Nearly every game I’ve worked on since the mid 2000s has started with someone saying “this time it’ll be hudless”
We do a bunch of work on some kind of HUD replacement, and then testers and focus groups come back with
“I couldn’t figure out where to go,” “I couldn’t see the enemies,” “it’s very confusing.”
You need to do the art very differently to make a modern game readable without UI. To a lot of art directors and focus groups, UI is less immersion breaking than the art changes that readability without it requires.
Not saying it’s impossible. Just requires a mind shift that AAA appears unwilling to take.
The only game I’ve played that really managed to pull of HUD-less was Dead Space. They really thought through the game design and interactions, it’s just a masterfully crafted game. I believe Dead Space 2 is almost entirely in a single continuous camera shot as well, kinda bonkers.
No ambitions for a hudless, waypoint-less gameplay system survive playtesting. There’s friction and then there’s watching someone do the same loop around for 30 minutes. I once watched a streamer play a game I worked on. The level artists had meticulously and organically sign posted where to go - like pulled out all the stops with lighting and directionality of the environment. Stopping just short of putting any yellow paint anywhere. The streamer still fucked it up.
Yeah … can UI be overdone? Sure. But in most cases, I still want a HUD-type UI, at least a little bit.
The best games out there give the player granular options to enable or disable specific UI elements, so you can have as much or as little UI as you want, and if some particular element is annoying you, you can disable it.
Nearly every game I’ve worked on since the mid 2000s has started with someone saying “this time it’ll be hudless” We do a bunch of work on some kind of HUD replacement, and then testers and focus groups come back with “I couldn’t figure out where to go,” “I couldn’t see the enemies,” “it’s very confusing.”
You need to do the art very differently to make a modern game readable without UI. To a lot of art directors and focus groups, UI is less immersion breaking than the art changes that readability without it requires. Not saying it’s impossible. Just requires a mind shift that AAA appears unwilling to take.
The only game I’ve played that really managed to pull of HUD-less was Dead Space. They really thought through the game design and interactions, it’s just a masterfully crafted game. I believe Dead Space 2 is almost entirely in a single continuous camera shot as well, kinda bonkers.
The only game I can even think of that’s hudless is Astroneer and it took me like 30 hours to notice. Can’t imagine how hard that is to do well
No ambitions for a hudless, waypoint-less gameplay system survive playtesting. There’s friction and then there’s watching someone do the same loop around for 30 minutes. I once watched a streamer play a game I worked on. The level artists had meticulously and organically sign posted where to go - like pulled out all the stops with lighting and directionality of the environment. Stopping just short of putting any yellow paint anywhere. The streamer still fucked it up.
Why would you watch DSP?!?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Yeah … can UI be overdone? Sure. But in most cases, I still want a HUD-type UI, at least a little bit.
The best games out there give the player granular options to enable or disable specific UI elements, so you can have as much or as little UI as you want, and if some particular element is annoying you, you can disable it.