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theweaselking"According to Steam’s tracker, Skyrim’s rocketed to 231,593 players (as of writing) during its first 24 hours. For reference, Modern Warfare 3′s currently in distant second at 78,161. That’s sort of, you know, insane. It’s probably also a record number of people concurrently falling to their knees, gazing up into the falling rain, and cursing a single interface designer’s name."
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 03:37 pm (UTC)The things that drive me crazy are all console-things that are just plain *dumb* on a system with mouse+lkeyboard. Like, you can't create shortcuts to things you want to commonly use.
In Oblivion, you could bind items or spells to the 1-8 keys on your keyboard. Tap the key, the item under that key is equipped and ready to use. In Skyrim, there is instead a "favourites" list. You can add any number of things to the favourites list, but you have to access the list by pressing "q", which brings up the WHOLE LIST for you you select from. If you regularly switch between, say, a bow, a pair of Destruction spells, a healing spell, and a sword/shield combo, you have to pull up the list and pick the items out from it each time. You can't even put "this sword and that shield" as a single item the way you could in Oblivion. So, if I want to drop my bow and pull my flamethrower because a crowd of dudes is charging me, I have to pause the game, open a menu, select my fire spells, unpause the game, and start blasting. In Oblivion, I *could* do it that way or I could just set up a shortcut because I make that change a lot.
Then there's the shop interface. When you go to buy/sell, a list of the categories of item that the vendor has appear on the left. Click a category, see the items. Simple, yes?
You have to click *on the letters of the word* in the category. Click between the letters? That's the same as "clicking outside the vendor interface", which is the same as "I am done shopping".
As well, one-click shopping is very real.... which means if you click on the wrong thing, you bought it, and you can't say "whoops" and return it. No, you have to sell it back, getting probably 20%ish of what you just paid for it, early in the game. Prices get better as you get your merch on, but that takes a while.
(misclicked while selling? You sold your Heap Big Magic Item! Want to buy it back for 5x the price?)
The crafting interfaces: The shortcuts are *different* on different screens. "E" is your key for Doing Stuff for most of the game, but here on the crafting screen there are *two* new shortcuts that don't get a lot of play elsewhere. After you hit E to select an item, it changes in the list to show you what you'll be making. You then hit R to say "craft this item". R is right next to E, and you use R in the rest of the game (draw/stow weapon, for example) so that's not a super big deal... .but then it pops up a "do you want to make this item?" window, and your choices are Yes/No. "Tab" is no, just like everything else in the game - Tab is *always* "no, negative, reverse, back out, exit" unless you're not doing anything at all, in which case it's "menu". So that's good. The shortcut for YES, though, is "y", or "Enter".
Y.
Or Enter.
Not "E", your "I want to do things" key.
Not "R", your "I want to craft this thing in my crafting interface" key.
Not even a key normally used by the left hand you're WASDing with.
(When smithing, I tend to use WS to navigate the list, ER to select-and-craft, and simply position my mouse over where the "yes" button will appear.)
Speaking of inventory interface crimes: You can go up and down a list of items with WS or mousewheel. You can also click directly on an item to "select and press E to use" immediately.
However, it's trivially possible to have it be IMPOSSIBLE to click on something. Your mouse simply can't highlight it. I find this happens most often in the Books/Notes list. The first few times it happened, I was very confused, and left the inventory and came back and it worked - later, I realised that the fix is to highlight the item above the unclickable one, then use WS or mousewheel to select it.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 03:41 pm (UTC)I just *also* want to be able to have a one-tap shortcut for "configure for ranged combat" and "holy crap flamethrower" and "return to my normal armor setup".
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 10:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 11:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-15 04:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 03:37 pm (UTC)Books! The person responsible for books gets the SPECIAL treatment. When you click on a book *in the world*, you get an unskippable ~1s animation of the book opening, and then you can read it, and press E to pick it up (or Steal it) if you want. That animation? Annoying as hell. And it's not possible to pick up a book from the game world without getting that, which is just a nuisance.
Books in CONTAINERS? Different story. Click them, they go right into your inventory without opening or reading them. Which can get you in trouble: You can read an owned book without stealing it, in the world. In a container, doing the "read book" thing will steal it WITHOUT reading it. And this is extra annoying if it's, say, someone's journal on their dead body, because you have to pick it up, then exit the container screen, then pull up the menu, go to Items -> Books -> scroll through until you find it -> click to read the item you just picked up.
Now, there IS a shortcut to let you read a book or note from a container without picking it up - CTRL-click. That opens it and lets you read it - but now there's no "take this book" option like there is on every OTHER book-reading interface in the game. If you're reading a book in this way, you need to leave the read interface and close the book before you can pick it up.
So, yeah, lousy UI design in a lot of places.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 03:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 09:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 09:32 pm (UTC)* Bring up the menu, you've got four directions - skills/Level up, items, magic, map. Move towards one of them and *it shifts*. It doesn't move FAR and it's occupying basically an entire direction so it's still easy to hit, but the target you're aiming at MOVES ON YOU.
* There's no way to say "I have 40 iron ingots and 40 pairs of iron boots and a forge. Smurf me up some smithing, don't make me click 120 times".
None of these are game-killers, they're all just annoying. They're oversights. They're mistakes.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 09:36 pm (UTC)I think you mentioned elsewhere that they haven't released an SDK yet, have they given an ETA for it?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 10:06 pm (UTC)(I've exhausted all the ones that jump out at me when I haven't played the game since last night. I'll update with more as I run into them. There's several GAMEPLAY complaints that aren't really an interface thing - things like factions becoming hostile too easily when their ally *runs into the path of the flamethrowing wizard* and a couple of the follow-NPC quests take FOREVER because he's really fucking slow *and* he stops as soon as you're not next to him *and* you have a long way to go in total - but those aren't interface things, beyond that it would be nice to be able to tell allies to STAY THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY IMMA DROP A FIREBALL THERE)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 10:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 04:26 pm (UTC)BEST MOD EVER: I found one that lets scrolls and potions be filed on the Spells part of your inventory, so they stop cluttering up your 'loot' space. AND for good measure they stack up to 200 items instead of 20 - but frankly that's just gravy once you've got them out of the main inventory.
SECOND BEST MOD EVER: Nice, high contrast, square automap, so I can actually see it over the background textures.
THIRD BEST MOD EVER: high resolution replacement textures for everything :)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 06:58 pm (UTC)Also: how is the alchemy? Actually, how are the poisons? In Oblivion I divided my time between poisoning the entire population of the all-red underworld and picking flowers.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 07:15 pm (UTC)Play mouse+Keyboard. There *will be* a few wacky things, but you'll get used to it pretty quickly, and I'm expecting the more annoying of the interface fuckeries (see my other comments in this thread!) to be fixed-by-mod shortly.
Alchemy: Well, for the first two days I thought it sucked, because I had a ton of ingredients and no clue what ANY of them did. And experimenting just had me wasting pretty flowers since I couldn't find any combinations. I found some recipes in books, but most of those involved rare ingredients that I didn't have.
Then someone pointed out that you can just *eat* ingredients to learn the first property, and durr, I could. And from there I learned a lot more.
Poisons: I never really use 'em? They seem to be very similar to Oblivion.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-14 11:59 pm (UTC)In other news: I CANNOT BIND TO THE KEYPAD. Left handers are ten percent of the population, and Bethesda hates every one of us. Yes, there are work-arounds with third-party keymappers, but JESUS CHRIST BETHESDA. The left side of the keyboard is a horrible ghetto that no game designer in their right minds would banish a left-hander to.
My Prob
Date: 2011-11-16 02:26 am (UTC)When I came across an orc trying to sell me drugs, I got these choices:
No Thanks
Sounds Illegal
Gimme those (Intimidate)
Where was the "Sure I'll buy some"?
Or the "Hey I got some ingredients, too, see anything ya like?"
Not enough No's. And when do I get to seduce someone?