I was impressed by the graphics and attention to detail when I played Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on the PC, and the first few hours I spent with the game flew by. Soon, however, the game's terrible menus and user interface began to sour the experience, and I found myself tempted to put the game back on the shelf for a month or so until these issues can be fixed.

This might be a contender for game of the year, but it's also a clunky mess once you begin to level up your character, manage your inventory, or use your map. The good news for PC players is that a full suite of modding tools is on the way, and the community will take care of all the balls that were dropped by the original development teams. And boy oh boy, so many balls were dropped.

Jim Rossignol summed up most of the issues I have with the game's usability issues over at Rock Paper Shotgun:

Hell, Oblivion's awkward interface was bad enough, but at least it allowed you to see almost everything at a glance. And sure, Bethesda, take away my stats, but at least allow me to see what I am wearing and equipped with inside the menus? The bonuses I have? Anything? No? And so I have to exit the menu system to look at my character? And I also have scroll through everything just to see what I am carrying? And even when you are clicking about in the menu there's a huge margin of error with a mouse, that most precise of pointing devices? Come on, Bethesda, this is not the future of RPG interface design we were promised.

This graphic from Reddit also does a wonderful job of summing up just how horrible and unintuitive the menus in the game can be:

The mistakes made in the menus are basic and frustrating: why am I scrolling when so much of my screen goes unused? Why is it so tricky to compare the stats of my weapons and gear? It's one thing when a game has an interesting idea and it fails in practice; I think innovations and risks should be celebrated even if they don't pay out in the end. In the case of the menus in Skyrim, there is no grand design or idea. Everything is just clunky and hard to use. It's also designed to be used with a controller, which is extra annoying for those of us on a mouse and keyboard.

Speaking of the mouse, movement with your mouse is a sludgy mess until you turn off mouse acceleration, but there is no way to do this in the game's menus. You have to go into the game's .ini file and make the change manually. This is a very basic flaw, and it's nonsense that it takes so much fiddling to make mouse controls tolerable. Gamefront has a good list of tweaks to make the game a more enjoyable experience on the PC. After a few minutes of tweaking, the game became much more fun.

Still, the real humdinger is the perk system, where you scroll through a series of constellations in order to select new powers for your character. This sounds great on paper, and during E3 it was an impressive visual. But that's what it is: a visual trick. It's very pretty to look at it, but it takes way too long to move from constellation to constellation, and it's impossible to see all the perks you've unlocked across every constellation. This makes it hard to find the cohesion in your character, and it gets in the way of actually building the skill set you want in the game. It's form over function in the worst way, and Gamasutra went as far as calling it the "worst screen in the history of [User Interfaces]."

So the game is bad? Or I should buy it on a console?

No, absolutely not. The game is wonderful, and it's a pleasure to get lost in Skyrim's story. There are plenty of mysteries to solve and enemies to fight, and the game can be played a variety of ways. I've invested way too many hours into it already, and I've barely scratched the surface of what Skyrim has to show me. When other games are sold for $60 and can be finished in under 10 hours, the amount of content included in Skyrim feels almost criminal. There is already talk of DLC, which is insanity; is anyone out there close to being bored with the content that already exists?

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.

Until then, we can only scratch our heads at the silly design mistakes that riddle the game, enjoy the game's story and beautiful locations, and start flame wars by laughing at how the game performs on the consoles.