Don't hide the information that makes your game playable

I've previously complained about spell switching in Skyrim. As far as I could tell, and as far as the game told me, it required pausing. Cast, favorites (pause), select (still paused), close menu (action!), cast different spell.

Thankfully, switching spells pauses, so I can switch between the two, but pausing constantly, particularly in the middle of a fight, is lame.  Beside any sense of power, there is the fun, and constantly interrupting the fight is not fun.

Turns out I was wrong, and I'm surprised that I managed to be. In Oblivion there is a hotkey system, which I knew about. In the spell book, hold down 1-8 and click on a spell and it will be bound to that key. Sadly, you cannot actually cast with those keys, but you can at least quickly switch spells without needing to open the spell book constantly. Where was the tutorial popup? I'm certain I saw one about the favorites menu, but somehow, not about the best part about it.

Skyrim uses a similar system, but it appears that you need to add spells to your favorites list first. Then you can open that menu and click a number while mousing over to assign a number to it. Hitting the key then picks that spell. Spells are loaded left to right. The actual spell switching behavior is slightly more complex, not difficult or confusing, though attempting to explain it makes it appear so.

Without this information, casters are garbage. Fully effective, but not even remotely fun to play. With it, they're as seamless to play as any other class and now I'm having a great deal of fun. Of course I'm running into the problem that I wish I had more hot keys, but I've never not had that problem, in any game, except GW2, but that used nested hotkeys which is cheating, and I sometimes find them annoying (due to things like the abilities I use for kiting being spread across skill sets).

Maybe you're wondering now, why am I just now noticing this? Didn't Azuriel tell me this in the comment about a year and a half ago? Yes. Yet somehow it slipped in one eye and out the other. Maybe I just needed practice time, which came in the form of Oblivion because I was feeling nostalgic. Despite my remarkable ability to completely miss the helpful content of a comment that I'd even replied to, I believe that my point still stands: Don't hide the information that makes your game playable!