While I do wish they’d keep the visual styling, I personally feel we should aim for a less cluttered HUD in games. There are so many games where it feels insanely satisfying to rock HUDless and just feel like you’re in direct control of the action.
If you can integrate your HUD into the lore to make it part of the story, you get bonus points.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst does this by using an eye contact based system called BeatLink, which is the Runner’s version of the Conglomerate’s Gridlink. The game lets you disable most or all of the HUD features, and mods allow you to hide the rest.
They also have options to adjust the amount of handholding it does. I’m a huge fan!
The other part of it is that it’s much easier now to dynamically render UI elements when necessary, which removes much of the need for a HUD with dedicated portions of the screen for information.
I really like that about a lot of Helldivers 2. There are screens on workstations that you need to control and the screens show what you need to do. Not a popup in your HUD. Also, there are ammo counters on a lot of weapons visible in first person mode, and a lot of other details to give you hints about your status without having it in the HUD.
While I do wish they’d keep the visual styling, I personally feel we should aim for a less cluttered HUD in games. There are so many games where it feels insanely satisfying to rock HUDless and just feel like you’re in direct control of the action.
If you can integrate your HUD into the lore to make it part of the story, you get bonus points.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst does this by using an eye contact based system called BeatLink, which is the Runner’s version of the Conglomerate’s Gridlink. The game lets you disable most or all of the HUD features, and mods allow you to hide the rest. They also have options to adjust the amount of handholding it does. I’m a huge fan!
The other part of it is that it’s much easier now to dynamically render UI elements when necessary, which removes much of the need for a HUD with dedicated portions of the screen for information.
I’d be interested to see a demake of a modern game on the PS1 or something that packs as many modern QoL improvements as possible into it.
I really like that about a lot of Helldivers 2. There are screens on workstations that you need to control and the screens show what you need to do. Not a popup in your HUD. Also, there are ammo counters on a lot of weapons visible in first person mode, and a lot of other details to give you hints about your status without having it in the HUD.