I haven't had nearly enough time to wander about Bethesda's Skyrim, the latest in its Elder Scrolls franchise, but I played long enough to get really frustrated by how badly the game's developers botched the game underneath its lovely graphical hood.
Skyrim's menus are horribly broken. The mouse is wildly off-target and weirdly laggy. Just flipping through the options or inventory takes forever. Between poorly designed menus and the drunken-mouse, I spent way too much of my initial gameplay just trying to maneuver the back-end. Overall, the UI is just a disaster.
Worse, many options aren't even included in the game's menus. You can't set the game's graphics options from within the game. The only way to fix the mouse is to turn off the mouse acceleration, but to do that you have to dive into the .ini file.
This graphic pretty much sums it up:
It's almost as if Bethesda got frustrated by having to develop the game for PC and designed the whole thing around the console experience. As Ben Kuchera notes, however, "The game is wonderful, and it's a pleasure to get lost in Skyrim's story."
Just so long as you don't get lost in the game's hideous menus.
Thankfully, Kuchera says the modders will be here to save us soon:
The PC version of the game may seem like a clunky mess now, but Bethesda has promised the release of a full suite of tools modders will able to use to bend the game to their will. I've already spoken to people who are in the process of "fixing" the menus, and mods that increase the game's usability should hit the Internet days, if not hours, after the tools are available, and maybe even before. Give it two months, and the PC version should be honed to perfection.
I'll try as many tweaks as I can find now so that I can post a proper review, but it may be that any reasonable play experience of the PC version of Skyrim will just have to wait. Which is, in my humble opinion, pretty lame.
[Note: I will follow this up with two full-length reviews. This is more of an 'initial thoughts' type post. Apologies for any confusion.]
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