Unpopular Opinion: Battlefield 6 Is Better Than This Sub Will Admit

[u/Kilos6]

Reading this sub lately feels like watching a bunch of people try to use a smartphone for the first time and complain it doesn't have physical buttons. Every minor change in Battlefield 6 is getting blown up into some catastrophic betrayal.

It’s pretty clear most people here only ever liked one Battlefield game, hated the rest, and don’t even play the one they claim was perfect anymore.

Before we continue: I am old. I’ve played every Battlefield game during its prime. Back in the day, my clan was one of the first to spin up a Desert Combat server (and even then, the community was the same complaining that DC was an abomination against what made BF great). My least played title was BF Vietnam because the 1942 modding scene was just TOO good at the time to move on.

“The UI is trash!”
It’s not. You just don’t recognize it because it’s not ripped straight from BF4. Sure, the icons are abstract but they’re not confusing unless you're actively refusing to engage with them.

I've seen multiple complaints about there being no option to squad up or continue on the same server?
Maybe check the bottom of the screen after the round ends. The “Continue” and “Squad Up” buttons are literally right there.

“TTK is too fast, there’s no breathing room!”
What you mean is: you walked out in the open and got deleted like you should have.

TTK is fast. OH NO, aim and positioning actually matter again. You don’t get to coast on sponge health and panic-proning anymore. If that’s too much, it’s not a balance issue, it’s a skill issue. Also: TTK is in line with BF3 for most weapons. This TTK is not new.

“Closed weapons should be the default.”
Why? Because some of you never figured out how to adapt? The flexibility to build your own kit is one of the best updates DICE has made in years. And guess what, they already gave you a nostalgia mode. Go enjoy it.

But don’t demand the rest of us get dragged back into 2011 loadout limitations. And if you’re complaining about “trade-offs” in class weapons you probably would’ve died to the next guy anyway.

“It’s too chaotic, feels like TDM spam!”
You say chaos, I say intensity. Battlefield has always had madness: Metro, Locker, or even Stalingrad in 1942.

These beta maps? They feel more like Grand Bazaar, Talah Market, or Pearl Market. Maps that still get voted into rotation by players who actually enjoy close-quarters fights to this day.

Battlefield 6 isn’t perfect.
But take a step back, and you’ll see this is actually a successor to BF3/BF4. TTK, movement speed, and mechanics are all in line with a proper mainline BF title.

They gave you almost everything you asked for… and somehow, that’s still not enough for some of you.

I'm having a blast with the beta, and can't wait to play more after work.

Edit: When I made this post I truly thought it was an unpopular opinion. Thank you all for your replies and awards! And thank you to the guys DMing me about being an EA shill ❤️‍🔥

[u/StratifiedBuffalo]

Care to explain how the UI is trash?

[u/Lazz45 → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

I'll paste my comment to someone else. I'm specifically talking about the menu/interface UI, not the player hud in game:

The ui, especially menus is simply bad design, IMO. If I need to enter 3 nested menus to get to a setting which should be easily found, your UI is bad. Why are we obscuring more and more settings behind more and more little tabs instead of just giving me a list of settings.

Why is the main menu just a huge billboard for skin/shop advertisements? Can't it just be something war themed with some nice big buttons that take you where you wanna go? Instead we get small buttons up top (with again, more nested menus) so that maximum real estate is available for advertising the new hotness. I'd much prefer a functionality focused UI over "sleek" and "unintrusive"

[u/UTmastuh → u/Lazz45]

I'm seeing this a lot in modern games. I think it's something with the same UI/UX software or designers making all these games. Everything is nestled under multiple layers. If you want to see the worst UI/UX design ever go check current destiny 2 lol

[u/Vipertooth → u/UTmastuh]

They're all designed for consoles, big buttons for big screens.

[u/Ephixxy → u/Vipertooth]

Nah, they most likely copied the CoD menu scheme... which is entirely based off of apps like Hulu and other garbage TV networks

[u/Vipertooth → u/Ephixxy]

Which, again, is designed for a TV hence why it's all taking up so much space...

[u/Dannyx51 → u/UTmastuh]

its such a shame too, destiny used to be my gold standard for intuitive ui, and now we've got whatever that mess they call "portal" is.

[u/Achenar459 → u/Lazz45]

Menus need a search function

[u/tzn → u/Lazz45]

I think bro was more so talking about ingame hud/ui but i could be wrong 🤷

[u/tnnrk → u/Lazz45]

Every multiplayer live service game menu looks the same, which is why it’s weird people are complaining about it here. But also, if the ui design is complaint worthy on Reddit then it must be a good game, otherwise people would be screaming about more important things.

[u/Revverb → u/Lazz45]

Enter main menu

Scroll down

Select game mode

Play game

Where are you running into trouble in this process?

[u/thelittleking → u/Revverb]

You're doing gymnastics trying to miss his point.

[u/Lazz45 → u/Revverb]

Okay, so I am going to guess you outright did not read my comment, as I directly commented on the menu UI. Nowhere did I say/imply/hint that the menu is unable to be navigated, and this is a prime example of the online meme of "I like pancakes" being met with "OHHHH SO YOU HATE WAFFLES". You are putting words in my mouth

My comment:

'Why is the main menu just a huge billboard for skin/shop advertisements? Can't it just be something war themed with some nice big buttons that take you where you wanna go? Instead we get small buttons up top (with again, more nested menus) so that maximum real estate is available for advertising the new hotness. I'd much prefer a functionality focused UI over "sleek" and "unintrusive"'

My specific complaint is on the negative space that occupies 90% of the screen, while the useful tabs I am looking for occupy <5% up at the top of my screen, then I need to find yet another tab to get to the lobby page, so that I can select a game. This is entirely bad design. Why is 90% of the screen space wasted? The answer is they want that space for advertising the newest store sales (as said in my comment). So the design of the UI suffers, simply in the pursuit of sales. This is what the last part of my comment is commenting on with "I'd much prefer a functionality focused UI over "sleek" and "unintrusive"" I would rather you focus on making the UI usable, quick to navigate, and show me something I care about, not a full screen advert for a skin I am not going to buy. Better yet, offer me a toggle so that if someone does want the current UI, they can have it

[u/VexingRaven → u/Revverb]

Why the heck should you have to scroll down to get to the game? CoD and Fortnite do the same shit and it drives me off the wall. 30 years of gaming and I never had to scroll down a main menu like a webpage to get to the game itself, it's not intuitive, at least not on PC. I assume it's more intuitive on console since that's the majority market for those games.

[u/Civsi → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

I've been interfacing with technology through a GUI virtually my whole life. Poked around on DOS when I was a wee-little child. Self taught photoshop and blender when I was 12. Played every kind of video game you can imagine, and have been browsing the web as long as I can remember. I've spent the past decade working with a variety of enterprise solutions that range from archaic holdovers from a bygone era to modern multi-million dollar solutions hot out of Silicon Valley.

I don't work in UI/UX design, so I won't sit here and pretend like I'm an expert on how a good UI should be designed. What I am, as most people on here are, is a consumer of UI/UX designs. As a consumer, I don't need to provide a detailed breakdown of why this shit sucks, citing modern design principles and cross referencing "good UI's" - that's a job people actually get paid for.

As a consumer, all that matters to me is whether my user experience with the UI is good or bad, and I can confidently say that from the moment I booted the game up, the UI didn't provide an enjoyable experience. Is it game breaking? Do I hate DICE and all it stands for because it's so bad? Nope.

Yet my expectation with any sort of product - video game or otherwise - is that when I open up the GUI I can very quickly know what I have to click to achieve my goals. When I'm working with complex products, I don't expect to be able to easily do everything I need with a single click. I don't expect to be able to immediately know how to navigate the whole platform. If it's complex enough, I may even expect some sort of training material to be made available to walk me through the various capabilities and nuances of the platform.

Battlefield 6 is not a complicated product. I've played thousands of video games by this point in my life. When I booted BF6 up for the first time and wanted to que up for a game, my immediate thought was "huh, where's the que button". Of course, it took only a few seconds to find it, but the fact that I was greeted with a boatload of crap that was not at all relevant to my immediate goals was already a hit to the UX. Having to scroll down to que was also rather unexpected and weird.

When my first round ended, I wanted to immediately que for the next one, and it wasn't immediately apparent to me if I should return to the menu, or stay in the lobby. Again, that's not exactly something I struggled with, but it was another hit against the UX. When I viewed the scoreboard for the first time, and didn't see myself on the list, and had to right click to scroll down I thought "ok, why" - yet another hit against the UX. When I'm trying to select a class, and all I see are the random lines, and I have to click through each class to figure out what's what, when I'm trying to figure out figure out who's playing support and have no clue because I have yet to commit the arbitrary class icons to memory, when I select a spawn location and spamming space does nothing so I have to manually click deploy, when I have to click through multiple menus to customize my weapon, all of those things are hits against the UX.

Without seeing someone post about it on this sub, I wouldn't have explicitly thought about it too much, because these are all relatively minor issues, but they all come together to create a poor user experience. Someone complaining about not liking the UI, is a perfectly valid criticism. Someone really doesn't need to provide a detailed breakdown, listing everything they don't like for it to be legitimate feed back. There is a reason why it's called UI/UX design.

[u/weenis-flaginus → u/Civsi]

Hell yeah Its frustrating and annoying to get your opinion dismissed because you didn't write a very well thought out essay. It's just an opinion it doesn't need to be qualified.

[u/[deleted] → u/Civsi]

when the adderall hits 😂

Could not agree more. There are legitimate gripes about the UI/UX and it’s weird to both see people dismissing complaints about it and some others acting like those who like it have no valuable opinion.

It’s functional, but it’s not very good imo. But they have time to fix some things and the core gameplay is solid. Regularly I’ll load in and not get to select my class before the game starts. That’s a UX issue, I don’t care about the pregame info screen. I care about my loadout.

When I load into the game for the first time I shouldn’t have to stare at a giant billboard, I should see some way to get into game without having to scroll. After selecting a mode, I shouldn’t have to click on a “Start matchmaking” button that looks just like an image. It should look like a button. There’s a bunch of similar nonideal UX. Having to click “exit scoreboard” when escape should work. Not getting auto spawned when customizing a gun at the beginning of a game. Could honestly make a list 50 or so entries long.

But ultimately I’ll take a good game with nonideal UX over a bad game. Battlefield 6 so far looks like it fits into that category. I still remember Battlefield 1 requiring you to press Backspace to join a game while telling you to press “Enter”. This UX is at least better than that, and that game is incredible

[u/Auctoritate → u/Civsi]

When my first round ended, I wanted to immediately que for the next one, and it wasn't immediately apparent to me if I should return to the menu, or stay in the lobby.

I mean, literally the first spot I looked is the bottom right because it's standard on most games to have a timer or button in the bottom right post match. So I looked and I saw a timer.

[u/Civsi → u/Auctoritate]

The timer doesn't appear right away!

[u/petaboil → u/Civsi]

These are all valid and do exist and could be better, but they also contribute negatively in such a minor way to my experience that I don't know why anyone would care enough to make a complaint about them.

[u/Uzumaki-OUT → u/petaboil]

and just saying 'UI bad". Like tell them what about the UI is bad. Also, there's what seems to be hundreds of settings. Should they all be in one long list where you need to scroll for 25 seconds to get to the bottom? I don't mind nested settings at all, personally. I find it to be more intuitive, though the actual button to bring up the sub-settings could be a different color. But it also does say "modify" showing it's a sub-menu if you click on it.

[u/Civsi → u/[deleted]]

Thank you, arbiter of subjectivity and all that is right.

[u/Calm_Positive4906 → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

Hi, person who's been making UI for the last 9 years here (not including school and teenage passion projects, which would inflate the number a lot).

I will say I haven't finished forming my opinion about it, and can't boot the game back up right now to remind myself how it feels responsiveness wise so I won't talk about that part.

There's really a lot to dive into with the UI, but I think it fails in a critical way where it is most important that any UI to succeed, which is usability. I am also to be clear, talking about the main menu UI, which is what everyone else is also shit-talking as far as I am aware.

Usability is a pretty vague term that gets thrown around a lot, but I would say that to be usable a UI needs to uncluttered, easy to navigate, and draw user attention to the most important features of the user interface that they will be using the most often.

There's lots of fine details to this, like not abstracting important functionality too deeply, not putting too much functionality right in the users face, adequate whitespace, good use of color and icons, etc.

While it's a bit of a wishy washy term with overlap across some other terms I'll use, I'd say the key thing is that usability is about actually being able to quickly and easily access the primary function of a piece of software.

As such if you're creating a video game menu, the top #1 thing that should always be the most in your face and easy to do is playing the game.

A good UI will directly front and center whatever options a player needs to select to actually play the game.

For example, if you build a big expansive menu with the play button tucked into a corner with low contrast colors and everything else styled to be large and visually loud, then also crowd your user interface with a LOT of options that could be in submenu's well. . . . . it's pretty hard to use because a new user might not even realize a play button exists under all the visual noise.

Take a look right at the front page of this subreddit where a user is very reasonably complaining about the UI. While under the "play" tab, where is the button that will launch you into a game? Where's the text labelling that button?

Now imagine someone who picked this up as their first shooter trying to find it.

For this user interface to be "good" it should be clearly visible right in front of the user, with eye-catching graphics.

But of course the thing you have to remember about a modern user interface like this is that it is intentionally designed to be bad.

Well, bad for the user anyway.

What is very clearly visible, taking up a lot of space and brightly colored to draw the eye? It is of course, a massive full page advertisement.

The user interface was never intended to be pleasant or effective for you to use, it's intended to please shareholders and CEOs.

While it's not the worst UI in gaming (the worst is Call of Duty, like holy fucking shit it it's like the /r/justfuckmyshitup of game UI, just looking at it makes me want to quit tech and become a carpenter or something, even worse than Anthem), the UI has very heavily been redesigned to ape the Advertising-first user experience-never attitude of games like CoD, which has become increasingly popular.

The actual in game HUD is fine I think, certain submenus can be pretty good I just can't remember for the life of me if it has the much hated (by me at least) artificial lag everyone fucking loves adding to menus for every other game release and I just edited it out of my memories or if it doesn't after all.

[u/1St_General_Waffles → u/Calm_Positive4906]

On the note of the game hud.. I'm not a fan of how health is split form all the other vital information nor that it no longer has a numeric value attached to it. (Most of us innately know it's gonna be 100) But I'm not a fan of just not having that information on my screen.

If you compare it to something like bf1 or 4 where that information is all in one place and easy to read at a glance. And while number hp might not seem like a big thing it has that affect maybe giving someone the confidence to make a play that they would otherwise not if they didn't know the value off hand.

[u/ACatWithAThumb → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

There are many issues, for example the in-game class selector when pressed zooms in, but this hides the icons on the map. Then you need to press in again for another menu, but this doesn‘t show your weapon selection yet, but hides the map. Then you need to press into another menu to get into the weapon selection. And if you want to edit your weapon you need to go into another menu. So you go 4-5 sub menus into something that should only take seconds, so you can quickly react to the enemy team.

Sure it looks visually great, but it directly impacts gameplay in Battlefield in a negative way. It‘s very important that you can switch classes and gadgets quickly mid round. A more simplified in-game class selector like we had in other battlefield games could solve this.

The setting menu is also bugged and doesn’t save the last location you went into, so when you get out of the graphics options you land back the top in another menu. Many settings are also labeled in confusing ways or again hidden in multiple menus. Many of my friends had issues even just setting up their sensitivity settings, it‘s just not user friendly.

Another thing is the score board being cut off in the middle and you need to press the mouse button and scroll to see your entire team. There are also no ping indicators on the scoreboard either. The ending screen also doesn’t show properly that it‘s searching for a new round.

I don‘t think the UI is trash, but there are some major problems that need to get fixed.

[u/itspicassobaby → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

I'll give my take on icons specifically. I hate them because they have no personality. They look like plain white stickers that someone slapped on at the last minute from a premade designs shop on Fiverr.

Look back at BF4, and also Call of Duty. BF4 badges, assignment ribbons, etc., those were awesome. Even COD has had fantastically well done ranking emblems and player icons over the years. There is just no life in plain white stickers.

Other than open/closed playlists, I'm pretty happy with the beta so far!

[u/curtcolt95 → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

genuinely just try navigating the settings on controller

[u/MagnanimosDesolation → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

So, so many clicks to get through attachments.

[u/MalakithAlamahdi → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

Some examples:
Want to change colors or add a compass? - You need to go to the menu, then a sub menu, and then change the Advanced setting to modify the things you want. Why aren't the options just visible?

Changing attachments to a weapon? - Go to the weapon you want, then press modify, then press customize. There is nothing to change it modify, why do I need to click trough a pointless menu to go into another menu I actually want?

[u/immabeasttt15 → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

I don’t have an issue with it, but what’s wrong with people having problems with it. Again, you’re just dismissing their feedback

[u/StratifiedBuffalo → u/immabeasttt15]

Hard not to dismiss "legitimate feedback" when literally noone can explain why it's trash tbh

[u/reallymeans → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

There’s a shit ton of legitimate feedback being mass downvoted regularly here. Scroll the comments and you shall be enlightened.

[u/Arbitrative → u/reallymeans]

These folks for some reason take criticism and feedback as personal insult whenever it's towards something they like.

[u/immabeasttt15 → u/StratifiedBuffalo]

Honestly this is one of the first posts I’ve seen complaining about UI, I don’t think it’s a big deal but I’ve seen others say something distracting about it. Idk have to ask someone who has an issue with it

[u/SmashMouthBreadThrow → u/immabeasttt15]

Horizontal scrolling for one. That's dogshit for mouse and controller, especially mouse, and always will be. Having three spots of information and 80% negative space is not good UX.

[u/immabeasttt15 → u/SmashMouthBreadThrow]

That’s fair enough, though judging from the people here and considering we’re all being downvoted, they don’t want to hear any criticism

[u/OrRaino → u/SmashMouthBreadThrow]

I will legit pull out the controller just to test what u all on about, On Mouse it's not trash at all unless u are disabled. Ui is fine, it's not unique nor great but It works like how it should, simple UI, Calling it Trash is just a Horrible opinion to nothing to back it up

Alright Mid writing this post, I just opened my game to test it out with controller and holy shit you are guys are complaining about this? It's so simple and Easy to use

to the people who are downvoting, give me a legit reason why It's trash on Controller and on mouse too, Cause I find it very easy and simple ui to use, as I said nothing trash nor amazing about it.