Games without HUDs

[DraQ]

Do you think aircraft fighters duking it out in the sky suddenly would get any advantages if they were deprived of a decent HUD ? Feeling more immersed in their job perhaps, watching their gauges display "this engine's capacity is probably below average", instead of "EC = -57.25% b/o" ?

A strawman.

Poor one, at that. Our orcs and elves wouldn't have nice and precise gauges indicating their health and status effects.

When you're hit, you are not given the amount of HP it took, all you know is that it hurts like hell (unless you have a lot of adrenaline and endorphins in your system that prevent you from paying attention to small details like holes and missing bodyparts), and maybe that you seem to be bleeding a lot. You may not even know how bad you were hit.

A game isn't a tool designed for some function, unlike fighter plane. A game, at least non-abstract game where instead of pawns and pieces you have some digital constructs that try to stand in for actual people and creatures, is certain simulation, and important part of a simulation is that it tries to behave like the thing it's simulating - this includes feedback.

And that's the problem here, because game is completely limited to audiovisual feedback.
In any case, the point of various HUD-less system isn't to deprive player of feedback, it is (or at least should be - I'm afraid is mostly driven by "omgliekamovie!!1") to integrate this feedback with the presentation as tightly as possible.

TBH I don't really see a possibility of complete success here, but I still think that high degree of success should be possible. You generally don't want to dispose of stuff like chargen and, by extension stat display, since it usually isn't part of the simulation, it's parametrizing your character before even starting, though some kinds of beginnings may attempt, with varying degree of success to weave it into the narrative instead.

Now health opens some more opportunities here - if hits that penetrate or bypass the armour are generally dangerous, you might not need a scale to indicate your health, because getting wounded once is going to be bad enough news and you will generally try to avoid getting wounded altogether - general cue can suffice here if coupled with some way to indicate location. Stuff like mana is harder.

You will obviously want to keep some way to examine your character for injuries outside of the battle, you will want inventory, if only because you don't want to count small items by hand for the same reason you don't need to make your character take a dump regularly and so on.

All in all I'm for getting rid of as much hud as possible, but not more. I don't want game to be simplified because of that, I don't want lulzy regen to facilitate combat with no health bar, and I do want information I can expect my character to have to be conveyed to me in about as precise fashion. If it's going to be immersive and stuff - all the better, but unimmersive, yet expectable information is batter than lack of it altogether.

Fact is : people like their games to be as customizable as possible, and it's the best possible compromise. I won't force you to play the way I like to play. Don't do unto others what you don't want others do unto you, it would be a common courtesy.

Sounds like oblivion. If you design your game around something it won't necessarily play well without it.

No, apparently it was because they had trouble figuring out where they were situated within the environment, as they had no consistent point of reference. From what I read on it, it was even leading to motion sickness in experienced gamers. Since we lack a real sense of depth in 3D games, not to mention weight, inertia, balance, and touch, we need a dependable way to judge the size, scale and state of our environment based solely on visuals and sound. In third-person games, the player character serves this function. In first-person games? Almost always, it's the gun model and/or crosshair.

Sorry, but it sounds retarded. Crosshair and HUD in general are completely independent of the world and have no relative size to speak of, no more than the edges of your monitor's case framing your screen.

Weapon model is better, but it's still generally doesn't offer any clues, if only because it generally doesn't collide with the world and is drawn in such way as to avoid clipping or otherwise interacting with the world.

While lack of body awareness may lead to bumping into stuff and clumsy navigation in cluttered environment and, in conjunction with lack of depth perception, problems when manipulating objects in relation to the world, moving around is generally about as disorienting as moving around IRL with one eye covered. You can generally expect you POV to be somewhere below 2m from the ground in most cases, your rate of movement conveys a lot of information regarding spatial positioning of objects and that's it. Same laws of perspective and everything apply. Trimmed peripheral vision may be a bit of a problem but outside of the forward 90 degrees we have really poor perception of stuff, though detecting rapid movement can be helpful.

Other than that, we have Penumbra, Amnesia and similar games. I haven't noticed any problems with those.

Yes, HUD and GUI in general serves as an anchor for the player, but not in this sense - it anchors the player to their character, broadening narrow audiovisual information channel somewhat. Other than that - nooo.

And, brotip - better give all the theories regarding TPP guns all the awkward silence they deserve.

Edit:

There is one possible use of a weapon or crosshair that may help orientation, but it has nothing to do with relative scale or position. It's merely the fact that they serve as visual cues of forward direction, without such cue, especially on a large screen, you can look several degrees off when trying to look forward which may be slightly disorientating and lead to clumsy movement as you readjust. Still, most people don't have fancy wrap-around screens, especially here in potatolandia, so the problem is rather marginal.