While Morrowind may not be particularly better or worse than many other games in its User Interface, it is singled out for special attention because it is the game that I am currently playing (and hence am most familiar with), and also because its interface finally made me determined to sit down and write this document.
For all that I like this game, its user interface is particularly dreadful in many places. This is sad, because the game almost delivers on the dream of immersive, continual roleplaying.
Herewith is the List of Horrors, in no particular order...
so far, so good.
Talking / Interacting with NPC's is vital to the game, and any player will find themselves doing it all the time.
To close the dialogue window, you simply press.... oh dear. There's nothing you can press to easily close the window. Owch. You are required to play "find the button" with the mouse to locate and click on a small button in the bottom corner of the popup window to dismiss it and get back to the game. bzzt - sorry, you failed. Go to the back of the class.
This is particularly jarring because the mouse is normally used a-la first person shooter to control mouselook as you run around. The moment you click that "goodbye" button you are back in mouselook mode, and you better be ready for it, 'cause the sudden transition can be really disconcerting.
What should happen is that you press the use key again to close the window. It then becomes easy to check if a particular NPC offers any services that you want to use - walk up to them, press use, look at the list of their services, press use again to close the window and resume the game. Note - no mouse movement, and no finger/hand movement required. Hence no context switch, no time wasted, and all is good with the world.
If you do want to use the services of a particular NPC, then there should be keyboard shortcuts for all the obvious actions - t for "training", p for "persuasion, b for "barter" etc. However the developers decided not to do that. After all, they spent lots of time and effort developing a pretty mouse-driven interface, so they probably felt compelled to make you use it. They were probably inspired in this from playing Wizardry 8.
In the case of Morrowind, pressing ESC brings up the game menu (save, load, exit etc) and then when you press ESC again, it closes that menu and puts you back in the menu that you were originally trying to get out of.
The required solution is simple - if there are any windows open, then ESC should close them. If there are no windows open, then and only then should the game menu come up. sigh. so simple...
The solution? Provide a show labels hotkey which, when pressed and held, will insert labels under all potions (and other items) so that you can quickly find the one you want. This changes an action which currently takes forever into something which is almost instantaneous.
Alternately, make all potions visibly different (a-la Diablo / Diablo II).
Many items can stack - arrows, potions, gold etc - so that multiple identical items only take up one spot in your inventory. Huffman coding says that common operations should be easy to do, so lets see how the game fares here...
Perhaps the simplest actions that a player might want to do is pick up either ONE item from a stack - eg when you want to quaff a potion, or to pick up the WHOLE stack (e.g. when equipping arrows). There is an obvious heuristic to set the default for each class of item so that a single-click over the item in your inventory should do the "right" thing..
Double-clicking on a stack should always pick up the whole stack, making it easy to sell all those potions you don't want.
It will probably come as no surprise to find that Morrowind fails this test as well.
If you click on a stack of items, up will pop a menu with a slider that you must grab with the mouse and move to indicate how many items you wish to take. Of all the choices that Bethesda might have made, this is possibly the worst design decision imaginable.
You can't even move the slider with keyboard shortcuts to do the "obvious" actions of selecting ONE or ALL items. The only concession to ease of use is that you can press ENTER instead of having to click on "ok" when you're finished.
The way that the controls are laid out in this game - and the way that most people will use them - puts the ENTER key about as far away from your normal hand position as its possible to go on a normal keyboard. Well Done guys - good choice.
Oh - and hitting ESC doesn't close this menu. It helpfully brings up the save/restore game menu instead. grrr.
To pick up one/all items requires a combination - ctrl+click or shift+click.
This might not sound like much of a problem, but remember that both the left and right hands are already busy with the movement keys and (probably) the mouse. Forcing the left hand to go hunting for ctrl or shift when performing a very common operation is just silly, and it makes the simple task of collecting / selling / arranging inventory items into an obstacle course.
It is also backwards when considered from the huffman coding perspective. The simplest action ( a single click) on a stack of items will always result in the most awkward interface response (the popup window with slider). Every time that window pops up there is a mental context switch.
This is how it should be by default:
| single click: | pick up either ONE item (potions, weapons etc) or ALL items (arrows, bolts etc) or prompt for qty when selecting gold in your inventory. (gold in crates etc should default to "pickup all"). |
| double click: | pick up whole stack |
| shift+click: | same as single-click, but also "uses" the item in the obvious way. e.g. quaff the potion or equip the arrows / armor etc. You are not left holding on to the item after this action. |
| ctrl+click: | popup window asking for qty. |
Other games manage to implement this sort of interface successfully - e.g. Diablo II and Dungeon Siege - so it is disappointing to see a modern game like Morrowind fail so badly.
Of course, it would not have been so bad if they had provided a way to re-bind these actions so that people like us who don't wish to fight with the controls might set them to something more sensible, but that didn't happen either.
Apparently (if you're a game developer) you have to provide ways to remap some actions - like movement keys - but not all actions.
Again, it makes me think that the developers have only a vague understanding of user interface design and the effect that a poor design has on gameplay.
Bethesda chose to make the language on these signs illegible - it is some kind of runic script - so you can't read them as you run past.
However, if you run up close enough to the sign (within a couple of feet), and look exactly at the sign, then a popup with the english translation will appear.
Come on guys... make up your mind. Do you want us to be able to read the signs or not?
Luckily this appalling design decision can be reversed by downloading the excellent weatheredsigns plugin, which replaces all the illegible signs with nicely rendered signs that can be clearly read as you run past without distracting from gameplay. The weatheredsigns guys get extra kudos for smart use of colour coding to make life even easier - well done.
Leaving aside for a moment the "interesting" design decision to not show health bars on creatures (presumably so that it is a surprise when you are repeatedly slaughtered by creatures much tougher than you), I'd like to draw your attention to the nice shortcut that they made available to easily cycle through your weapons - by default it is the useless [ and ] square-bracket keys (located near ENTER on most keyboards), but at least I was able to remap it to the more useful mousewheel.
repeat after me.. [ and ] require a context switch (because you cant find them without looking down at the keyboard), whereas the mousewheel is right there under your hand. Other games (e.g. Unreal) understand this.
But lets see what happens after you've picked up a bit of loot - including that nice looking orcish battle-axe which you intend to sell for lots of money. (You intend to sell it because you're hopeless with axes, so there's no point trying to use it in combat.)
Hmm, wait a minute - now when you scroll through your weapons, it automatically includes the axe - despite the fact that you have no intention of using it. sigh. When this happens to you in combat it can be a tad disconcerting.
Lets see now - surely the scroll-through-weapons should only apply to weapons that you want to use, so why not provide a means for the player to indicate the weapons that they want to be included, and then only cycle through them?
This could have been done in any number of ways without interfering with the usability - e.g. allow the player to "equip" all the weapons that they might want to use, and then only cycle through the set of currently equipped weapons.
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