If you hold up on your dpad you will skip to the first spell you have memorized. It's not quite the same, but still nice.

Sadly one of the reasons i won't play as a mage i tried and i felt too frustrating. Diablo 1 and 2 did shortcuts better, it's sadly an embarrassment. They should be ashamed of this system of spell selecting knowing it could be programmed in the game in about 2 hours of work.

I like the game, but this is a severe oversight.

Basically, the UI has been unchanged more or less since Demon's Souls. It's really showing its age, and it's one of the things most in need of an upgrade, IMO.
It doesn't stop me enjoying characters that use spells, but it does mean I try very hard to never have more than 3-4, 5 at the absolute most, spells prepared simply because cycling through the list in combat is more likely to get you killed than it is to get you the spell you want when you want it.
There's plenty of better ways to do this found in other action RPGs.

Originally posted by Detective Costeau:

Basically, the UI has been unchanged more or less since Demon's Souls. It's really showing its age, and it's one of the things most in need of an upgrade, IMO.
It doesn't stop me enjoying characters that use spells, but it does mean I try very hard to never have more than 3-4, 5 at the absolute most, spells prepared simply because cycling through the list in combat is more likely to get you killed than it is to get you the spell you want when you want it.
There's plenty of better ways to do this found in other action RPGs.

Yeah i like it playing mage too, but cycling trough more than 4 spells is so bad, and it's such a quick fix too they just don't care i guess...

There are a few things to consider here, a few very import facets of Ui design. I know a little about UI design, both graphical and non-graphical, it's a significant part of my job.

The absolute most important thing a UI must do (after function as intended) is be intuitive. If people can't instantly do the ting they want, your UI doesn't work and you did a bad job designing it.

Even way back in the early Souls days, the controls all worked pretty well for a joypad (but they're astonishingly bad on keeb).

Scrolling though a set of spells is, I agree, not great. We put our bread-and-butter spell in position 1, the 'oh crap it's going South' spell in slot 2, then random garbage in the rest.

If you're really clever you'll space synergies by the same number of lots (e.g. cycle 3 times to get to Hidden Body, cycle 3 more to get to your mist).

Anyway, lets loop back to the top. We all know what a Graphical User Interface (GUI) is, but I also mentioned non-graphical user interfaces. These are physical things: buttons, keys, joysticks, mice etc. They're the best UI to use because they're extremely fast and intuitive but more importantly, especially in a game, they use muscle memory.

I know you don't swap spells by thinking "Right, I need to hammer on that there D-Pad Up button a whole buncha times". You think "Oh crap it's all gone South, where the smeg is that spell?"

You get to your spell by, in your head, cycling through the spells. You don't, even for a microsecond, think about that D-Pad Up button.

So now imagine swapping that muscle memory physical UI with a radial menu. "Oh crap, it's all going South, let me just bring up this here circular maguffin and peruse my options. Alas, I am perished."

The UI is basically set up for a slower game that also had limited uses of spells

Man I wish we could go back to the unique spellbook approach for Mages.
Now it's just a condensed preservitive meat product

Say what you will of Lords of the Fallen, but the catalysts and it's shortcuts are perfection.

Fromsoft doesn’t know how design games for pc and kb+m, they design their games around controller. That’s why FS games are typically poor pc ports

I agree..legit criticism finally....


The question is how would they squeeze it in..it would have to work in a controller

You can with a simple macro. I wrote one for myself in the second day of playing this, but there is one in nexus too.

I can give it to you if you want, but it is written for a bit obscure input emulator, so you would need to download that first. It is probably easier to get the one in nexus mods.

Originally posted by ReBootXD:

Fromsoft doesn’t know how design games for pc and kb+m, they design their games around controller. That’s why FS games are typically poor pc ports

I'm sure it's so PC players don't get an unfair advantage over consoles..

Imagine playing with a controller against someone who has 6 spells at the press of a button...

Macros are really easy to make..even for unskilled developers

Originally posted by Sgt. Flaw:

Originally posted by ReBootXD:

Fromsoft doesn’t know how design games for pc and kb+m, they design their games around controller. That’s why FS games are typically poor pc ports

I'm sure it's so PC players don't get an unfair advantage over consoles..

Imagine playing with a controller against someone who has 6 spells at the press of a button...

Macros are really easy to make..even for unskilled developers

But this game doesn't have cross play anyway, I think.

Originally posted by xunlaiAgent:

Originally posted by Sgt. Flaw:

I'm sure it's so PC players don't get an unfair advantage over consoles..

Imagine playing with a controller against someone who has 6 spells at the press of a button...

Macros are really easy to make..even for unskilled developers

But this game doesn't have cross play anyway, I think.

Then I'm mistaken if im wrong..I was sure it was x-play

Yea it could work..idk if Id change the controller for kb n m tho...kinda be it for tat for me

Now if I could use both....

Originally posted by Sgt. Flaw:

Originally posted by xunlaiAgent:

But this game doesn't have cross play anyway, I think.

Then I'm mistaken if im wrong..I was sure it was x-play

There is cross play for PS4 and PS5 players, or the different versions of xboxes, but different brands (PC, PS, Xbox) can't play with each other, according to google.

Originally posted by Sgt. Flaw:

Originally posted by xunlaiAgent:

But this game doesn't have cross play anyway, I think.

Then I'm mistaken if im wrong..I was sure it was x-play

Crossplay or no, plenty of pc players choose to use controllers, so I’m sure your reasoning is sound