Should BioWare be toying with Mass Effect 3 HUD?

Do you like when developers toy with a section of game franchise that is already fine to begin with? I can’t stand it. To find out that BioWare is actually toying with the Mass Effect 3 HUD is just heartbreaking as there was never anything wrong with the HUD from the original two games to begin with. I can understand the ideology of wanting to offer up something new to the gamer, but don’t fix what isn’t broken guys.

According to a forum post over on the official forums, the development team is certainly looking for a new way to design the HUD, but nothing is set in stone as of yet.

“We actually had the exact same thought during ME2 development and did a few prototypes of a health and shield indicator in world on Shepard’s armour,” senior designer Brenon Holmes wrote in a response to a fan post on the BioWare forum.

“The end result was not as great as we’d hoped…

“It was OK when Shepard was out of cover, like in the image you linked. The issues started to crop up once you popped into cover, with the way that the camera was positioned and with Shepard’s orientation changing we had to do some fairly crazy stuff to get the health indicator to display in a reasonable position.

“Even then it ended up being rather confusing to reference when you were in the middle of a fight. I think if we’d simplified our health system so we only had one meter or bar it might have been easier to represent it on the armour (like on Isaac’s back in DS).

“All that said, we’re still really interested in trying to move information into the world. That’s one of the things that I love about Dead Space; the interface… it feels really immersive. I just want to touch the hell out of those buttons.

“So we are still investigating ways of putting some of our HUD elements into the environment… we’ll see what we end up with.”

What do you guys think? Do you like it when a developer changes things around like this or do you prefer for them to keep it the same throughout the franchise? I definitely want Mass Effect 3 to feel like a new experience, but I also want it to feel like a Mass Effect experience as well.

Readers Comments (1)

  1. If they make it like Dead Space I’m all for it.

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