What if Apple made a fantasy game?

Ignore the fact that this character's name appears to be "Bendu Olo".

According to Todd Howard, it'd be The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Yes, it's that time again kids, GAME INFORMER NEWS DAY!!! Today we've got a new article on the new menu system of Skyrim. This has been a big question on the minds of the fans since the overhaul was announced, so lets drop this on the cutting board and dissect it.

In a move that nobody really asked for (well, not the fans anyway), the team at Bethesda have taken it upon themselves to develop a new menu interface for Skyrim, one that they intend to feel more "tangible".

You start out, like all Bethesda games, by pressing the B or Circle button to being up the menu. Now though, instead of opening up a journal or some other such item that stores data and things, you get a radial compass menu with four options. From there, pressing right will bring you to your inventory where all your items are sorted by type. Each item has it's own rendered 3D image and it's own unique abilities. You can zoom in and look around at the item, checking out it's fine details. No clue where the stats are, but okay. UNIQUENESS.

Pressing left on the compass menu will bring you to your magic list where each spell is broken down to describe how it works. There are over 85 spells.

Hotkeying has been replaced with "Bookmarking". What's the difference? You now go to a "favorite's menu" when pressing up on the D-pad, pausing the action. You can map anything from your spells or items menus onto your favorites, with no limit to how much stuff you can put there. Sounds kinda like making it just more of a hassle than hotkeys really. Why not just open the whole menu at that point? They're both lists. STREAMLINED.

Back to the compass menu thing, pressing down will take you to the map. You can explore the whole topography of the games world here IN HIGH-DEF 3D. From the map you can plan travel routes, manage quest icons and fast travel. Yes, it looks like fast travel is showing up once again, regardless of how many fans dislike that feature.

And lastly, pressing up on the compass menu shows you the skies where you can check out constellations and stuff. Bethesda may have ditched the class system but Astrology is here to stay. The three big nebulae in the heavens are the thief, the warrior, and the mage. Each of those represents one of the major skill sets. Within each nebula are constellations for each of the 18 skills. Any player can use any of these skills and they'll level up with use in old Elder Scrolls fashion.

A carryover from Fallout 3, whenever you raise your overall level, you can pick a perk. They each pertain and supplement one of the 18 skills. A lot of perks have their own level, so you can pick them multiple times to increase there effect. When you pick a perk, it star lights up in the constellation. This means that when you look at the sky with your high-level character, it will appear different than somebody else's sky in their game.

And that's it for the menu. Is it just me or does the "look to the heavens" part sound like they really wanted something for up on the compass but couldn't think of anything to put there? I'd have thought it'd make more sense to just have an overall character screen there. Is that actually it? Is there just more to it than we've gotten out of GI in this article, or is the character overview section somewhere else, or is there even one anymore? this just sounds like a possibly annoying interface. I'm all for innovation here, but I'm an RPG gamer. I LIVE for lists and text. Abandoning that just seems like a play to appeal to everyone. Either it's oversimplification or too much cumbersome flash. I hope I'm wrong here. In any case we will see come November, maybe earlier.

By the by, Game Informer also released a video of art director Matt Carofano talking about how the look of the game is different from previous Bethesda titles. Cool, quick watch for all you atsy kids.

BethBlog claims that next week will be the end of Game Informer's Skyrim coverage. Look for updates throughout next week for my wrap-up of the big news we've had all this month as well as the end of Game Informer's tyranny of Elder Scrolls news oppression.

Source: Game Informer

Damn. The Dragon Born must be one bad dude if he can turn on stars with a whim. Wholes into Etherius or giant flaming balls of gas, that's still pretty badass. I hope you can make the heavens say a dirty word.

And where are all these new constelations coming from? Is this Tambrial's version of our reorganizing of the zodiac? Are they allowed to do that when stars actually DO determine something about you? That sounds like cheating.

I'm not impressed with the favorites menue either. it kind of defeats the point of having a quick menue when it will eventually grow to several dozen items long (if you play like me anyway) and be harder than the raidial one to navigate.

Speaking of, I do like that idea... if it's done right. I feel it has the potential to be quite time saving. I think the 3D models of your items will be neat to. Those are always fun. It'll be cool to see artifacts of ultimate power from close up and see all the minute detail the developers did, or perhaps did not, put into them.