Far Cry 2 struck a successful compromise with no apparent HUD ensuring strong immersion, but with ammo and health indicators appearing when you pushed buttons to reload and inject yourself with syringes (health boosts) that you had collected. I prefer Halo 3 without the motion detector in Team SWAT multiplayer, although I think it is a good idea to mark your team-mates with waypoints that show if they are being fired upon or have just died - it also avoids you killing members of your own team as you lob grenades ahead of yourself as you get a warning whether that area contains members of your team. Obviously, you could just rely on team-chat and there is an option for "no waypoints", but unless you are playing in a clan that has an established set of place-names for all the locations on every map you are going to experience some friendly-fire.
I think the future trend is towards contextual HUDs which are hidden the majority of the time to ensure player immersion isn't upset.
Actually, thinking about it... more could be made of the "Buddy system" in Far Cry 2, with an AI controlled buddy accompanying you on every mission, so there was no actual Singleplayer campaign, just a virtual Co-op mode. The benefit of doing this would be that this buddy could react to your current state of health/fatigue with contextual dialogue: "You're bleeding", "Hey, you really need to rest, you look terrible, man..."
which you wouldn't know to take heed of as there was no Health bar anymore and in 1st person there was only a limited (look down on yourself) body image. The buddy would function as medic, meaning that if you let him die you couldn't be resuscitated, only perform First Aid if you could get away from the combat situations that had injured you before you bled-out. Far Cry 2 made this awkward as the enemy seemed to have X-ray vision and could sustain too much damage (considering that they were wearing T-shirts).
Oh, and the game would have been improved if you could have kept some extra guns on your jeep/boat.
I think the future trend is towards contextual HUDs which are hidden the majority of the time to ensure player immersion isn't upset.
Actually, thinking about it... more could be made of the "Buddy system" in Far Cry 2, with an AI controlled buddy accompanying you on every mission, so there was no actual Singleplayer campaign, just a virtual Co-op mode. The benefit of doing this would be that this buddy could react to your current state of health/fatigue with contextual dialogue: "You're bleeding", "Hey, you really need to rest, you look terrible, man..."
which you wouldn't know to take heed of as there was no Health bar anymore and in 1st person there was only a limited (look down on yourself) body image. The buddy would function as medic, meaning that if you let him die you couldn't be resuscitated, only perform First Aid if you could get away from the combat situations that had injured you before you bled-out. Far Cry 2 made this awkward as the enemy seemed to have X-ray vision and could sustain too much damage (considering that they were wearing T-shirts).
Oh, and the game would have been improved if you could have kept some extra guns on your jeep/boat.
