HUD’s Up
“This, as it turns out, is a new revolution in games: the anti-HUD movement.“
These are the words of Clive Thompson, taken from a Wired news column about video-games. (I read the article on collision detection, one of the most interesting blogs around about weird research, games, science, technology, and culture. Please check it out!)…
In “Riddick”, we spent a lot of time and effort to eliminate HUD elements. Since then, other games has gone further. “King Kong” is one example. Other examples are “Condemned” and “Call of Duty 2” – and “Myst”… Yes, the strive for complete immersion has gone on for quite some time, so while we were ahead of most of the games that take the HUD-less design path (although we did have some HUD elements in “Riddick”) we all are far behind the earliest attempts. Actually, when you think of it are most of the solutions to HUD problems quite simple and straightforward. “Call of Duty 2” simplifies the damage model to be able to remove a health-bar. It works like a charm. “Condemned” removes the need for an ammo-counter by making it really easy to keep track of the amount by memory only (most guns have 2-3 rounds left). If you need a reminder, the game allows you to open the gun and look – in-game. (“Riddick” does like some other games and puts the ammo-counter on the weapon.)
But while these designs are deceivingly simple I believe they are extremely hard to come up with because they require some new thinking. In most examples where a traditional HUD has been removed the required information has to be presented in some other way. Some games replace the health-bar with walk speed and animation, but that sucks big-time because the more hits you take the harder the game gets. “Call of Duty” does exactly the right thing here and approaches the problem as a whole. The question asked should be “what is the required information?” and “how can we make the mechanics harmonize with what we no longer got?” These questions are tackled properly by the “Call of Duty 2” designers.
I, like Clive Thompson, also believe that there is an anti-HUD movement, one that Starbreeze is very much part of. The game we are working on currently (“The Darkness”) have some hard HUD challenges that we are thinking hard about right now. Clive Thompson argues that there is nothing inherent in HUDs that ruins immersion, that HUDs can actually serve immersion. In part I belive he is right. It is more important to deliver the proper information than to frustrate players, but I don’t see HUDs having value in themselves (but then again, I’m not a fan of “Steel Battalion” either). If the information channel between game and gamer can be made simpler, less ambiguous and more naturally mapped, that is the way to go.
