EDIT: I couldn't be happier that this post is now obsolete. They did a great job fixing these problems.
DICE did what DICE always does: they gave us a fantastic, immersive shooter that's hobbled by some terrible, seemingly obvious UI decisions. I maintain the most irritating of these numerous BF3 UI gripes is that the in-game chat window is a complete failure.
My argument has three points:
1. It's too brightly colored / opaque. BF3 contains mostly earth tones dark shadows, making even the [what appears to be around] 50% opaque and 50% desaturated blue box too colorful and in a game where that 3x3 square of pixels in the distance may be a guy who's about to shoot you in the head, it's unacceptable.
2. It's too wide. Check out this screenshot (kindly provided by GB user CL60). Easily half of the width of the box is wasted space in this current state. I know the space is anticipating more text but in my experience (~30 hours so far) the in-game text rarely gets long enough to fill this space.
Now consider that it's also frequently appearing and disappearing every time a server message or user-typed message is received. The effect is hard to describe, but if you consider that the human eye is only good at focusing on one thing at a time, and that in most cases while playing this game your eye is focused on an area around the crosshair, you might begin to see how this is a problem:
My eye is usually really focused on an area about the size of the center circle, with the middle circle being the "grey area" marking the edge of concentration. The outside area is, in effect, peripheral vision. The proximity of the bottom left corner to the crosshair is the key problem here. It not only obscures a critical area within the circle you're concentrating in, but it also puts something that's moving and heavy emphasis into your peripheral vision, where the blinking on and off is likely to divert your attention.
This phenomenon is much, much worse for those still using a 4:3 monitor instead of a 16:9 monitor. I've done both.
3. It doesn't do its job anyway. The window is very difficult to glean information from while in-game. There's no color-coding to indicate the source so you can easily filter information. [edit: it slipped my mind that it does color code messages from squadmates to other squadmates.] The window disappears very quickly without a method to call it back (besides typing something).
Interestingly enough, all of these detriments were added very late in the development cycle with probably very little chance to test the changes with a wide audience. Check out how the chat window looked in the Beta:
So what's to be done?
0.Just roll back to the Beta chat window. Easy enough.
1. Halve the size of the window to about 1.5x the width of the map box. Why does the least-essential element of the HUD have the most prominent place in the hierarchy?
2. Reduce the font size by a point or two. This would bring the BF3 chat box into a consistent place with previous BF games.
3. Desaturate the color and reduce the opacity by another 25%. Check the background of the "points captured" indicator on the bottom left for what I'd be happier with.
4. Reposition it to the top left. Get it away from the circle of focus at the center of the screen. Again, something that previous Battlefield games have done.
5. Most importantly, give us the option to turn the damn thing off. This is 2011. We've had the option to alter and turn off pieces of the HUD since at least the days of Unreal Tournament (and probably even earlier though that was the first time I remember being able to do it). If not an option in the game options, at least give us a console command or an .ini to edit.
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