Review: Skyrim (PC) - Can mods save an imperfect game?

Bethesda - hire these guys already!

It has been quite a while since I wrote about Skyrim, and frankly I only played for a short while after the last post. Nothing new happened that could affect my opinion of the game as I have so far expressed it.

My intention was to finish at least the main plot and before finishing the review. However, on yet another day of trudging through the endless tundras of Skyrim, doing one fetch quest after another, clearing this fort and that fort of identical bandits and evil mages, I had a friend IM me. When the conversation turned to what I was doing, I watched myself awkwardly explain that I was playing Skyrim, a game he probably would not like, as it was not very good, and I wasn't much liking it either for that matter, and then... Wait, so why am I playing this again?

I didn't have an answer then, and it's been nearly a month now. I did other things in the meanwhile. I still can't find a compelling reason to play Skyrim, other than this notion that one should complete a game in order to review it (which I don't really believe in). It slightly bothers me.

Eventually, I decided to compromise. You'll recall (and hopefully I correctly recall) that my major complaints were uninteresting gameplay, an agonizing interface, and a sordid color palette. Turns out it's not all bad! Bethesda did one thing right and added decent modding support, and there's plenty of mods out there that fix at least the latter two.

Namely, the SkyUI seems to improve the interface quite a bit. I am especially excited about their quick-menu redesign. There is little that needs to be said, the Skyrim Nexus page quite adequately describes it.

Second is the FXAA Post Process Injector. Based on the name alone, it sounds like some amazing work on the modders' part... But anyhow, what it does is saturate the colors, among other things. Unfortunately, when the Skyrim 1.3 update came out, it apparently broke the PPI compatibility (some DRM nonsense code that took issue at messing with the memory, I gather). Currently the PPI's page on Skyrim Nexus is hidden.

Besides these, there is a plethora of texture, bump map, model and game content packs. But really, SkyUI and PPI are the make or break factor for me here. If the PPI (or another alternative) works again, while SkyUI and preferably some of texture packs don't stop working, I'll try to complete Skyrim, and hopefully will post about whether it becomes a worth one's time with mods.

Without mods, it isn't. I mean, the story is sorta neat. The new lore is sorta cool. The free-world exploration is sorta interesting and the weird TES monsters are kinda nice. The engine is obviously great but the art style is a bit dull, and the voice acting is plentiful but the dialogues are bland. Hell, if you wanna write a poem, about the merits of the game - you can! (Heh heh) But really, all the games pluses are all "sorta" pluses, and the games few but important minuses are deal breakers. You don't play a bad game for a sorta nice thing. It's not worth watching a playthrough of Skyrim, either. Unless the person doing it was extremely entertaining, there's just so much grind and doing the same things over and over again that most of it would put you to sleep, and you couldn't skip to the interesting parts really because the fun parts of Skyrim are those random things that just happen suddenly and unpredictably while you are just getting along with it. The plot and the dialogues are certainly not fun (not so much as to justify spending time on the game anyway). And those random things, well, they're random. You'd have to watch the whole playthrough to know where they are in the first place, and it could be hours.

I mean, the only way to properly handle a game like this is to have most of your let's play be a time-lapse, and I haven't seen too many of those. Now that I think of it, a time-lapse Skyrim LP would be pretty cool... Hmm. If anyone does find a good LP, incidentally, let me know: I just might do something shocking and scandalous like review a game based on the LP!

But, back to the matter at hand: Skyrim is a very long game, and not really that interesting. You won't lose much you don't sink weeks of your time into it, and if you do... Well, you'll lose those weeks of time, for one, and most of it won't even be very enjoyable. If you feel terribly curious, and the price aside, it's worth taking a weekend or two to check out what the game is like, maybe take a look, but I wouldn't try to complete any at all sizable portion of it.

Score: 2/5

Bias: This was an early version with no mods. I am jaded by the media constantly raving about it, and all the awful, cancerous memes the fanbase has spawned. If I review it again, with mods, after patches, and after the goddamn children in the media shut the hell up about it already, I'll probably give it a 3 (all else being equal).

Skyrim: Useless Skills

Just in case anyone is curious, here's a few important points about skills to keep in mind when planning out a build:

• Weapons have roughly the same DPS, the difference is speed/damage per swing. Because there are per-hit effects which become important later, you want to go with the fastest: Swords. Also, if you are using a broken tactic like run to enemy, hit, run back before he can hit you, a fast weapon helps. By the way, daggers are even faster, but not all one handed weapon perks apply to them. (But daggers do use one-handed weapons)
• Sneak is broken. Yes, you can sneak around stationary enemies. However, once you take that first shot, hiding is ridiculously difficult, so sneak contributes little. Also, a lot of enemies pop-up behind you or attack you due to a script or whatever, so you get no chance to sneak. Bosses, being the strongest enemies and the target where sneak attacks would be most useful, can't usually be sneak attacked because of the level design (an arena where the boss makes an entrance by charging you). The only exception is if your sneak is 100: Then you get the hide in plain sight perk- it's a bit buggy and you can abuse it by sneaking right in front of an enemy, which will force him to be unaware of you for a second (which is what the perk does) and then you can sneak attack him before he "sees" you again.
• Alchemy is fun, but ultimately not worth the training or the higher level mobs you will get due to extra levels- all you need to make is health and maybe mana potions, both are very easy. Enchanting is fun but you can get magic items easily anyway. Smithing is, again, fun and lucrative, and I'm not sure if you can get dragon armor (best in the game) without it, but for other things it's not hard to find powerful items anyway.
• Speech is useless. Persuade/intimidate attempts are rare, do not have interesting dialogue paths, and the rewards you get are shit. Speech itself affects your merchant prices, but even with 100 speech you still get ripped off (they sell at double price and buy at half) and with crap speech it's not that bad (sell at triple buy at third) so yeah. Money is very easy to get in this game, anyhow.
• Pickpocket is pointless, you can simply quicksave and quickload until you get the item. There is also a bug where having too high a pickpocket score can make you success go from say 13% to 0%.
• Lockpicking is useless. Lockpicks are common, cheap and light. The minigame is very easy, even for hard locks. There are very few doors you actually have to pick.

Basically all you need is a weapon skill, an armor skill, and the relevant magic skills. If you enjoy crafting, get crafting, but only after level 20-30 or monsters will become impossibly hard.

The best weapon is sword. The best spell schools are destruction and alteration (+ to armor spells like oakflesh). Illusion is nice because it has invisibility and light spells, but they are not useful in combat. Restoration is nice for healing, but those spells are too expensive and you will not have mana left for offense, or really anything besides occasional bursts of healing. Conjuration has bound weapons, which are nice, but the summons require obscene amounts of mana.

So yeah. Keep in mind that I'm far from finishing the game.

Review: Skyrim (PC) - Style and difficulty

Stylish!

My other post dealt with things about Skyrim that are bad as a consequence of it being a console port, but there are things about Skyrim that bother me besides those.

Gray on gray, all day


I really don't like Skyrim. The setting, not the game. It's gray as fuck. Everything is gray to begin with- the terrain is either white snow, gray rock, bluish-grayish water reflecting a perpetually overcast white sky, or dun grass. The mountains are all grey and white. The cities I visited all seem to be made of gray stones and grayish brown wood, except Riften, which is just completely brown. The people are dressed in gray furs and gray armors. The barrows are gray. The forts are gray. The caves are gray.

It's just difficult to convey how soul-crushingly desaturated the game is. I could show you screenshots, but it really wouldn't get across the experience of seeing a million different scenes and landscapes, all drawn with dust on rock tablets. I wonder if it's possible to come up with a rendering algorithm that performs better for very sparse palettes... Maybe at least you could squeeze some extra FPS out of this nonsense that way.

I don't know why they did this. I mean, perhaps the landscape being gray is realistic. I'm not even gonna go into the silliness of ultra-realistic graphics in a game that has gypsy anthropomorphic cats killing dragons by literally yelling flames and lightning at them (yeah, the game isn't all bad). But did the trees have to be gray? Did everyone's skin have to look like cadavers in a fluorescent-lit morgue, even by torchlight? I haven't invested the time into making a Skyrim/real life tundra photograph comparison yet, but I have this uncomfortable suspicion that Skyrim will actually turn out to be less saturated!

But like I said, it's not about realism. You know how on some days, rain clouds just cover the sky and make everything look so glum that you take one look outside and immediately regret ever getting out of bed that day? That's what playing Skyrim feels like! I thought games were supposed to make you feel happy, not suicidal.

Useless Skills

On a more serious note, Skyrim shares this leveling mechanic that TES games have, where instead of leveling by killing things, you level by increasing your skills, which in turn increase through use. Enemies scale according to your level. It's a lovely system- except the way it works in Skyrim can be quite troublesome.

With my first character, what fights I had before coming to Whiterun, the first big hub city, were extremely easy (as I complained in my previous Skyrim post). As a result, I decided to improve my crafting and thievery skills a lot, and got to level 15 or so with crap combat skills. Big mistake. When I finally started to work on clearing the various nearby dungeons, encounters became extremely difficult unless I chugged potions by the dozen.

I eventually made a new character and actively tried to get to about level 15 without improving any non-combat skills, and it's a fairly easy game so far. I do occasionally die, but often due to the interface and controls more than anything else. Anyway, leveling is largely determined by your highest skills, so I should be able to safely get my "useless" crafting skills and what not to catch up now.

The thing I don't like is, it really doesn't make much sense for non-combat skills to be treated as equivalent to combat skills, especially when the game is mostly about combat. You basically end up with a game where, unless you jump through various hoops, you are penalized for not focusing on a combat related skill. This isn't exclusive to the TES leveling system- games where you get XP from killing enemies, and distribute points at each level-up, also do this: They force you to choose between skills which open up certain optional gameplay elements like crafting or extra quests through persuasion, and being effective in combat.

Balance-wise, this is nonsense. I suspect the idea of valuing non-combat skills as much as combat skills came from the same place most RPG conventions came from- pen and paper RPGs. When you are playing DnD, having a high Diplomacy score is just as useful as having a high melee attack bonus (although even DnD sees it fit to separate combat and non-combat skills, actually). This is because there is no limit on the actions you can take- when you are attacked by bandits, trying to fast talk your way out of the situation doesn't suddenly require the GM to produce 10 time as much code for this 5 minute encounter. When you need to kill a dragon in DnD, you can realistically attempt to talk a local company of mercenaries into helping you, and not have to deal with the clumsy problem of having 150 allies fighting on your side and responding to your commands in a first person RPG.

Making "wimpy" skills like persuasion, pickpocket, sneak, knowledge, and so on effective alternatives to combat exponentially increases the code you need to write, but it makes no difference for PnP games where you make everything up on the spot anyway. The way these skills are balanced for PnP play is simply not applicable to software RPGs. It is perfectly viable for me to train nothing but two-handed fighting and beat the game like that. But the very idea of beating Skyrim with 100 speech and nothing else is hilariously impossible. In fact, speech barely makes a difference in how easy the game is- there are obviously side quests where it is relevant, but the advantages are trivial. You can almost never avoid fighting tough bosses with speech, for example. And yet, increasing either skill will result in equally powerful enemies.

More practically, suppose one character has 100 in two-handed fighting and heavy armor, and whatever score he started with in all other skills. Now, suppose another one which is the same, except he also trained speech to 100. The second character will get much more difficult encounters than the first. Why? He is no more powerful than the first, because you can't persuade hostiles in this game. He will have slightly more money, because of better merchant prices, and those few extra coins from using persuade to ask for a better reward after the occasional quest. It won't really be that much money though, and money is almost always trivial to acquire in Skyrim, even without using exploits and cheap tricks.

So why even bother with Speech, if it's so useless? Well, because it opens up fun dialogue options sometimes, and if you're that type, it lets you play an eloquent or tactless character and have the world react to that, even if in an ultimately useless, purely cosmetic way. With the crafting skills it's the same- oh sure making the best armor early on would give you an advantage, but then you could just as easily steal or buy good armor. It's doing nothing for balance, but it is effectively forcing me to ignore the many different crafting ingredients and recipes it has.

I don't understand the logic behind this. Why punish me for not ignoring half of the game's features? If you didn't want me to craft, you could have saved yourselves some time and not added crafting at all, devs.

The solution is obviously very simple. Supporting skills should be weighted, and shouldn't contribute to leveling as much. Morrowind already had a system that while not perfect, worked wonderfully- if you think a skill is useless you would leave it as a misc skill, and it would not contribute to your level progress

The same for perks- combat and non-combat perks should really be bought with points from separate pools. The whole idea of competition between content and ease of play is probably coming from the same kind of thinking that brings us gems like "now finish the game using nothing except the shitty starting weapon for a bonus level!" Why is it that I have to prove myself worthy to have something I already bloody paid for? Fuck off, game. If I want a tougher challenge, I'll just up your difficulty slider!

Rubber-band difficulty

I don't like, this rubber-band business in general, either. Fundamentally, it's like running on a treadmill- no matter how much faster you run, you will still be in the same place, so why bother running at all?

It has been said that RPGs are basically games about making numbers increase. To be more precise, there should also be many numbers, and each should require distinct, bizarrely unique methods to increase. If you can come up with subtle, complicated inter-relationships between different numbers, even better! This is what makes up the heart of a fun RPG (though perhaps not, mind, an action-RPG).

Usually, these numbers are measured relative to the game world. "It used to take me 5 hits to kill a diseased goblin scout, but after leveling and getting better gear, I can kill the same goblin scout in 2 hits!" That's why these things are fun- it's the sense of progress as you successfully navigate the game's mathematical labyrinth. But when the game is designed so that it always generates a goblin with enough health for 3 of your hits, you've just taken away the thing that made it fun!

Perhaps you are thinking, "but that's stupid! If not for level scaling, you'd keep running into dungeons which are too hard for you, or too easy!". Well, for one, this happens anyway. As I said, if you decide to try some fun but useless skills like speech, pickpocket or alchemy all dungeons will be too hard, and if you make a boring barbarian axe swinger robot all of them will be too easy.

But even if we disregard that, what is the problem, exactly? So you walk in a dungeon and get your ass kicked. You just run away, do some other stuff until your skills and equipment are better, and then return for revenge. Hell, with an open-world, non-linear game like Skyrim this really works- there are so many quests that you wouldn't ever have to just grind random encounters. I mean, doing that is fun! It actually feels like you're accomplishing something, what's more, you get the nice feeling of "getting back" at the game for that "unfair" dungeon it gave you. It also naturally divides the world into areas which are associated with different stages of the game. Consequently, more of your choices matter- now doing quests in a bad order can make your life quite difficult (and short).

Note that, I said quests, not cities. It seems a lot of games without rubber-band difficulty get that wrong- they make some cities just generally higher level than others. Of course, when you have the super-power empire's capital patrolled by level 5 guards in wooden armor because you start there, while the rebel camp that supposedly stands no chance has level 80 guys with game breaking items strolling around, things get a bit silly... But whoever said all the high level areas must be geographically clustered?

I mean, it's okay if there's a level-50 dungeon right next to the starting town. I'll go in there once, get killed, and resolve to come back much later to see what's inside. Since dungeons have icons on the map anyway, you could give them a color based on how far above or below your level they are, to save the player some tedious bookkeeping. Honestly, it seems to me like that would be a much more interesting, fun game. In fact, not everything is scaled- giants and mammoths for instance have a fairly high minimum level, and after accidentally getting roughed up by a giant at some point I can't wait until I'm powerful enough to take on them. That kind of thing is fun, its dramatic, it makes for a nice adventure- and perplexingly, in Skyrim it's the exception and not the norm.

Review: Skyrim (PC) - Why console ports suck

Let me say again, to be clear: I don't like console games, and Skyrim is a console game. I don't like a lot about Skyrim, and most of my gripes have to do with it being a console game (although a few big ones don't), so a lot of this post will be me complaining about console ports.

By the way, it's not like Skyrim is awful. I don't hate everything about it (obviously, any game that shares lore with Morrowind already gets points from the start, as does any RPG with lots of skills that are improved by using them). But there really isn't anything non-trivial so far that I really like, so I'll defer on talking about the things I like until I'm done with the game (I'm not sure yet if I'll have the willpower and/or time to even finish the main quest). So, this post will mostly be me complaining.

Console vs. PC
As I said, I don't like console games. It's not a very fundamental dislike. If you think about it, what is the basic difference between a PC and console? You could get from the former to the latter in two steps: First, make the hardware monolithic, non-customizable, proprietary, and so on (incidentally, this essentially produces a Mac). Then, gut the OS to make it capable of only playing games. You have pretty much made a console, except because we started with a PC, it's still displaying things on a monitor and you still use a keyboard and mouse for input.

That's not a big deal, because input/output method is independent from the platform: You could hook up a mouse and keyboard to a console, and you could use a TV and gamepad (with no mouse or keybaord) to -albeit clumsily- control your garden variety Windows PC. Of course, in practice nobody seems to do these things, and this is the crux of my issue with console games, but before I get to that: There is nothing really wrong so far. If anything, monolithic hardware and a minimal OS dedicated to games are good, because they make coding games easier, although there's the issues of compatibility... But none of this really influences game design. And it's obvious that console games are different than PC games in certain key ways.

That difference in game design stems from the difference in traditional input/output setups. As I said, PCs, or rather PC users, tend to use monitors and keyboards while console users go with gamepads and TVs. It doesn't have to be this way, as far as I know it's not terribly difficult to use a keyboard with a console and vice versa. However, for some reason, nobody does.

With the PC, of course, it's stupid to use a gamepad instead of a keyboard unless you are playing a game, and even then, it makes sense only for some games. Some people already do use their TV as a monitor (I have) and a lot simply don't have a TV and use their monitor to watch TV stuff.

With consoles, there really is no reason to not use a monitor and keyboard/mouse. There is no reason for this not to be standard- except most console games are made for playing with a gamepad, but that's really only because it's the standard. I guess historically, consoles came about because back in the day, you couldn't expect people to buy computers for playing games on them. Now, the price difference is no longer there.

Note that for the most part, a console's I/O scheme is a subset of a PC's. If you try, you *could* devise a hypothetical game which uses the buttons and analog sticks of a gamepad in such a way that you simply can't play it with a keyboard and mouse- but such games are almost non-existent. For instance, console game like to assign movement to the stick, and you can control walk/run speed with how much you push it, but in most games you never want to and almost never need to run at anything but the maximum speed. It's not that you can't make a game where sometimes you want to walk slowly- it's just that seemingly nobody does. The one exception is detailed flight and racing sims: things like fine steering adjustments often do matter, and they are impossible on a keyboard and clumsy with a mouse while an analog stick does work quite well, except people who play those seems to get specialized controllers anyway, even on consoles.

Notably, you just can't make an FPS game on a console- anything that involves pointing at things on the screen a lot is torture without a mouse. Yes, people try anyway, and I think the attempts suck and will be doomed to suck until the console market gets used to the idea of using mice and keyboards. Yes, you "could" make a PC-style shooter on a console, meant to be played with a mouse, but it won't sell well because most console users won't want to buy or use a mouse just for your game.
Notice that it's harder to make a console RTS: Not only do you need to convince users to buy and use a mouse, but you also need them to sit close enough to the TV to see the small units and interface elements. The mouse, by the way, isn't just for selecting units- any game with many complicated menus will be difficult to handle without a mouse and keyboard.

To solidify the point, observe that in terms of design, it's trivial to port a console game: You do have to deal with different APIs and such under the hood, but you have to change almost nothing about how the game is played- just remap the controls to a keyboard and bind the camera to the mouse. Whereas porting a PC game to the console, especially a "real" PC game which heavily uses the mouse and keyboard to their full potential, would be a ridiculously difficult task. Moreover, there is no genre of console games which does not exist on the PC- some, like platformers, aren't as numerous, but you certainly can't say no notable PC platformer exists in the same way that you can say no notable console strategy game exists.

Complexity ceiling
Hopefully, I've made clear the following: There are kinds of games which can realistically (as in, more than 3 people will actually buy and play them) be made on a PC, and kinds of games which can realistically be made on a console. Practically all of the former can be ported to the PC, although not all developers choose to do so, while there is a distinct class of PC games that cannot be ported to consoles. Note that I'm saying kind- most console action RPGs aren't ported, for instance, that doesn't mean they can't be, as those few that are ported clearly demonstrate.

As I said earlier, I don't like console games. That's not because they're bad games- sure, many suck, just as many PC games suck. It just so happens that even "good" console games are so rarely interesting to me. Now, not every game I like tends to be complex, but most are. And complex games, along with FPSs, are just those kinds which go into the "wouldn't work on a console" category.

Furthermore, with an RPG like a TES game, there's really two aspects of appeal: The lore and the complicated complicated mechanics. And when you have the added constraint of making a game that would work on consoles, too, inevitably some things go. You just can't have a million attributes- it would generate a large amount of data. Displaying copious information is something a PC setup can deal with, but with a console you need the text to be large and legible from a distance, so there is a very finite amount of text, and therefore information, you can display. The same goes for things like interface icons and elements in general- they must be large and visually distinct to avoid confusion.

Or rather, now that I think of it, I don't see why you can't have lots of small text in console games. I've never found it particularly impractical to view lots of text/symbols on a TV, from a distance. But it seems that developers at least believe that console game interfaces should be as simple as possible.

The second factor comes in when you consider that a game which has a large amount of information to display needs to provide effective ways to navigate and manipulate that information. Again, a gamepad is not very well suited to this task, and keyboards and mice have, for decades, proven to be ideally suited to it.

The Interface
To illustrate, I'd like to contrast the interfaces of Morrowind and Skyrim. Morrowind, of course, had a single "status" screen which showed the inventory, map, stats and spells, these have been split up into four items you get when you press Tab in Skyrim. For my purposes, I'll focus on Skyrim's inventory screen.

Morrowind status screen.

There's really a lot I like about Morrowind's UI, such as being able to move around the parts and what not. But the crucial part is this: It's just far more efficient. First, this whole thing pops up with one keystroke. Suppose you need to answer a basic question, such as "do I have a pickaxe?". One key, done. Maybe click and drag the scrollbar or click an inventory filter if you have a lot of stuff on you. In Skyrim, you need to press Tab, lose half a second to the cute fading animations, press up to select inventory, another animation, press left to get to the leftmost column, then press up or down a few times to select weapons, and then keep pressing up or down until you get to "P":

Skyrim inventory.

Now I realize this seems silly, but those few milliseconds of animation, and those few extra keystrokes really do matter: This is something you do thousands of times over the course of the game. It just cannot be tedious.

What's worse is, when the interface is annoying to use, as a player you try to avoid using it as much as possible. That means having only one weapon and/or spell, and switching as little as possible- so the least frustrating way to play the game also happens to be the most boringly simple cookie-cutter way, which I find tragic in a game which is noteworthy due to the potential it has for complexity. If I wanted to play a game where all I did was swing an axe at enemies from start to finish, I wouldn't play a TES game- I'd play hack and slash action RPG.

Ideally, for instance, I would play a versatile magic-using character. Whenever I am attacked, I would cast an armor buff, the appropriate elemental resistance buff for the enemy. Then I would soften up the enemy with an appropriate damage spell (fire for ice wraiths etc), maybe conjure a suitable creature, then cast an attack buff and finish the enemy with my weapon. Maybe I'd even cast a bound weapon spell! Then, if I run out of health, I would heal myself, or if it looks like I'm overwhelmed I'd cast invisibility or something similar and escape.

That would actually be fun! I would have a wide variety of choices (spells, potions and weapons) at my disposal, each suited to different tasks, and I would have to decide on the fly which ones are applicable to that situation. It would be a game that actually gives me something to think about. It was what Morrowind did, and that is why Morrowind was fun. Skyrim, annoyingly, gets the hard part right: It supplies you with the options (unlike many other RPGs which have tons of spells, weapons and what not, most of which are utterly useless). It supplies you with the variety of problems that have different solutions (even though most are ultimately "kill the enemies", the enemies must be killed in very different ways, which is again something most games like this forget about).

The problem is, actually doing the above in Skyrim is torture. Just the amount of time you would waste watching the animations would easily waste a minute per encounter, not to mention breaking the flow. The amount of scrolling through menus would be obscene. It's just not something you can really do- and on either point, I know, because I tried it! A few times, just for the heck of it, I did try to do the many spells approach. The interface aside, it was very enjoyable, and very effective. Unfortunately, it was just such a hassle that I can not do it on a regular basis, once every few minutes, in a game that is dozens of hours long. In the end, I just use the same fire spell on everyone unless I absolutely can't win without using other spells too, and even then there's the temptation of simply turning god mode on briefly just to avoid having to deal with the obnoxious interface to implement a tactic I know will work.

And yes, I know there is an inventory/magic key in Skyrim. I am already using it. Guess what, you still have to watch the animation! It's still not instantaneous like Morrowind's was! And, no, the favorites menu doesn't work either: First off, it shows a ridiculously small number of items, and you still have to scroll.

Now, just to convince you that this is a systemic issue, and not just the Skyrim devs being incompetent: Let's consider why the Morrowind interface is better. First off, it can display more spells, because they are in a smaller font. Scrolling is easier because you have a scroll bar. You can have several screens at once, because when navigating you don't have to go from "select weapon mode" to "select screen mode" and then select the spell screen, and then select the spell. You just click your mouse on whichever element of whichever screen you want. There is a reason why the mouse became so popular, guys.

By the way, I just wanted to mention the stats. Note look at how Morrowind displays them: The window is actually quite small (when I play Morrowind I usually close the useless map and make the other ones larger, not to mention that Morrowind supports resolutions higher than the 1024x768 pictured, with the same font and icon size). But anyway, you can still see all of the attributes, all three status bars with numbers (when drinking potions in Skyrim, you are told how many points it will heal, and are shown the appropriate status bar, but you don't see what the exact numbers of it are), all major and minor skills, and even some other skills. You can't see all skills, because Morrowind had a fuckload of skills, but this UI still shows you much more information than Skyrim's UI, and in a quarter of the screen space.

What's more, look at the inventories: One thing Morrowind can afford to do is show cryptic icons for everything which don't necessarily display all the information about the item. This works, because you can mouse over the icon to see what it means. If it's a common icon, over time you effortlessly come to memorize the meaning, and don't need to do that. Note another thing about Morrowind's UI that you cannot see: You could assign any items or spells you want to your number keys, which really helped things- you didn't even have to go into this screen. The combination of the mouse and no constraint on font or icon size is what makes the interface so much more useful- which is exactly what consoles cannot have, so long as the current prevalent idea about interfaces of console games persists.

The Skyrim interface, if you took out the stupid things like fade-ins, probably is as efficient as you can get, when you are constrained with a gamepad. That said, with a mouse and keyboard, as well as a close-by monitor, you can do a much, much better job. The interface isn't my only problem with Skyrim, as I said, but if the PC port's interface was designed specifically for the PC (what you can't see in the screenshots is the embarrassingly buggy mouse support, by the way), I would have probably loved this game despite the other shortcomings.

That's not to say Skyrim's interface design does not reveal some stupendously bad decisions: I won't list all of them, but most obviously, why is the favorites menu only in a tiny corner of the screen? Bringing it up pauses the game, you usually have much more things favorited than the 3 or 4 items it can display at a time, and laying things out in a 2D table would make navigtating much easier, even with a gamepad.

Review: Skyrim (PC) - Oh fuck it, here we go.

Goodbye social life - I hardly knew ye.

I've been putting it off for a while, but... Well, yeah.

The menu was pretty. And frustrating. Clearly designed for a console, and they did a decent job porting most of it, but not all. For instance, occasionally confirming a command is Enter. You play the game with a hand on WASD and a hand on a mouse. The inventory opens with Tab. You use the mouse and/or WASD to browse it. Enter? What were they thinking?

It's streamlined and nicely organized and whatnot, I guess. But then the Morrowind interface wasn't particularly clumsy. I guess it was clumsy for a console.

The graphics are cute. The distant mountains and stuff particularly seemed really pretty, with fog hanging around their snow covered sides. Not that I ever look at mountains much, though. The primary area of interest is the 50 foot long, 90 degree arc right in front of me, seemingly inhabited by low resolution plants and goofily modeled wolves. The textures in general I didn't particularly mind (but there are some real nice HD packs out there). But occasionally, there are things like plants you gather which you look at closely all the time, and it's really obvious when they have horribly pixelated textures. But really, it looks fairly good! All the bloom made me a bit dizzy, but it's hardly ugly.

My major annoyance was that the animations are still really awkward. Right at the start, during the prologue bit, you are a prisoner about to be executed. Oh, Elder Scrolls and your prisoner characters... Anyway, some other shit happens and they decide to let you go. Talk about deja vu, huh? But, you do see some other poor sod get his noggin lopped off- and oh my god the animation is just so awful; I laughed out loud. I mean come on, this isn't some kid's free time project, Bethesda. This game is fucking huge, and this is a crucial scene of the game. Was it that hard to just fiddle with it behind the scenes to make sure at least this particular script is running smoothly?

The engine overall is, well, I realize they improved it a lot and added much. But thing is, the thing feels exactly like Fallout 3, and I didn't like the way Fallout 3 felt. The game also keeps messing around with  your mouselook rate, I guess to sync up the player model animations or something, but fuck, game. I don't care if my character looks weird when rotating. Leave my mouse alone, I feel like my character is perpetually nauseated. Really, I hate it when games do this. Just leave the camera free- the sluggishness doesn't add to the immersion, it adds to the frustration.

And, I guess, the wonky writing. Again, I only played a little bit, but gah, the NPCs are WEIRD. When the prologue ended, I spoke to the officer formerly in charge of executing me, and he casually tried to recruit me into the same military! Jesus Christ, man, have some tact. And the quests... As I entered the town for the first time, some dude walked up to me and just randomly started bitching about how his girlfriend was a slut and asked me to go sort out the other guy or something... Um, excuse me, who are you again? What a surreal game.

By the way, if you're still on the fence about that: Quicksave is F5. Learn it, use it. Autosave is utterly unreliable, and the game lets you do things with serious repercussions without warning or confirmation. I was walking around the aforementioned town, checking the place out, when I saw a house. I thought, "oh hey, cool, I wonder who lives here!" Big mistake- I ended up having committed an act of theft, and because I wasn't sneaking the telepathic guards immediately became hostile, including some quest NPCs. So yeah, save often, pay attention and don't trust this damn game.

The slight unforgiving nature is kind of refreshing, though. Reminds me of those games like Quest for Glory where you could die from trying to pick your nose. I say slight, because really the combat is predictably a cakewalk. You just swing you weapon and sure enough the enemies soon die. No uncertainty, no risk... But maybe it'll get more interesting later.