On the Oblivion PC interface
Mar 30th, 2006 | By Debbie "Weefz" Timmins | Category: PC, Rants
I’m a PC gamer. We have more than 101 keys. We have mice. We have high-resolution monitors. We have a long, long history of RPG interfaces being progressively refined for usability from the crappy-looking Gold Box games to the Ultima series, through Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Dungeon Siege and Morrowind. So why the FUCK have we been shafted with an interface designed for a 12 button controller?
I love Oblivion. I’ve been playing it non-stop all weekend. But the interface is truly godawful.
As said, I have more than 101 keys. Can I map any of them to bring up my inventory at the touch of a button? No. How about the map? No. (More on the map later) Can I map any of the keys? No! Bethesda have declared the keys and be damned to anyone who has played Half-Life and thinks that SpaceBar should be Jump and E should be Action. I can map the commands that already exist, but not additional useful ones like World Map, Local Map, Spell list, etc. Still rubbish! Fortunately not quite as bad as I originally thought.
Inventory: I have a monitor that happily runs 1280×1024 pixel resolution. I’m 30 centimetres from the screen. Why can I only look at 6 items at a time? I don’t need letters 2 cm high telling me that I have steel arrows. Make it smaller! Show me more! Use those unique advantages that mean the PC gaming market is still alive, despite the bugginess and ease of piracy. Using a mouse means precision controlling – I can click directly on small things in a collection of small things. I shouldn’t need to tap through a giant menu. Even if you preserve the general design, you should be able to fit at least 10 items in that space.
Let me sort my inventory so I can find my torches instantly instead of scrolling past a hundred raw spell ingredients just to get some light. Give me a paper doll so I can see exactly what I’m holding and wearing instead of making me scroll up and down through my stockpiles of weapons to find out the condition of my equipped sword. The picture of my character is very pretty but am I wearing my enchanted necklace under that giant cuirass? I don’t know. CAN I wear an enchanted necklace under that giant cuirass? I don’t know. How about two necklaces with different enchantments? I Don’t Know!
The in-game map: The in-game map is shite. It doesn’t zoom out, it’s less than half the screen size, I can’t make it bigger and if I want to look north or south around the tiny slice of world that I can see I have to click and drag the top of the tiny map down to the bottom of the tiny map. Repeat ad nauseum. Added to that, (and I realise that this particular part of the rant is entirely my personal preference) it’s not intelligent enough to tell that if I’m pottering about in a city or dungeon I’m a hundred times more likely to want the local area map than the world map and in the countryside I probably want the world map, not the local map. Of course, this feature might be tricky to implement as it stands because for some obscure reason the maps are lumped into the same category as the journal.
Instant travel that progresses game time is nice. I’d like to know beforehand how many days I’m going to lose by using it, but I assume that the game has been designed so that you can’t accidentally miss out on a quest through it, right?
Oh and having the hidden well entrance to the Dark Brotherhood clearly marked on the map as “Dark Brotherhood” when I haven’t touched the well, didn’t know it was openable and certainly didn’t know that it leads to the Dark Brotherhood is just silly.
The journal: Actually, I like the journal. I like being able to choose my active quest and while the marker in the compass is a bit close to dumbing down the exploration and challenge for my liking (particularly with regards to the Thieves’ Guild joining quest), it can be tricky to find things amongst all that grass. Many other developers could learn from this journal. (Deus Ex: Invisible War developers, this means you!) For the current quest we need to know Who wants What and Where to go next. Everything else is optional. Those three are NOT. We also need to know what quests we have already completed because (and I know this is shocking) sometimes we play games through more than once. It’s good to have a reference for what I’ve already completed with this particular character. This journal has everything. Thanks, guys!
Whew, okay. Rant over. I feel much better now :)
[Morrowind paper doll image swiped from this fansite. ]
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That’s pretty shitty! Even if it was optimised for the Xbox 360, the least Bethesda could have done is to allow key mapping.
Actually, you can map existing commands after all. Not new useful ones like Inventory though. Turns out it was my PC was being sluggish and unresponsive when I was testing keys, so I thought existing buttons were unmappable. Oops! :|
You know what I hate the most? I can adjust mouse sensitivity but it only applies when the game is running. If I pause it, the pointer always drags sssslllooowwwyyy across the screen, regardless of my settings.
So pretty and lovely.
Good .
I think i will love it. haa
It’s the interface which has put me off playing Oblivion (beyond playing the tutorial) on my PC and can agree with your points above.
In a way I feel I’ve missed out because of it and am now waiting to pick it up cheaply for the Xbox 360.
Setting aside the differences between single-player RPGs and MMORPGs, another few things that frustrated me about the Oblivion interface having played World of Warcraft:
It’s constantly stuck in mouse-look mode. Mouse-look mode is great most of the time but I can’t mouse over my buffs to see what they are . . . for that matter there’s no know way to know what effects your buffs (for example ones you got from random shrines) have, is there!
Can’t move around while looking at your map?
Biggest one of all, you can’t assign different keys to cast different spells! You can assign a small (made smaller by the fact that the same shortcuts are used for everything else, like weapons and tools) number of keys to *select* spells, but then have to press the generic “cast” button to cast. So to cast a given spell takes two key presses at the least, and spell-key assignments aren’t even shown on the interface so you’ve gotta remember what’s what.
Jonathan – I agree – there are all these nice little buff icons but I have no idea what the heck they are.
You’ve touched on the most annoying part – RPG interface designs have been around for soooo long and practically perfected for MMORPGs by now. This is NOT a new concept. It was just laziness on their part to design for the 360 and not the PC.
I recommend the DarkUI mod by DarN, or something like it. It makes a ton of improvements that make the UI behave more like it should have at shipping. If you don’t like the idea of a dark-colored interface, check out BTMod.
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11280
You can view images of the interface in action from that page by clicking on the images tab. Unfortunately, it doesn’t solve the custom key mapping issue (though it does add arrow key usage to many menus).
I have to agree about the shortcut keys….Generally having to trawl through a dollhouse of spells and items to find the one needed is a bit of a pain, but that,s why you have the tabs on the underside of your inventory. It quickly categorizes the items into general like lockpicks, gems and such, weapons, armor and potions. It’s not that bad. It takes 3 or 5 seconds more to select, but hey, seeing the rest of the game, (BTW I play Oblivion like 5 hours a day, sometimes more) it is AWESOME. Once you see your foe flying through the air, still spasming from the electric bolt you shot him with and still burning with your Fiery Touch spell you have used just moments before, and then sliding down a embankment, limbs flailing as he rolls over rocks and shit, to hit the water, and wait for it…create ripples on the surface, and actually FLOAT!
The definition of brilliance.
Regards
Polo26450
THe Brotherhood South Africa/SNAFU!
I actually quite liked the Oblivion interface – then again I’ve lived through the gaming hell interface that is Neverwinter Nights 2 UI – now THAT is horrible. Think Oblivion is complicated? Play NWN2 and you’ll know what complicated is. Try managing (in a similar fashion) inventories for a host of different characters.
Oblivion was refreshingly simple. Things were grouped together. There were times I found the game to be somewhat buggy though, especially with regard to the map. I never found myself lost really though, except in the very rare large dungeons.
There was that shift-button (I think it was shift) hot mapping where you could add 8 different things to the wheel, giving you quick access to some spells etc.
The thing I did find odd was, as you mention, lack of keys to access say inventory or map. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember everything being accessed from the tab key? Or maybe that was just my machine.
Ultimately I found Oblivion to be a wonderful, wonderful gaming experience. Perhaps the only thing that marred it for me was, as with all RPGS with a freeform element, the ‘best’ character was always going to be some sort of spellsword. It didn’t benefit you whatsoever to be an amazing fighter and not use magic, and vice versa.
A sneaky archer with some descent arrows can be just as good as a spellsword
[...] at The Average Gamer there’s a great post on Oblivion and how the UI isn’t up to scratch. Check it out, then come back here. Here’s some [...]
I actually just got finished playing some Oblivion. I was so disgusted with the interface that I immediately googled "Oblivion bad interface" to make sure I wasn't alone.
It actually does a LOT more wrong than you go into up there. I could go on for pages. (An example: There are FOUR different ways to exit menus — Space Bar, "Use" Key, Tab Key, Exit Button — and usually only one works for any given menu. Go ahead, try them all! Fun for the whole family!) It's really quite astonishing how terrible it is for such a high-profile game.
Making matters worse, it was just as bad in Morrowind. They've had several years to figure things out, fire their current Interrface Designer, PLAY their own game and see the glariingly obvious, etc. and have evidently turned a blind eye.
I've gotten used to looking past design flaws when there's a compelling game underneath (hell, I'm a fan of the Gothic series), but I think this time it's just too much. I can only pick up and drag my mouse repeatedly just to see the top of the map so many times before my irritation overrides everything.
I have Fallout 3 but I'm afraid to start it.
Well said Compass.
Sorry to tell you, Fallout 3 is, I believe, even worse. It crashes more often, the interface is even more frustrating and the dialgue option font size is huuuuuuge. I'm waiting for the modding community to step up and fix it. Failing that, I might just buy on PS3 next year since it's clearly designed for the controller and TV.
Agreed on pretty much all fronts. There are some significant, glaring omisions from the UI for this game, and it’s quite unfortunate.
One thing of note, though I personally still get annoyed by it, is that the Function Keys are mapped to the Invent, maps and journal commands. Sure, this makes vague elements of sense, but I really would have preferred to have I for inventory, since I keep hitting it so damn many times.
[...] like he looked into my shrivelled, wasting, PC gaming heart and saw that it was [...]
[...] mods that have come out in the past 4 years. I had some serious issues with Oblivion, most notably the console-driven interface. I was also disappointed that much of Cyrodiil felt the same. There was none of that awe-inspiring [...]