- The map stuff is nice. It should make finding the major cities and quest objectives a bit easier. Scrolling sucks so jumping to places I know I want to go will help.
- The Quick
commands for quickly getting to the inventory, skills menu, et cetera are useful. - Quick Save is nice but it's too bad they didn't implement background saving so game flow wouldn't be broken with a several second wait (to USB drive) for the game to save. Still though, I don't have to go through menus now so it will be faster and I will save more often.
- Commanding your follower is nice but a bit wonky.
It seems like you still need to be within regular interaction range to get commands to work. For example I told my follower to Stand somewhere but then I couldn't get her to follow me again. Every time I would say the command it would recognize it but put a red X beside it. Finally I said the command standing right next to her and it took. This is possibly a bug or limitation due to the implementation just hooking into the existing command framework, I don't know. - Equipping spells works fine. I can now bind everything to various named spells and quickly equip them without bringing up the menu. Fortunately they included a Light command as well which is great because I use Candlelight constantly in dungeons. I will definitely be using Equip Light and Equip Dual Frost Spell a ton. It's great that I can also blurt out Equip Dual Fire Spell or Equip Dual Lightning Spell for when I run up against frost resistant or mechanical monsters. In the past I would have to rebind my D-pad hotkey from Frost to Fire or Lightning. For awhile I'll also be using Equip Summon Spell but I'm not too far away from having a permanent summon so that will be less useful in time.
- There does not appear to be any limitation to what you can bind to each hotkey so it's possible to bind things like powers to commands like Sword. You lose a logical association when you do this, naturally, but you do gain additional verbal hotkeys if you just have extra stuff you want available.
- As a negative you can't activate Powers by voice (Things like racial abilities, Vampire's Sight, et cetera). I use Vampire's Sight a lot. However, now that I have freed up the left and right D-pad hotkeys I can bind Vampire's Sight to one of those and a shout to the other one.
- Speaking of shouts. Using shouts in dragon language isn't as humiliating as I expected. Being able to control how many words of a shout you use is great (Controlling it by holding down the button required timing that was sometimes too precise). Also, having the entire shout repertoire available limited only by your memory is great. I will definitely be using Wuld a lot since I don't have to do anything special beyond say the word.
- Another negative, though. I found a bug I think. If you have a Power equipped to your Power/Shout button, attempting to use a Shout via voice command will only activate the first word even if you said all 3. If you have any shout equipped then any other shout can be used correctly. I kept saying Fus Ro Dah with Vampire's Sight equipped and I could see the game recognize the full shout but my character would only perform Fus. Finally I figured it out. An easy work-around is bind Vampire's Sight to D-pad left and any other shout to D-pad right. When I know I want to use a shout then I just equip a shout by pressing D-pad right first and the game will then accept two and three word shouts in dragon language without issue.
- A neutral comment. Shouts can be performed by saying the name in English. For example, saying Unrelenting Force will activate as much as Fus Ro Dah that you know. To enable using shouts in the dragon language you hold RB. Previously RB activated your Shout/Power. Now you activate them by holding LB and hitting RB. This isn't either positive or negative, it's just a change that will take getting used to. Even just testing things I was hitting RB and expecting something to happen but it wasn't. I had to stop and think what was wrong. I'm sure after an hour or something this will go away, though.
- There are some loot related commands that seem interesting. Specifically the Loot Items and Set Loot Limit commands. They seem to provide a way to loot only items that will give you a good weight to gold ratio. A loose system I was already employing to prevent my inventory from filling up. I'll have to experiment with the feature but on paper (on PDF?) it sounds promising.
I do wish they would implement a way to trigger a power directly. It would simplify my play experience much further if I could just say Vampire's Sight and have it turn on/off. I guess it's not too bad that I can keep it bound to a D-pad button and activate it manually. That's not really worse than before but there is the addition I can now access all shouts via voice rather than just not use them at all which was the case previously.
I look forward to playing again and settling into the new commands.
Update:
I've discovered the cause of wonky follower behavior so I've updated the text above to reflect that. I also ran into another minor issue with the map. Sometimes the cursor does not appear - especially when using Quick Map indoors where it defaults to the local map. Without the cursor you can't highlight things like doors. I also had this happen on the main map and I couldn't highlight anything. The solution for the local map no cursor seemed to be turn it off and back on. I don't know if that will fix the world map to as the only time it happened to me I just closed the map entirely and re-opened it.
I like the Loot Items and Set Loot Limit commands. I don't even have to think when I loot stuff now. I just open the container, glance at the items, say Loot Items and then check what's left to see if I care about it. I set the loot limit to 25 and so far it seems to be working well. My inventory isn't full and it's pretty much picking up all the stuff I want. Sometimes it doesn't get a crafting reagent but that's easy to manually loot. It's not a bug or anything, it's just the reagent isn't very valuable so it's not picked up.
I definitely like changing spells with voice. I'll be walking along and hear my Atronach despawn or see my Candelight go out and I speak the Equip Summon Spell or Equip Light command, cast it and go on my way. When I see enemies near I equip the correct elemental magic for the situation and engage. No breaking flow to bring up the favorites menu and all that non-sense.
As predicted I've already adjusted to using LB + RB to cast powers. Now the trick is remembering to ensure Vampire's Sight is equipped rather than Unrelenting Force. I accidentally cast Fus and just missed my Atronach because I forgot to ensure Vampire's Sight was equipped. That could end up bad if I end up shouting a guard or pushing Eola off a cliff or something.
Minor issues not-withstanding this is a very solid feature and improves the flow of the game. I'm saving more often. I'm checking the map more often. I'm spending less time in menus since I don't need to use the favorites menu at all and if I need to access some other menu I can jump straight to that menu then jump straight to the section I'm interested in. Hopefully they iron out some of the kinks but as it stands I'm quite happy with the feature.