You've seen our coverage of the game. Now it's your chance to ask the game's director your most pressing questions. Next week, we'll be recording a special edition of our weekly Game Informer Show podcast focused on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Why so special? Bethesda's Todd Howard will be joining us on the show to answer your questions about the game. How might queries pass from your mind to Todd Howard's ears? Just type your questions into the Comments section below. During the podcast, we'll try to ask as many of your questions as we can, and see what he has to say. We've had a blast rolling out Skyrim information throughout the month of January, and our conversation with Todd Howard will be a fun way to finish. Needless to say, even after our intensive month of coverage wraps up, we'll be following Bethesda's big project throughout its development, right up until release on November 11th.

Автор: Matt Miller

In a game as large as the open world RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, comprehensive menus are a necessary evil. Though they may not be pretty, players need a way to easily manage items, review skills, and map out directions to their next dungeon crawls. The menus in Oblivion functioned, but they were essentially a cumbersome medieval equivalent to Excel documents. For the sequel, Bethesda is striving for a friendlier user interface. Rather than refine the pre-existing menu system from Oblivion or Fallout 3, Bethesda decided to toss them on the scrap heap and develop a new, streamlined interface. Searching for inspiration, the team kept coming back to Apple, and for good reason. Over the last decade the company has revolutionized how consumers interact with software and hardware moreso than any other tech outfit. ”You know in iTunes when you look at all your music you get to flip through it and look at the covers and it becomes tangible?” game director Todd Howard asks. “One of our goals was 'What if Apple made a fantasy game? How would this look?' It's very good at getting through lots of data quickly, which is always a struggle with our stuff.” Like in Oblivion, pressing the B or circle button opens up the menu system. Instead of returning you to the last page you visited as it did in Oblivion, Bethesda now presents you with a simple compass interface that offers four options. Pressing right takes you to the inventory. The interface is a clean cascading menu system that separates items by type. Here players can browse through weapons, armor, and other items they gather during their travel. Instead of relegating players to looking at an item’s name and stat attributes, each possession is a tangible three dimensional item with its own unique qualities. Thousands of items are fully rendered, and players can zoom in on or rotate each one. You can even get an up close view of the flowers and roots you pick for alchemy. “It becomes an interesting time sink,” Howard says. “You can look at and explore every single thing you pick up.” Pressing left from the compass gives players access to the full list of magical items, complete with breakdowns of how the spells operate. As we mentioned in the Building Better Combat story, the world of Skyrim features over 85 s ... Читать дальше »