The Fog of War: Notes from the Battlefield 3 Beta

The beta for DICE's upcoming Battlefield 3 recently closed. As an avid on-line shooter dilettante, I was excited to get a look at what seems to be a very important release for EA. Battlefield is a long-running franchise, but this installment is being positioned to directly compete with the industry's reigning military shooter juggernaut, Modern Warfare 3. Designing a successful first-person shooter is difficult; designing one that works well enough to capture the console audience is even more so. Will Battlefield 3 be able to pull this off?

It's hard to tell, but to be honest, I'm not optimistic. I've been in a bit of a visual design mood lately, and because of this, certain aspects of BF 3's visual presentation stood out. Complex, fast-paced games need readable, navigable on-screen information systems, especially on a console where control inputs are limited. Unfortunately, BF 3 does a sub-par job of conveying crucial information.

The in-game HUD is pretty, but its symbols and numbers could be redesigned to be more readable. Instead of denoting grenades with "G," why not use a widely-recognizable pictogram? Implementing this symbol would also allow for multiple grenade types with different physical profiles. It took me a while to figure out that the three dots near the ammo count represent the gun's firing rate. Changing them to be shaped like bullets would have communicated their significance much more quickly, as it would be clear that a group of bullets meant auto-fire while a single-bullet meant a single shot.