I love this game. It's funny reading these comments and talking to my friends, because we are each playing it so differently (which is truly impressive). The environment art crew should be really happy with their work as well. This game looks so much better than the last one, and I keep finding beautiful vistas and dungeons.
[edit] ah, that's the exact same image the poster above me attached, however, I made it clickable, for all to minimize the effort of scrolling and using the screen real estate as much as possible. Irony...
perk for the dagger. That shit is ridiculous.:poly142:
If you're not using a shield, always carry two daggers, you're quicker and every attack is double damage, it turns your backstabs into 30x damage instead of 15x.
I managed to sneak up on a Dragon and backstab for 30x, I was all giddy.
At nearly 50 hours in, I have -almost- gotten around to finishing the main quest. Skyrim is not undeserving of all this praise. It's good to see the devs made good on their Oblivion + Morrowind promise. Skyrim makes Oblivion look bad in almost every aspect. The story telling is better, the art is better, the combat is better, the sense of adventure is better, the world seems larger... Well, the menus are still shit, but you can't win all the time, I guess.
I've had tons of crashing, bugs, and those goofy NPC shenanigans that only Elder Scroll games seem capable of producing, but none of it has come even close to stopping me from enjoying the game.
There are already several solid mod releases too. Lots of art fixes and performance enhancers. My favorite of which fixes the fucking TERRIBLE blocky normal maps on NPC faces. (Also, nude mod.)
after 20 hours of playing I feel like I've only seen a small fraction.
also, Morokei is kicking my ass hard core - I finally had to just give up and leave so I can come back later.
question about mods: if you install a mod can you uninstall it and continue playing? I was playing Stalker Call of Pripyat with the Complete mod, it introduced a game breaking bug about 15 hours into the game - an important NPC's cut scene wouldn't play so you couldn't talk to him. When I uninstalled the mod, I couldn't load any of my saves that used the mod.
Yeah, that guy saved Oblivion for me (along with the leveling fix). I really hope that someone fixes that UI in about a weeks time (by then I got my old, but better, graphic card from my house) and can finally play the game.
I dunno what screen real estate is about, I spend all my time browsing websites that have empty space to the left and right.
That screen real estate comment in the image is kinda misleading but in general the reason why websites are designed the way they are is because websites are almost entirely text and there's an optimum viewing width for reading. Nobody wants to read a block of text that spreads the entire width of a 32 inch display, what was once a paragraph is now just a really long line of words. They also have to cover a much broader range of platforms and viewing resolutions.
His commentary makes it sound like a UI is a UV map and you need to be maximizing all your space to get the most use out of it which is pretty bad philosophy. His mock-up works well though (all he filled the space with was a character portrait which IIRC is what Oblivion did too) so maybe it's just poor phrasing.
I dunno why he thinks icons are the best thing ever. Morrowind used icons mainly because the interface was obviously designed for a mouse where you mouseover an icon to see what the item is. Not really as convenient with a controller and an inventory with 100+ items. It's much easier to find an item in a list of text than it is digging through a bunch of items that all have the same icon to see which one is the one you want.
That screen real estate comment in the image is kinda misleading but in general the reason why websites are designed the way they are is because websites are almost entirely text and there's an optimum viewing width for reading. Nobody wants to read a block of text that spreads the entire width of a 32 inch display, what was once a paragraph is now just a really long line of words. They also have to cover a much broader range of platforms and viewing resolutions.
His commentary makes it sound like a UI is a UV map and you need to be maximizing all your space to get the most use out of it which is pretty bad philosophy. His mock-up works well though (all he filled the space with was a character portrait which IIRC is what Oblivion did too) so maybe it's just poor phrasing.
I dunno why he thinks icons are the best thing ever. Morrowind used icons mainly because the interface was obviously designed for a mouse where you mouseover an icon to see what the item is. Not really as convenient with a controller and an inventory with 100+ items. It's much easier to find an item in a list of text than it is digging through a bunch of items that all have the same icon to see which one is the one you want.
But the whole point is that we are playing on a PC, not a console, and shouldn't be stuck with bad UI decisions that just don't work with PCs. Icons + text = win, its much easier for the eye to narrow down what you are looking for with icons and then confirm with text, then to just have text. The UI is badly designed if you have anything else then a controller (aka a crippled controlling device) when you can design something better for the PC version, which has some much different control devices (mouse + keyboard).
But the whole point is that we are playing on a PC, not a console, and shouldn't be stuck with bad UI decisions that just don't work with PCs. Icons + text = win, its much easier for the eye to narrow down what you are looking for with icons and then confirm with text, then to just have text. The UI is badly designed if you have anything else then a controller (aka a crippled controlling device) when you can design something better for the PC version, which has some much different control devices (mouse + keyboard).
That might be your point, I don't think that's the point the guy who wrote the image was making (and if it was there are far worse things to criticize, like the fact that you can't use the mouse for most of the interface function but then it's suddenly REQUIRED for confirmation dialogues...) Plus the UI still sucks even with a controller.
No developer wants to make two entirely different user interfaces.
That screen real estate comment in the image is kinda misleading but in general the reason why websites are designed the way they are is because websites are almost entirely text and there's an optimum viewing width for reading. Nobody wants to read a block of text that spreads the entire width of a 32 inch display, what was once a paragraph is now just a really long line of words. They also have to cover a much broader range of platforms and viewing resolutions.
His commentary makes it sound like a UI is a UV map and you need to be maximizing all your space to get the most use out of it which is pretty bad philosophy. His mock-up works well though (all he filled the space with was a character portrait which IIRC is what Oblivion did too) so maybe it's just poor phrasing.
I dunno why he thinks icons are the best thing ever. Morrowind used icons mainly because the interface was obviously designed for a mouse where you mouseover an icon to see what the item is. Not really as convenient with a controller and an inventory with 100+ items. It's much easier to find an item in a list of text than it is digging through a bunch of items that all have the same icon to see which one is the one you want.
Thing is, most of us here are PC users. We want an interface that works well for PC, not a shoddy console port. The current interface works fine for console, but for PC, it's just bad. And no, maximizing screen real-estate isn't bad philosophy. We want info, as fast as possible, and icons allow you to get a visual indicator of what it is you're looking for.
When I am sorting through my list of potions in Skyrim, it takes at least 20-30 seconds to find what I am looking for. When I'm in combat, that is far too long to find a simple health potion. Whereas having icons would allow me to quickly distinguish magicka, stamina, and health potions with the aid of colors.
Yeah, I know, I can bind potions to my favorites, but I dont always have a stack of potions waiting to be used, I just use potions I find scattered around everywhere.
I'd like to see a windows like file management system, with sort by options, item name, icon, key description elements such as price and main stats, hover over or click to bring up more info, right click options, etc.
question about mods: if you install a mod can you uninstall it and continue playing? I was playing Stalker Call of Pripyat with the Complete mod, it introduced a game breaking bug about 15 hours into the game - an important NPC's cut scene wouldn't play so you couldn't talk to him. When I uninstalled the mod, I couldn't load any of my saves that used the mod.
It will give you a warning the first time you try to load a save with a plugin missing but it's doable, how much it'll break the game depends on what it actually did to a game.
If you installed a giant overhaul plugin, it's probably likely you'd have some issues if you removed it afterwards :P even if the game let you.
And no, maximizing screen real-estate isn't bad philosophy.
Put your entire inventory of 200+ items into little boxes and fill the entire screen with icons of them and tell me how good an interface that is.
A user interface has to convey a lot of information in a way that is easy to understand and minimally intrusive, using all of your screen space is rarely ever a good way to do that unless you do what this guy did and just fill it with fodder (a character portrait)
Not using paragraphs is a great way to maximize the amount of information you can fit on a single page but nobody wants to read a wall of words. In much the same way, nobody wants to be overwhelmed by UI garbage.
His commentary makes it sound like a UI is a UV map and you need to be maximizing all your space to get the most use out of it which is pretty bad philosophy.
Well you always do have to make use of all available space - there is such thing as the proper use of whitespace. This is one of the points where Skyrim fails miserably though.
In books with a good layout textblocks and pictures are framed by a proper amount of whitespace which helps you to indentify what you are looking at, recongnize the structure of the textflow and highlights the importance of certain elements. A grid, its structure and the distribution of content and whitespace in it are essential for proper graphic design - and that does include UIs.
Put your entire inventory of 200+ items into little boxes and fill the entire screen with icons of them and tell me how good an interface that is.
They had that in Morrowind, and Diablo. Both are excellent. You could also use filters, such as Armor, Weapons, Misc, etc, to reduce the amount of elements on-screen.
They had that in Morrowind, and Diablo. Both are excellent. You could also use filters, such as Armor, Weapons, Misc, etc, to reduce the amount of elements on-screen.
Yeah, the only thing I would have liked, was an option to switch into a grid based list form with icons and names of the objects, so you didn't have to hover over the similar icons, like magic items.
They had that in Morrowind, and Diablo. Both are excellent. You could also use filters, such as Armor, Weapons, Misc, etc, to reduce the amount of elements on-screen.
Err that's not what they had in Morrowind, in Morrowind your UI was confined to a box and everything outside of it was "wasted space"
Err that's not what they had in Morrowind, in Morrowind your UI was confined to a box and everything outside of it was "wasted space"
Morrowind had great freedom in how you could resize position and lock things in place when you exited the ui, you could essentially utilize all the screenspace you wanted, but it had quite some flaws and suffered heavily from overlapping windows.
Why do we have to call these mods "Fix's"? I always cringe when I see these "Fixing it" mods. If your altering preexisting content isn't it just a mod? Fixing it sounds like you need to fix something Bethesda couldn't or wouldn't fix. Your not "Fixing" the UI your changing (or modding) it.
Or maybe I'm just nuts. heh.
Oh by the way, Thieves guild main quest. Amazing. That is all!
Man..i am surprised at the Ui hate. I am playing on a pc and I find the Ui really great and fast and I love favoriting spells for fast access.
You don't think it's a little redundant to have to open your UI, assign something to your favorites, then open your favorites just so you can assign a hotkey to it?
Ive been playing pc games with a controller for a while now though, I think its just the era we are in with all these multiplatform releases requires it, just cause , assasins creed, tomb raider, gta, even battlefield vehicles...they all play better with a controller. I miss the freedom of a mouse but the way the controller is mapped out is just really neat compared to clunky keyboard controls.
The UI isnt very good even for a console. The favouring system is a mess. You cant reorder any of them when you viewing the list. Also in any of the menus they dont rollover, you cant scroll starting from the bottom. They could place a lot more information on the screen at one time, and you wouldnt have to move around and click on things so much.
Its usable but it could be a whole lot better. I hope they fix if even just a little bit.
The UI isnt very good even for a console. The favouring system is a mess. You cant reorder any of them when you viewing the list. Also in any of the menus they dont rollover, you cant scroll starting from the bottom. They could place a lot more information on the screen at one time, and you wouldnt have to move around and click on things so much.
Its usable but it could be a whole lot better. I hope they fix if even just a little bit.
yeah I definitely didnt think the ui was "very good", just "ok" really, nothing impressive or amazingly useful but generally playing the game feels fine - running ,jumping, shooting fireballs, getting out weapons etc all those are mapped nicely to the controller and to me thats what counts. I dont even use favorites I just have potions thats all, so the ui isnt much of an issue for me.
I don't think the UI is "ok," it's a bit below that. Design wise, I'll give it a passable grade, but sometimes shit just doesn't work. Select a book, close out of the book, and now you can't mouse over any other items. Click another item, you'll just get the same book again. You have to exit out of the whole menu first.
You don't think it's a little redundant to have to open your UI, assign something to your favorites, then open your favorites just so you can assign a hotkey to it?
I guess it depends on how you play the game. My character is a jack of all trades, so I change my armor/weapon/magic/shouts a lot during battle. This means a looong favourite list, but I prefer it to Arkham City's implementation which is prettier but rather clumsy for me.
What I mean by redundant is that you have to add an item to a list, then go to the list an add it to a hotkey. You can't just add it to a hotkey from your inventory, first it has to be added to favorites.
I use it too but I do wish I could flip through it with the scroll wheel.
In general the whole UI just feels like it grew out of circumstances and not out of planning, especially the fact that the UI is completely split in half, you have to go through an entirely seperate interface to save/load or access your quests vs. opening your inventory and the interfaces regularly overlap.
Hey all, got a question maybe one of you know the answer to:
So im dual wielding daggers, got a bow and a healing spell so far. Is it possible to reliably bind both my daggers to a wep preset, like bind them to the nr 1 button, put the bow on 2 and the healing spell on 3?
Hey all, got a question maybe one of you know the answer to:
So im dual wielding daggers, got a bow and a healing spell so far. Is it possible to reliably bind both my daggers to a wep preset, like bind them to the nr 1 button, put the bow on 2 and the healing spell on 3?
you can add them to favourites in teh inventory and magic lists respectively, then press 'q' to go to your favourite menu, hover over one and press 1-8 to hotkey them to those keys. Unfortunately I think you need 2 hotkeys for your daggers, but I think if they're both the same (eg Iron Dagger(2)) you might be able to tap 1 twice and dual wield like that.
Hey all, got a question maybe one of you know the answer to:
So im dual wielding daggers, got a bow and a healing spell so far. Is it possible to reliably bind both my daggers to a wep preset, like bind them to the nr 1 button, put the bow on 2 and the healing spell on 3?
For example purposes:
If you have 2 Iron Daggers, you can hotkey those (via the favorites menu) to 1, hotkey the bow to 2, and hotkey the healing spell to 3. If you have two daggers equipped, and want to switch to dual healing, you would have to hit 3 twice. If you have both hands full of healing, and want to switch to the daggers, you would have to hit 1 twice.
However, if you have the daggers enchanted, you will need to hotkey each enchanted dagger separately. i.e. Iron Dagger with Fire hotkeyed to 1, Iron Dagger with Soul Trap hotkeyed to 2.
Replies
oh, and this...
[edit] ah, that's the exact same image the poster above me attached, however, I made it clickable, for all to minimize the effort of scrolling and using the screen real estate as much as possible. Irony...
http://blog.fileplanet.com/2011/11/11/five-oblivion-mods-skyrim-should-have/darnified-ui-screen-1/
If you're not using a shield, always carry two daggers, you're quicker and every attack is double damage, it turns your backstabs into 30x damage instead of 15x.
I managed to sneak up on a Dragon and backstab for 30x, I was all giddy.
I've had tons of crashing, bugs, and those goofy NPC shenanigans that only Elder Scroll games seem capable of producing, but none of it has come even close to stopping me from enjoying the game.
There are already several solid mod releases too. Lots of art fixes and performance enhancers. My favorite of which fixes the fucking TERRIBLE blocky normal maps on NPC faces. (Also, nude mod.)
EDIT: This.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9f8VwuoTuE
This game man.
This game.
http://imgur.com/a/Ftk4S#0
That doesn't make it right
also, Morokei is kicking my ass hard core - I finally had to just give up and leave so I can come back later.
question about mods: if you install a mod can you uninstall it and continue playing? I was playing Stalker Call of Pripyat with the Complete mod, it introduced a game breaking bug about 15 hours into the game - an important NPC's cut scene wouldn't play so you couldn't talk to him. When I uninstalled the mod, I couldn't load any of my saves that used the mod.
Yeah, that guy saved Oblivion for me (along with the leveling fix). I really hope that someone fixes that UI in about a weeks time (by then I got my old, but better, graphic card from my house) and can finally play the game.
His commentary makes it sound like a UI is a UV map and you need to be maximizing all your space to get the most use out of it which is pretty bad philosophy. His mock-up works well though (all he filled the space with was a character portrait which IIRC is what Oblivion did too) so maybe it's just poor phrasing.
I dunno why he thinks icons are the best thing ever. Morrowind used icons mainly because the interface was obviously designed for a mouse where you mouseover an icon to see what the item is. Not really as convenient with a controller and an inventory with 100+ items. It's much easier to find an item in a list of text than it is digging through a bunch of items that all have the same icon to see which one is the one you want.
But the whole point is that we are playing on a PC, not a console, and shouldn't be stuck with bad UI decisions that just don't work with PCs. Icons + text = win, its much easier for the eye to narrow down what you are looking for with icons and then confirm with text, then to just have text. The UI is badly designed if you have anything else then a controller (aka a crippled controlling device) when you can design something better for the PC version, which has some much different control devices (mouse + keyboard).
No developer wants to make two entirely different user interfaces.
Thing is, most of us here are PC users. We want an interface that works well for PC, not a shoddy console port. The current interface works fine for console, but for PC, it's just bad. And no, maximizing screen real-estate isn't bad philosophy. We want info, as fast as possible, and icons allow you to get a visual indicator of what it is you're looking for.
When I am sorting through my list of potions in Skyrim, it takes at least 20-30 seconds to find what I am looking for. When I'm in combat, that is far too long to find a simple health potion. Whereas having icons would allow me to quickly distinguish magicka, stamina, and health potions with the aid of colors.
Yeah, I know, I can bind potions to my favorites, but I dont always have a stack of potions waiting to be used, I just use potions I find scattered around everywhere.
It will give you a warning the first time you try to load a save with a plugin missing but it's doable, how much it'll break the game depends on what it actually did to a game.
If you installed a giant overhaul plugin, it's probably likely you'd have some issues if you removed it afterwards :P even if the game let you.
[ame="
[ame="
A user interface has to convey a lot of information in a way that is easy to understand and minimally intrusive, using all of your screen space is rarely ever a good way to do that unless you do what this guy did and just fill it with fodder (a character portrait)
Not using paragraphs is a great way to maximize the amount of information you can fit on a single page but nobody wants to read a wall of words. In much the same way, nobody wants to be overwhelmed by UI garbage.
In books with a good layout textblocks and pictures are framed by a proper amount of whitespace which helps you to indentify what you are looking at, recongnize the structure of the textflow and highlights the importance of certain elements. A grid, its structure and the distribution of content and whitespace in it are essential for proper graphic design - and that does include UIs.
Yeah, the only thing I would have liked, was an option to switch into a grid based list form with icons and names of the objects, so you didn't have to hover over the similar icons, like magic items.
Morrowind had great freedom in how you could resize position and lock things in place when you exited the ui, you could essentially utilize all the screenspace you wanted, but it had quite some flaws and suffered heavily from overlapping windows.
Or maybe I'm just nuts. heh.
Oh by the way, Thieves guild main quest. Amazing. That is all!
Ive been playing pc games with a controller for a while now though, I think its just the era we are in with all these multiplatform releases requires it, just cause , assasins creed, tomb raider, gta, even battlefield vehicles...they all play better with a controller. I miss the freedom of a mouse but the way the controller is mapped out is just really neat compared to clunky keyboard controls.
Its usable but it could be a whole lot better. I hope they fix if even just a little bit.
yeah I definitely didnt think the ui was "very good", just "ok" really, nothing impressive or amazingly useful but generally playing the game feels fine - running ,jumping, shooting fireballs, getting out weapons etc all those are mapped nicely to the controller and to me thats what counts. I dont even use favorites I just have potions thats all, so the ui isnt much of an issue for me.
I guess it depends on how you play the game. My character is a jack of all trades, so I change my armor/weapon/magic/shouts a lot during battle. This means a looong favourite list, but I prefer it to Arkham City's implementation which is prettier but rather clumsy for me.
http://www.dorkly.com/article/27365/the-real-danger-of-skyrim
I use it too but I do wish I could flip through it with the scroll wheel.
In general the whole UI just feels like it grew out of circumstances and not out of planning, especially the fact that the UI is completely split in half, you have to go through an entirely seperate interface to save/load or access your quests vs. opening your inventory and the interfaces regularly overlap.
http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1267229-modding-the-gui/page__view__findpost__p__19229995
So im dual wielding daggers, got a bow and a healing spell so far. Is it possible to reliably bind both my daggers to a wep preset, like bind them to the nr 1 button, put the bow on 2 and the healing spell on 3?
you can add them to favourites in teh inventory and magic lists respectively, then press 'q' to go to your favourite menu, hover over one and press 1-8 to hotkey them to those keys. Unfortunately I think you need 2 hotkeys for your daggers, but I think if they're both the same (eg Iron Dagger(2)) you might be able to tap 1 twice and dual wield like that.
For example purposes:
If you have 2 Iron Daggers, you can hotkey those (via the favorites menu) to 1, hotkey the bow to 2, and hotkey the healing spell to 3. If you have two daggers equipped, and want to switch to dual healing, you would have to hit 3 twice. If you have both hands full of healing, and want to switch to the daggers, you would have to hit 1 twice.
However, if you have the daggers enchanted, you will need to hotkey each enchanted dagger separately. i.e. Iron Dagger with Fire hotkeyed to 1, Iron Dagger with Soul Trap hotkeyed to 2.
Hope this helps!
Oohlala
` key, console click on the door and type unlock is just what you might aswell do.
It's all about retaining the illusion of having accomplished something without actually having done anything
[ame="
Enjoy
lol you know it
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/14/user-interfarce-skyrims-silly-choices/
Honestly, a Lockpick Pro Mod? What's next? An auto-aim bow?
That's kind of what the discussion has been about these past 2-3 pages. :P
Thanks for the link! Such an awesome soundtrack. Reminds me of the old Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. One of my favorite movie scores.