The Gamer's Quarter

[Ketch]

King Kong and Ico were praised in part because of the way they removed the traditional overlaid HUD / interface. Do you think that it is good to remove HUDs? (Ie. replace it with appropriate audio/ visual indicators.)

It seems like games could be made to remove as much screen clutter as possible, health would be represented visually. Time limits could be seen by Majora's Mask style impending doom (or Blast Corps?).

But would this be worthwhile? Personally when I'm playing Beyond Good & Evil, I wish there was no obvious HUD so I could just take in the landscapes. Thoughts?

[dark steve]

I think so. One of the things that bothered me about Shadow of the Colossus was how easy it would have been to just shuck the HUD entirely without causing the player to lose much of the feedback: Repurpose one the vibration motors to a heartbeat for the stamina, maybe start pumping up the HDR lighting when your health gets low, and just chuck the item indicator entirely.

It's kind of like opening a film with Hitler in his bunker, debris falling, Eva rocking back and forth in the corner, and then having a lieutenant run in yelling "Hitler! The allies are shelling us in your underground bunker!! This will surely go down as the darkest moment for us the Nazi party during 1945!"

[Lackey]

This is absolutely dependent on the game. If immersion is the goal, and the player is in a role where they wouldn't logically have a HUD (eg: in King Kong you use old weaponry which didn't have any explicit ammo counters) it does make sense to drop it. What's silly about the bullet counting thing in King Kong is that it just obfuscates a normal ammo counter and makes a button for it instead of making it always visible. A lot of games become a lot harder when you can't easily check how many bullets, how much health, and so on that you have and not harder in a good way. Lack of information isn't beneficial to gameplay.

Like you've indicated, there's something to be said for integrating these indicators better into the game so that the HUD isn't absolutely necessary. Designing around it, basically.

A good example of the middle ground here is Metroid Prime where the HUD not only provides much necessary information but makes sense in the game's setting and actually helps put the player in the protagonist's perspective.

EDIT: About Shadow of the Collosus: the grip meter is the one thing I see being really problematic there. Without being able to see exactly how long you can hold on the game would be exponentially harder and much more frustrating. Granted you could probably tweak around it, but fuzzy indicators for something so essential would be very tricky. Agree about the health and item though. These things are obvious enough on their own. It takes a LOT to die on normal difficulty anyway, I don't see that being a huge problem. In fact it would probably improve the health recharging a bunch, since it wouldn't be obvious that you have to wait for it to come back; you'd just know that you can only handle a certain amount of damage at one time. Also, the undocumented items (is this still considered spoilers?) would have a much more mysterious function.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[helicopterp]

I think it all has to depend on the game. From what I've played of Ico (which isn't much, but I'm working on buying a ps2 one of these days) the lack of a HUD really worked. It was all so lonely. The rooms in that castle are huge and barren. The camera is always panned way back, making the rooms bigger and Ico smaller. And Ico is an adolescent kid, in the throes of puberty. It helps that he doesn't strut like most videogame heroes; he scuttles. His knees are knobbly, and he jumps spastically. The lack of a HUD and any sort of tutorial session really gave you a sense of solitude and helplessness that I haven't really seen in any other game. So in that instance, it worked out well.

Much has been made, too, of Fight Night Round 3 for the Xbox 360. I'm not one for sports simulations, but boxing games are basically fighting games. One of the standards for fighting games over the years has been the health bar, which the Xbox 360 shucks in favor of actually having to read your opponent's facial expressions and body language. I can't say from experience how well it plays, but the concept is a refreshing way to use those high tech next-gen consoles.

I guess what I'm saying is that it can definitely heighten a game's experience, but the developer has to know why and how they're going to get rid of the HUD, and make sure it fits with the rest of a game's design.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[DonMarco]

Going further back, you have games like Oddworld and Donkey Kong.

Really, Bungie could make a HUD-less Halo very easily.
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Collector of over 1,538 strategy guides. That's weird, right?

[Lockeownzj00]

For starters, we had an interesting debate over on 8-bit a ways back on this very concept. My thoughts? Well, I spoke of it in the thread, but...

It's neither a replacement for HUDded gaming, nor is it a worthless dynamic. The problem with failed implementations of HUDless gaming, like The Getaway, is that they are stepping stones. All stylistic facets of all forms of art--movies, paintings, music, what have you--have had failures, but these failures are not always necessarily failures of thought. HUDless gaming is a concept still in its infancy, and as most attempts at HUDless games have proven clunky (most, not all. there are some games that have pulled it off beautifully), it merely shows that we need to work harder to refine it.

Today's gaming industry would tell you, "it doesn't work, throw it out," but needless to say, I find this a startlingly unhealthy attitude.

In the 8-bit thread, I pointed to Call of Duty 2's health system. Lack of a HUD is not merely an aesthetic choice--it necessarily changes the gameplay. If you can not quantify your health, how else could you know to take caution? CoD2's delirious recovery system was extremely enjoyable, in my opinion. While unrealistic (it's a fucking game, for christ's sake), having a real reason to watch your back other than waiting for the next med pack made the game much more tense. In the heat of battle, as your hearing dwindles with every bullet, as your vision blurs, your only instinct is to survive. I might be glorifying it, but damn...it really makes it all feel so...primal.

And of course, there is the stylistic factor. As was previously mentioned, the lack of HUDs in Ico is not merely because "there was no need--" it enhanced the setting. You felt even more curious in this cold, desolate castle; even more motivated to get out.

[kirkjerk]

One random thought is that it's not *just* HUD vs No HUD...
To some extent, it's quantitative data vs qualitative.

I guess Ico vs. SotC is a clear example of this (disclaimer, I didn't get far in SotC, mostly because it felt like a platformer I had trouble seeing).

Ico's combat is pretty distinctive, even similar (in combat) brawlers w/ low "hit point" enemies, you know exactly what it takes to kill each enemy, either through a display, or because it's some obvious small answer like 2 hits and they go away. The kidnapping of the princess, and having to multitask to keep her safe, kept a simplistic formula interesting.

The grip meter, then, is the opposite, where the quantitative value has a much greater role.

And that's one of the things about real life vs games, and most blatantly in any game with a health meter... damage is a smooth continuum, and more ofteh than not, a characters fighting capacity is undiminished until the very end.

I'm not against this, because it lets my video game life be much more interesting than my real one. In the real world, I don't heal by resting (well, not that quickly anyway) or by taking on a health pack. I know some FPS combat simulators deal with this realistically, where one bullet is generally enough to greatly diminish or eliminate someone's ability to fight. I don't like those games much myself. (Similarly, I love my flight combat games to be very arcadey--- I figure unrealistic controls counterbalance not having to go through years of flight training...)

So my point is, HUDs reflect the odd, other-worldly quantitative nature of damage (I guess they're also useful for maps..) in virtual game worlds, and that other worldly nature is a result of wanting to let the player take more risks and do interesting stuff.

I agree that Metroid Prime handles things very well. In general, encasing the player in armor can obscure certain sins of simulated physiology or the lack thereof.

[sawtooth]

Metroid Prime also has an adjustable HUD, so it gets points there, too.

Does anyone play FPS games with the hud off? For some reason, I can't seem to find an option in Aleph One to play with the hud on, and it's absolutely nerve-wracking to play Marathon 2 with it off (not to mention the way Aleph One turns the volume on the computer ALL THE WAY UP when it starts, which sucks when I have headphones on).

However! Duke Nukem 3d is really fun to play with the hud off.
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[TOLLMASTER]

I can't imagine playing an FPS without a HUD.

I can't really imagine how to give players ways to "sense" that their health or ammo or what-have-you is low. In games like Quake and Tribes, you never really get the sense of how much damage a weapon does unless it kills you. There isn't much tactile difference between a nailgun hit and a shotgun hit, for instance, and your character moves as quick as ever even right before he dies. And armor and the way it works would make this almost impossible.

Certain weapons and hits in Perfect Dark would blur or shake the screen, which I thought was nice, but the idea could have been expanded.

[purplechair]

I think that the recent Call of Cthulhu game didn't have a HUD. And was an FPS. It sounds like it doesn't feature much shooting, though - mostly just running away and trying not to find out what's chasing you - but I am reliably informed that you do have to keep a mental note of how many bullets are in your revolver, and stuff.

[B coma]

I've been meaning to play Rez with the HUD turned off.

[Ketch]

2d Mario Bros games usually don't really need any kind of HUD, you can see how many hits Mario can take from his state. You don't need to be told what level you are on, and you could probably use sound / music to represent time limits (or abolish them).

[Szczepaniak]

I really like HUDs. They are a staple of games, and I find overly complex, or very "gamey" HUDs quite satisfying to view.

I also like complex pause screens, like in Super Metroid.

[OtakupunkX]

[dessgeega]

i think some games can work very well without huds and some cannot. i remember thinking cyan's slipping an "inventory" into riven signalled a step away from immersion and towards gameyness. uru was subsequently a whole lot gameyer, but it was intended to be a massively multiplayer online game - you need some sort of status display.

there's an x-men game on the mega drive that starts as soon as you turn on the power. that is to say, the first stage starts as soon as you turn on the power. no logos*, no title screen.

* KNOWLEDGE!

[OtakupunkX]

[dessgeega]

[Sushi d]

[Shapermc]

I think that it really is based on what the game is trying to do more than what kind of game it is. BG&E is a good example of a game that could go without the HUD. Metroid Prime is a good exaple of HUD implementation (even though it could have been pared down a little). There are some games that seem to have an HUD just to show you as much information as it can.

I guess this is what I want to say: Doom 4 should have a HUD because people are just trying to play a game.
Silent Hill 5 (not origins, which I hold little hope for) should not have a HUD because it will be trying to tell a story*.

I think it should be based on focus not genera. Also, I don't know how many of you have ever shot weapons, but I don't think a bullet meter is needed in games. Just how many spare clips you have.

*please, please, please
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[SuperWes]

I like HUDs a lot. I don't think that much is gained from their removal unless they're only there for superficial reasons in the first place. The example above that talks about removing the Super Mario stats completely misses the point of removing a HUD in the first place. Does that little bar at the top actually make the game any less cinematic? I say hell no. Sure, it doesn't add to the game, but really how often do you actually look at it when you don't need to? Never? Leave it in.

Bushido Blade got rid of life bars. This was a neat idea at the time, but when I played the game I always wondered how much life I had left. Maybe I was stuck in videogame mindset when I played the game, but I know for a fact that the game is keeping track of this stuff, so by obscuring it from the player are they really doing anything but forcing the player to focus on nothing but one-hit kills?

Has anyone read about the Halo 3 demo they showed off to "select press" at E3? Apparently one of the things they did was pause the demo movie they've been showing off and then zoom in on the Master Chief and rotate around his body. This is relevant to the discussion because one of the things they did was zoom in on his face and show off how the HUD was transparent and visible within the Master Chief's helmet. You'll probably never see that kind of thing in the game, and I'm sure it's not there in the current Halo 2 model, but it's interesting to see that as the engine gets more powerful Bungie is able to evolve the level of realism to add in concessions to the gamey elements present in the world. NEAT!

-Wes
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[Mr. Apol]

I can't imagine playing Ace Combat without a HUD. I think that goes without saying.
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LJ -- Profile

[dessgeega]

[Sushi d]

[purplechair]

As I recall, Bushido Blade mostly just worked by disabling your limbs as they were hit, with a clean blow to the head or chest killing you. I can't remember if you could die from lots of leg blows, say. I guess you probably could.

We used to play it a lot in 2-player link mode. It was a first-person slash-em-up deathmatch in Japanese gardens. I dunno if I'd say it was fun... but it was novel and interesting, certainly.

[Lockeownzj00]

[Shapermc]

[SuperWes]

[TheRumblefish]

[Lackey]

I'd never thought of the health bars in that game as having been "taken away." It just didn't occur to me. Either you killed the guy with your sword or you didn't, heh.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Lockeownzj00]

[dark steve]

I played quite a bit of Bushido Blade back in the day, and if it's possible to kill your opponent without hitting an "instant-death" vital area, I never saw anyone do it. Wes, are you SURE that BB had invisible life bars, or was it just that the 5th or 6th hit was the one to hit something important?

You could slow your opponent down by getting him in non-vital chest areas, but no matter how many times you pounded the same spot, it wouldn't actually kill him.

[SuperWes]

[TOLLMASTER]

I was thinking last night about games that have HP, Defense, and Magic Defense.

Those three stats all determine how long a character is going to live, and I was wondering if they could be simplified without reducing much of their function.

As a lover of numbers I can't really let go of them, though.

[Lockeownzj00]

[Swimmy]