Briareos H on 12/11/2011 at 09:05

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Fuck
I remember from the early skyrim videos "we made the ui so slick and beautiful"
And yet they managed to make it worse than The Witcher 2, which is a particularly impressive feat.

I know console is the main market yadda yadda
How obscure, how insignificant exactly has the PC market become that not even a single developer working in a huge team takes the time to think about what is practical with a mouse and keyboard?

What is that untold rule that multiplatform RPGs should have huge text, no mouse, static and single windows and first and foremost, scrollable lists rather than filtered grids? What?? And yet Morrowind was multiplatform, its interface had multiple, independent windows. They were dynamically resizable, semi-transparent, overlappable. The density of information was simply perfect, everything was grid based and in a single glance you knew everything you wanted to. Or grabbed a corner of the minimap and maximized it to look at the path you were going to take. It was perfect.

Why am I playing a PC? Not out of hate, not because I hate consoles - cause they're great for Street Fighter, DiRT and shitty shooters like Call of Duty. I am playing a PC because I LOVE the sexy graphics, I love every option which allows me to play in more than 30 frames /sec, I love the fast kb+m input response time and above all, I love the density of information. So devs, give all of that to me or else I'll be sticking a pad in it and pretend that big black box was a shiny white thing a green ring in front, and I'll be super sad and frustrated in my life and crying to myself in the bed and shouting at you how you stole the childhood from so many young ones who will never become PC gamers, and you will have, sadly, won.

I can't explain to myself why with each game they take steps further back on purpose, what makes console RPG games so static that they can't have a compile flag telling THIS IS A PC, THIS IS A XBOX. An efficicent, dedicated UI engineer has the time, IN FIVE FUCKING YEARS, to code an interface specific to each platform.
Are there untold rules written by Microsoft that the code running on PC and Xbox should be exactly the same? Is there economic pressure? Are developers simply mindless sheeple? Again, how insignificant exactly has the PC market become, sales-wise, to forget about it developing a RPG?

also I'm drunk, coming home and seeing that Skyrim is finally loaded
and i'm filled with rage

Gryzemuis on 12/11/2011 at 17:34

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The Interface is terrible. Really terrible.

Make sure you don't change the keybinds. If you touch them, and you make a mistake, things get even worse. Especially when you assign the escape or tab buttons to some action. They will still have some parts of the original function, but mixed with new functionality now. It makes it really hard to get in and out of sub-menus. It's a mess.

I agree. A junior programmer, with a little vision on how a PC-UI should look, could do a better job in 3 months time than what we have now. It feels like Bethesda has assigned absolutely nobody to take care of the UI. In fact, it looks like they have explicitly forbidden programmers to work on the PC-UI.

10 Millions WoW-players. Those are all in the market for Skyrim. RPG. Fantasy. Huge world. If Bethesda played it right, those 10 million could be their customers. But WoW players know how they like their UI. Blizzard did everything wrong the last few years. But they got their UI right. Flexible, intuitive, configurable. And they allow their players to use (and create) addons to change everything in the UI. And the players use those addons. They want them. They demand them. 10 Million players who have gotten accustomed to be able to configure their UI how they like it.

And now we get this crap from Bethesda.
No matter how good the rest of the game is, I just can't forget how crappy the UI is. I am reminded every minute, when I try to pick up something, or try to switch my spells. It's a thorn in your foot that hurts at every step you take.

Digital Nightfall on 13/11/2011 at 12:05

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I seem to be the only one who really likes the interface.
I find it better than Oblivion's, or every Oblivion UI mod I tried.

Yes, I am playing with a mouse/keyboard.

dvrabel on 14/11/2011 at 16:54

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My biggest grips with the UI are:

The world map isn't useful for navigating as it doesn't show roads.

There's no indicators for currently active effects and their remaining time. Why do I need to interrupt a fight with a dragon by going three layers deep into the menu/UI to see if my potion of fire resistance has ended?

No way to go from the inventory screen to the magic screen (etc.)

And there are a number of bugs as well:

Mouse clicks often ignore the position of the pointer and activate stuff you weren't expecting (using potions you weren't expecting or simply exiting the current screen completely).

Mouse click on dialog choices often doesn't work right.

Lists often start half scrolled off the screen unnecessarily.

Digital Nightfall on 15/11/2011 at 12:05

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Someone mentioned to me today that alot of the mouse weirdness vanishes if you disable the x360 controller in the options menu. Apparently disabling that removes some of the controller functionality from the menus, which inappropriately persist during mouse use. I haven't had a chance to try it.