Want to see what sidequests you have? Oh we lumped them all into a “Miscellaneous” category, which will close if you move the mouse incorrectly. Ding -> kick to the nuts -> attempt to select a star. This thing will make you hate just selecting a single star when you level up. Forget planning a character in-game using this thing, that would make setting up Planetary Interaction across six planets in EVE look like figuring out a WoW spell rotation compared to the amount of time it would take you to look at everything in Skyrim. AHAHAHA now you are two stars to the left. HAHAHAHA the game took you to three stars above the one you wanted. First you have to go into each constellation itself, and once there, the game zooms you in so you can only see one star at a time. But you can’t actually see what each star is until you go to it, and hahahaha good luck getting to the one you want. There are about 20 different trees (smithing, lockpicking, archery, light armor, etc), each represented as a constellation, with each star being a perk or bonus. You wanted to save that guy? Oops you ‘clicked’ execute. Nothing says “I’m having fun now” like clicking the option you want in an important storyline decision, and the game misunderstanding the click and selecting something else. Best part? It’s not like that 100% of the time, so you get used to it being normal, and then once every 10 clicks or so it will go into hyper-sensitive mode. For some idiotic reason, the game demands you click the exact center of an option, otherwise it takes the click as a ‘cancel’ click (so if you are shopping, and don’t click the dead-center of an item you want to sell, the game will take you out of selling mode and back into talk mode, same goes for taking/giving items to your companion). When you are talking to people, the game world does not pause (awesome), but have fun clicking the response you really want every time with the mouse. Fading hitbar that you can cycle with the mousewheel please. It’s very immersion-breaking (and I don’t say that jokingly, as Skyrim has great atmosphere you don’t want to be pulled out of), along with just being slow/bad/dumb. And nothing says “I’m having a great time in combat” like pausing it every time you want to switch a spell or drink a potion. For items/spells to appear in that menu, you have to go into the normal inventory and click F on the item/spell. The fastest way to switch weapons/spells in the game is to hit Q, which pauses the game and opens up a quick-select menu. You know those “work sensitivity” videos you watch in Corporate America? The one where the white guy calls the black guy a bad word, and the video goes on to point out that you should not do that? Or the one where the white guy (always picking on the white man…) hits on the white woman by teller her she has a great rack? And you watch those and go “clearly this is exaggerated for effect, this never actually happens”? Yea well the Skyrim UI is like that, except it’s not a joke or an example or an exaggeration it’s the final UI for a game that has been in development for years from a very respectable studio that spent millions on the game.
There are UI design decisions in Skyrim that should be used as the absolute most extreme example of “DON’T DO THIS” for design courses. I don’t care that I’ve not played every single game ever made, I’m confident Skyrim beats them in terms of sucking. Skyrim has the worst UI in the history of videogames. Anytime you play a game 20+ hours in the first few days, that says a lot about the game, so clearly I don’t hate it. Like pretty much the rest of the world, I was playing Skyrim all weekend (being sick helped in that regard actually).