Povuh

Exploring videogame worlds with the HUD turned off

Lately I've been playing a lot of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom. It's a huge open world game that's fun to explore, with secrets hidden all over the place. One optional feature I'm really enjoying is the Pro HUD setting. This turns off most of the HUD elements such as your health bar (outside of combat), thermometer, control reminders, and most notably the minimap.

Having minimaps and quest markers on a game's HUD feels to me a bit like watching a video with subtitles: They can be very useful, often essential, but there's a risk that you end up concentrating on them so much that you stop fully noticing everything else happening on the screen. In games I've caught myself staring at a floating quest marker on the screen, running straight at it while the distance indicator on it slowly decreases to 0, ignoring much of the beautiful landscape around it that some developers worked very hard on.

So whenever a game gives me the option to turn off HUD elements or things like quest markers, I tend to give it a try, sometimes with mixed results.

I think Tears of the Kingdom and its predecessor (Breath of the Wild) are especially well suited for turning the minimap off, because the games have very distinct distant landmarks that are easy to recognize. The world is also filled with friendly characters who will constantly tell you about interesting places and important landmarks nearby. For quests, NPCs generally give good directions and there's plenty of clever tricks in the landscape design to guide you to the right place. And of course you can still open the big map at any time to see where you are! For both games I do recommend playing with the regular HUD until you're a good bit past the tutorial sections, so that you're familiar with the controls and mechanics that are hidden with the Pro HUD setting.

In Skyrim, both the game's compass and quest markers can be unofficially disabled through an .ini file tweak. I enjoyed my playthrough without the compass, but I left the quest markers on. It's clear the game is not designed to be fully played without quest markers, because many of the quest descriptions are too vague to follow. Of course, someone's made a mod to address this.

In general, I like it when I can explore a game world intuitively just by looking around, and when a game lets you organically discover things. I'd rather miss out on some things entirely, than to be spoonfed all of it. I'm not sure what the state of Ubisoft games is these days, but I remember playing some Assassin's Creed games where I felt like I was ticking off a bunch of collectible/POI markers on a map like it was some kind of to-do list. That got old quickly!

To wrap it up, here are some other games where I really enjoyed the exploration aspect of it (with or without HUD tweaks):

And I have high expectations, exploration-wise, of the following games I still need to try: