Ghost Recon Breakpoint — Fighting both the UI and AI
It has been 2 years since the launch of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a tactical military shooter developed by Ubisoft and the sequel to Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. After picking up the game in a recent sale, I figured it would help me scratch that itch of an open world stealth game in the same vein as Metal Gear Solid V.
For those who are unfamiliar with the setting of Breakpoint, you play as Nomad, the leader of a US special forces team known as The Ghosts who leads a group of Ghost operatives to the fictional Auroa Archipelago to investigate the sinking of a US cargo ship as well as the communication cutoff from the island. Things don’t go as planned and the they are ambushed by a group known as The Wolves led by Walker, a former Ghost operative who turned rouge.
While there are some performance issues and bugs I experienced, none of them were game-breaking to me. However, I found it difficult to keep playing because of one reason— The UI.
As a student currently taking a course in UX/UI, I would like to give my thoughts and opinions on the design issues that I encountered after my 8 or so hours of playing.
General HUD
The HUD in Breakpoint has all the essential components you will find in a third person shooter like in any other games, objective markers, mini map, health bars, ammo count, etc. However, where the HUD falls apart is how the information is being presented to the player.
Looking at the image above, players will notice that the objective list on the left is taking up a large amount of screen space. This is borderline unacceptable in a game where gunfire can come from any direction as it limits the player’s field of vision. I had cases where I was sprinting along the road to my next objective when an enemy vehicle patrol would spot me as they were blocked by the objectives list.
While there is an option to ‘limit’ the HUD information by pressing the default tab key, it unfortunately also closes the mini map with only the ammo count being displayed. The only time the mini map is displayed by default was when there are enemies nearby. It would be great if there was an option to keep both the mini map and ammo count displayed at all times without unpinning the objectives. For completionists, I could see this being an issue where they would have to choose between pinning objectives or permanently opening the mini map to locate collectibles scattered in the open world.
Aiming HUD
My issues with the HUD extends to when my character is aiming down his weapons. The HUD when aiming down is simple enough, crosshair can be seen with keys X, B, Y, T each adding different customizations to the weapon. For players who have invested enough time in the game, this might not seem like an issue. Newer players to the game might not grasp what the various keys does without looking in the key bind settings.
Even after finding out what each key does, the thing that really bothers me is the suppressor On/Off key (T by default on PC) and the confusing suppressor icon. In the figure above, I had my suppressor on but the T key is still displaying the suppressor icon as if the game is telling me that by pressing T, my character will equip the suppressor. This became an issue for me in the first few hours of play as I had to glance down the barrel of my own gun to do a quick check to ensure my suppressor was on before performing stealth kills.
Ubisoft was able to get it right in Wildlands with a small tooltip beside the icon so not bringing it into the sequel is kind of a misstep.
Shop Menus
In Breakpoint, cash called skell credits can be earned after completing missions or looting from boxes and enemies in the world. With these credits, you can visit shops in the base to buy vehicles and weapons to aid in your missions. That sounded great to me until I saw the horrible UI in one of the shops and it was not a pleasant experience.
After accessing the shop, I first checked out the selection of vehicles available so that I could start planning and saving up the cash to get one of these helicopters of my choice with weapons to have an easier time travelling the open world and dealing with enemies.
I was annoyed that there was no way to sort by vehicle type so that I could compare the price and specs of these helicopters. Speaking of comparing specs, there is NO way to tell how powerful each vehicle is. What you see in figure 5 is all the information on the vehicle the game provides you. That’s all. No tooltip or additional information when you hover over the vehicle.
Want to know how the Overseer Rockets compare to Overseer Rockets Mk II? Open the web browser of your choice and perform a google search to find out the differences. When the game forces me to open my web browser to search for information that should have been in the game, it is a big red flag and it feels like the developers could not be bothered with it.
For having 89 vehicles in the shop menu, there must be an easier way to filter by vehicle types with accompanying tooltips for these vehicles. It was honestly quite baffling to me as no recent games I played had this issue with lack of tooltips.
What was mentioned previously pertains to purchase, so how does selling items stack up? Surely they can’t mess this up as well right?
You can sell items but you could only sell one at a time or sell all the same time. If you want to sell 30 times of the same item but want to keep some spares, you have to hit your space bar 30 times to sell it. This is inexcusable for a game that came out in 2019 and I have seen RPGs that came out 20 years ago implemented a counter to select how many items to sell with the up and down arrow keys.
Objective Board and Map Interface
To earn those credits to purchase vehicles and weapons, players have to complete missions so let’s take a look at the objectives board
I do not have any major issues with the objectives board as key characters with their profile pictures are laid out in a fashion similar to the planning phase of a special operations team often seen in movies. From a design perspective, it looks great and adds to the authenticity that you are playing as a special forces unit. What I am not pleased about is what happens after you selected a mission.
After selecting a mission, it is pinned to the left of the screen in the objectives list. In most games. after selecting the mission, the main map will automatically open to highlight the waypoint. In Breakpoint, nothing happens after you pin the mission. You are required to manually close the objectives board and open the tactical map where you will be greeted with the image in Figure 8 and it is too cluttered for my liking.
As far as I know, there is no way to disable inactive objectives so players will have to contend with the multitude of circles around the map. Circles are colour coded according to mission types where yellow denotes main missions, green for faction missions and blue for weapon blueprints. Objectives pinned by the player will have a white outline around them but there is one minor issue. For players who have multiple objectives of the same type pinned but would like to visit a particular area first (eg. obtaining the MP7 blueprint), they would have to manually hover over the two blue objectives with the white circle outline to reveal which location contains that particular blueprint.
The closing of the objectives board and opening the map becomes a slog when the player realizes they have to repeat this for every objective as he/she has to gauge the distance to determine a suitable vehicle for transport even after factoring in fast travel.
Skills Menu
After earning experience points from completing missions, the player can upgrade their character abilities in the skill tree. The skill tree in Breakpoint is serviceable for the most part as it makes use of branching and connecting nodes to cluster certain skills under a theme (eg. Recon). What could be done to improve upon it is adding a skill point cost beside each skill icon so that players do not have to manually hover over each skill for the tooltip to tell them the skill point cost.
A bizarre exclusion from the skill tree in Breakpoint is the zoom function and it was a somewhat odd decision to exclude what seems like a basic function. Thankfully, it was a minor issue for me due to the limited amount of skills available which meant that it would take several drags of the mouse to view the skills at the edge of the skill tree.
Conclusion
After playing Breakpoint for 8 hours, I find myself hesitant to continue playing it because of the multitude of minor and severe UI issues I have encountered so far. Individually, none of the UI/UX issues I brought up (apart from the vehicles) affected the core gameplay but it did not compel me to continue playing either as well. It felt unpolished in terms of both gameplay and UI design wise. I did not mention about inventory management as the guns I currently have are limited in number for me to form any opinion on sorting weapon types or comparing weapon stats.
This article is focused on UI so I will not mention much about gameplay but what made me ultimately stop playing breakpoint was the moment I was sniped out of a armored helicopter by the enemy AI while flying around and raining destruction on their base. It was immersion breaking and felt cheap when there were other ways the AI could respond such as firing anti air missiles or sending additional reinforcements that includes a helicopter.
In some ways, the prequel Wildlands felt more like the sequel than Breakpoint was as I did not encounter any of these cumbersome issues with the UI and gameplay was tight without weapons being tied to levels which I was not a huge fan of. Breakpoint tries to incorporate the looter shooter mechanics from Tom Clancy’s The Division but ultimately felt unpolished and out of place in a Ghost Recon game.