Earlier this week, the Panorama UI has been released into the beta release of CS:GO. The Panorama UI has been anticipated for a while in the past few months. It’s supposed to be a much cleaner and more organized version of the old CS:GO UI which has been pretty much the same for the past few years. Supposedly, the new UI shouldn’t change any of the actual gameplay except the scoreboard. Additionally, it’s supposed to increase the framerate for most people.
From pictures and videos of the new main menu as well as the inventory and setting screens I can say it looks a lot better than the old UI. In addition to being a new sight, it feels and looks like a whole new game. On the main menu, there’ve been a few changes. Most of the main features are still there, but it looks a lot different. There’s now an animated character model that takes up around half of the screen. You can select a weapon for the character model to hold, and from what I’ve seen it looks like all of the weapons have different animations. Your profile, which includes your rank, medals, etc have been hidden to the right side of the screen and can be brought up by moving your cursor to that side of the screen. Your friends list has also been moved to the same side. Party lobbies have also been removed and now they’re just in the top right corner where you can still type, but now you can still change your settings without having to leave the lobby. The inventory menu has also been changed by being more organized and the case opening animation has also been changed. You can now more carefully inspect your weapons by rotating them on your own although it doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to rotate them 360 degrees.
The Panorama UI is still in beta, so its features can still be changed before the official release. Overall, I think this will be a good change for the game since Valve has been known to not really pay attention to their own game by adding useless things that don’t help the enjoyment of the game.