downsize the text. So why do we have to? Needlessly hiding information from the user is VERY sloppy design. Another problem here is that for inexplicable reasons, Bethesda decided to have the lists track the selection arrow instead of the other way around. The selection arrow remains fixed in the center of the lists, so that's where the lists' origin point is. And on first opening that particular list, you will notice that half of the space allocated for it is completely empty. It's going to use that space anyways, guys, why not keep it populated? As for the skills, again, you need to scroll in order to check your progression and current rank outside of the few displayed on screen at once. There's plenty of space available up top, why not just put that info there?

- The Radial menu is completely pointless. For the console, in order to open the menus, you must first go through this compass display that serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. You press the Menu button to bring up the compass, use the thumbstick to select which menu you wish to enter, and then press your action button. Three actions before the menus actually display anything useful. At least Oblivion gave you information the moment you entered the menus, you didn't have to go through Skyrim's massive-waste-of-time compass display. At least on PC you can skip that thing. But why should PC be able to skip it when consoles can't? How about we get rid of the middleman entirely and just map the menu access controls to the D-Pad? Sure, it would mean losing the quick-selects, but since consoles only got two of those, its a sacrifice that can be made. Now, you use the D-Pad to open your inventory and map and such, and your Favorites are accessed by pressing X. This shaves three unneeded actions off actually getting to the actual meat of the UI while losing none of the original functionality aside from two quick-slots that are not needed anyways (that is WAY not enough for them to be useful). Or how about actually giving some useful tool-tipped information in the compass menu? Inventory could display the stats of weapons and armor you currently have equipped, spells would do the same for equipped magic and powers/shouts. Skills would show you the rank and progression progress of your six highest skills and level progress (moving it from the bottom, about the only real info that was actually displayed on the compass menu), and map would tell you what region you are currently in as well as the current objectives for your selected quests and the clock (also present now, one of only two pieces of information available on this menu as-is). You know, give that menu a reason to exist by making it into a quick-reference interface as well as a gateway middleman.

- Navigating your perks is difficult. Scrolling forward through the stars is okay, but there is one critical flaw here I really can't believe Bethesda missed: you need to scroll backwards blind. The only thing worse than scrolling without reason is scrolling when you can't even see where you are trying to go. 3D menus like this simply cannot have a fixed camera angle.

- No at-a-glance details whatsoever in your inventory and spells lists. If you want to know an item's value, or how much damage a weapon does, or whether or not the item is stolen, you must scroll all the way through your item list until you get to that specific item. This is a direct symptom of the half-a-screen for one item problem, so much space is being wasted being in-your-face that there isn't any room for any sort of quick-references. Oblivion's default UI showed you the details of up to five items at a time. Granted, it wasn't much, but if you advertize reducing the amount of information provided by your interface as a feature of your game, you probably have your priorities in the wrong place. Personally, when I'm paging through a menu, I don't care about "viewing objects in high detail," I would prefer to view my menus in high detail, with lots of good information being communicated to you at one time.

- Speaking of the high-detail object viewing, why give us the ability to zoom in on the object, but then leave it at the same size and detail level when we are not interested in the high-detail view? That makes the whole zoom feature pretty pointless, and further reinforces how much good space is being wasted trying to
make you oooh and aaah.

There are plenty more issues on PC (mostly due to shoddy porting), but these are universal; and are genuine flaws, not bugs. Those are all novice mistakes committed because Bethesda put making things look pretty before analyzing the ease of use and fluidity. Apple-inspired? Sure.... There are so many basic flaws that what this UI needs is not an optimizing, not even an overhaul; it needs to be rebuilt from scratch. And Bethesda really needs to read "UI Design for Dummies," because the very basics of this one are so, so wrong.

This is my one major complaint for this game. I abhor this dysfunctional interface that we received. Everything listed above was an amateur mistake on Bethesda's part, stuff so obvious once pointed out you wonder how they didn't notice it during development. And the answer for that is really quite simple: Bethesda, yet again, was trying so hard to impress us with shiny graphics that they didn't give any good thought to the core design the graphics were being built on. The same mistake was made in Oblivion, where Bethesda tried so hard to wow us with procedural foliage, distant visuals, and Radiant AI that the game that was being built to house them suffered for it. I so want for Bethesda to learn from their mistakes, but this seems to be the one they just keep on making.

I found Skyrim's easier to use than Oblivion's was when I first started playing it.

The issues I have with it is key binding and strange instances of not selecting what I'm hovering the mouse over.

EDIT: and not being able to go to the magic side from inventory and vice-versa is kind of lolwut.

Ease of navigation is not the issue here (except in the skills menu problem), lack of information for no good reason is. Scrolling is easy, but when you leave space on your lists that is going to be used anyways unused (unless it can't be used, like if you don't have enough items to fully populate the list) requiring the user to scroll just to maximize information output, something is very wrong. I am of the camp that the User Interface is not about looking pretty, it is about being informative. Skyrim is the opposite, with very little information being displayed on screen at a single point in time and monumental amounts of wasted screen real-estate, requiring more effort out of myself to obtain that information. If there is one place effort should be minimized, it is the menus. They exist for one reason and one reason only: to inform the player. Pretty visuals go after making sure the user is able to get what he needs easily and quickly.

And it is anything but easy or quick to get information out of these menus. I don't care about menu eye-candy, that's what the game I am playing is for.

EDIT: Actually, if you click on the very edge of the screen off from the category list, you can do that by going back through the radial compass, but only if you accessed them through the radial compass. If you used the quick key, you get sent back to the game. Again, took me forever to figure that out and it was an accident when I did.

Hmm, Other than switching to the different menus, I found everything pretty intuitive. The map for example: I knew there had to be a way to pan it. Click and drag didn't work so I tried arrow keys. No? WASD was the winner.

I wouldn't go back to Oblivion's. I remember showing a friend Oblivion and he literally laughed at Oblivion's menus. That's not the reaction you want from your audience. (He started referring to Oblivion as 'The Menu Game.')

I definitely like the way they separated everything. Inventory, magic, skills, map. Finding what you are looking for is just a little bit quicker than Oblivion's was (at least for me). Even after how long I played Oblivion, I still tripped up on the tabs while looking for stuff. I mostly edited out the long item hunts in my videos, but they happened.

You might also try moving your pointer to the edges of the screen, too. That will also pan the map.

Speaking of the map, despite me thinking it went a little overboard in the visual department, it is the one part of the menus I do actually like. For one thing, unlike Oblivion's it really does take up the whole screen, and your objective markers never disappear, they remain visible on the edge of the screen pointing to where you can find them. What I wish I had was the ability to freely zoom and pan, and I got that through a couple INI tweaks.

Notice how the map menu is conspicuously absent from my OP? If I would keep one thing from Skyrim's interface, it's the map, because it actually is easy to use and navigate. Oblivion's, on the other hand, was very claustrophobic.

What I might do at some point is provide some sketches of what I think can be done to Skyrim's interface to make it even easier to use. I'm not familiar with coding in Flash, but if possible, I can try to figure out some implementation (Skyrim's UI is Flash-based).

And I agree with you on Oblivion's UI. I would not want to return to it ever. I guess I could say that although Oblivion's was bad, Skyrim's isn't much better. Oblivion's UI was badly organized, but Skyrim's is horribly inefficient for how much improved the organization is. Couple that with all the bugs that came from a bad porting job, and we get a PC UI that is a complete mess.

But I truly do feel the consoles are hardly better. There are a number of places in the UI I feel could be improved upon so that less screen real-estate goes to waste and more information is communicated to the player. Again, I will try to mock these up so you can see what I feel is a better system.

I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I like the UI on my PS3. I can see how it would be problematic for PC users, though.

I prefer a lot of empty space in the inventory menus. The background shows through, giving the sense of standing in the game rifling through my stuff or running through spells in my mind rather than breaking out completely to a menu screen.

The journal section looks completely different from the menus, as I think it should. Using it I get the feeling of opening a book and checking my notes. I would add one more layer of information in the Miscellaneous Quests section. It’s annoying to have to check the map to remember where to find the woman who wanted bear pelts, for example. I don’t care about the stats, so I can’t comment on how useful they are.

The map is a problem for me. It's lovely, but not very useful as a map in a land where roads sometimes go around the mountains and sometimes go over them. It does make it fun to look for what might be a mountain pass. I have occasionally had to blunder blindly along or wait out a snowstorm. Actually, I guess I can’t celebrate immersion on one hand while complaining about the frustrations it offers on the other.

The one thing I hate is no hotkeys. At least I haven't figured them out if the PS3 has them.

Consoles can assign left and right on the D-Pad as quick-selects.

It is actually a lot easier to ignore the problems on the consoles, since that was what the UI was designed for. It doesn't change that the communication problems and bad design decisions exist, but I can say that everything wrong with the UI is amplified significantly on PC because next to no effort went into giving it a proper port, so it is very M+K unfriendly.

No hotkeys on the PS3 as such. It's the press up to access the favourites menu...Then choose left or right hand...

This just in...

Someone has overhauled the inventory menu.

From what I can see, it stays in spirit with the original UI, but is much better laid out. No screen space that is already reserved for the lists is ever empty unless absolutely necessary, and you get stat quick-references for everything in your inventory.

That's one. Now for the other two...

for me personally, I fell in love with morrowind time and time again because of the fact that you could drop gold. this really turned me off when oblivion didnt allow you to drop your gold. i know it seems stupid, but if i ever got bored of morrowind, i would find a random cave and drop all my gold in it in piles of like 100. and sort of just dump all my treasure there and start fresh with just the clothes on my back and the sword on my hip.
then later on when i inevitably wanted to play again, i would go on a treasure hunt, because like a dog and a bone, i would forget exactly which foul hole i left my treasure in. i did enjoy the quick selector in oblivion though, and i have yet to find one in skyrim, so it really pisses me off when i need to change a spell and i have to enter a pause menu.
another thing that i loved in morrowind that was improved in oblivion was spell crafting & physics. the fact that the spells would actually make things go flying almost made me forgive the lack of levitation, mark & recall spells. and they even took out the lock spell? along witha few others that i enjoyed in morrowind.
i liked the inventory menu from morrowind a lot better than oblivion or skyrim, i liked being able to see all of what i had at a glance, as opposed to running around 2 pounds from being over encumbered, not knowing exactly what the heck was weighing me down, so id hafta sift through a bunch of menus when in morrowind i could easily see, Oh, i have 10 ebony chestpieces right there.
the removal of spell crafting really really really really really really really really broke my heart. am i really going to be stuck with 3 fire spells the entire game? and now there isnt even an unlocking spell. i hate picking locks! seriously! in oblivion i made sure to have my alteration at 100 so i could unlock anything with magic just so i wouldnt ever have to deal with another stupid lock picking window.
i much preferred making sure i had one of every type of spell so that i could use the effect in a spellcrafting window or enchanting. I just don't understand, everything in skyrim feels so clunky and awkward when even in oblivion it just seemed to operate smoothly.
the cons of skyrim in my opinion are as follows:
can't drop gold
no return of awesome spells, levitation, mark and recall, lock and unlock.
no return of being able to taunt intimidate, or bribe people universally. ( like in morrowind)
removal of spell crafting </3
crappier menus

the good things about skyrim:

it just feels so dense and full of stuff to do.
the storyline gives rise to my foolish blood.
its beautiful, but id rather have the features above and have oblivion's graphics than have a pretty, but crappier game.
increased variety in character creation
increased variety in voice actors


as a final note, i should say that ive only logged about 12 hours in skyrim, so if anything i ranted about proves incorrect. feel free to let me know. i haven't found a way to keybind or to manipulate objects yet, thatd be another downfall if those aren't included.
i just wish i could talk to a bethesda developer and tell them how much better the game could have been if they would just simply include dropping gold and spell creation. i haven't played oblivion in years because i had no incentive to go back to the game. when ive picked up morrowind a few times here and there.
magic in skyrim makes me cry with how simple and watered down it has become. a huge downgrade from oblivion. wtf bethesda. wtf.