Instead of meters, your body tells you what’s going on: a growling stomach that might attract wildlife, blurred vision when exhaustion kicks in, and senses warping when stress rises. Our goal is for the world to feel immersive, not overwhelming; a mix of atmospheric exploration and smart decision-making.

“Gee I’m so tired of games that convey information clearly” said no gamer EVER. Also this sounds like a negative feedback loop as the danger screen effect makes it even harder to get out of trouble. That obnoxious beep-beep from the original Zelda when you’ve got very little hearts left comes to my mind.

My stomach rarely growls when I’m hungry, and when it does it’s only a few times on an interval of a few minutes. Not ideal for being able to tell and therefore make decisions. In contrast, I’ve never experienced blurred vision from exhaustion or “warping” due to stress.

At the end of the day, these HUD elements make up for the fact that it’s not possible to simulate a sense of an empty stomach that you physically feel through a computer, or the sense of exhaustion when you’ve been awake too long. You can display that information clearly with a UI element, or in an obscured way with other cues, but they’ll all be artificial.

I liked the follow-up paragraph:

I’m not sure that qualifies as a “rethinking” of the genre: other survival games have relied on sounds and visual effects to give players information about their character’s survival status. It’s also, honestly, not my favorite approach: effects like blurred vision can just wind up being annoying to deal with if they’re overdone. None of those effects are shown in the trailer, so I guess we’ll see how Verdant handles it.

This is a tired old gimmick.

It can work situationally. Different games have different approaches to health and to UI. Mario had different sprites and mechanical implications for health. Spyro the Dragon had Sparks change color, and if you lost Sparks entirely it became a pain to collect things.

But most of the time, often in modern action/horror games, it’s just nonsense. A pretty transparent attempt to make the player “feel” in danger by making the character bloody or putting up an increasingly opaque vignette without actually communicating health well. It makes it all that much more easier to try to give the player the feeling of “surviving that attack on 1HP” without actually having to fudge numbers.

There has been a trend the past several years of thinking UI = bad, and that less UI = more good. I find it incredibly annoying. Just give me the UI. Give me the minimap. These are things that are so useful in real life that humans have been trying to make them for thousands of years. We made smartphones and GPS systems because maps are great. Google and Meta and Apple and tons of other companies have been trying to make AR glasses a thing for years. It honestly breaks my “immersion” to NOT have a minimal in games like Horizon Zero Dawn.

It CAN be interesting to do stuff like this if the game is designed around it, but usually it just feels like the devs are trying to re-invent stuff they don’t need to, or following trends for the sake of being trendy.

just make things like this options. show ui for hunger thirst and give audio and visual signs of hunger and thirst. can choose either or or both.

Just like Call of Duty rethought the FPS genre by making it so your health was how much strawberry jam was smeared on your screen instead of a health bar.

That could be dope, or could be frustrating depending on how it is implemented. I will keep my eye on this one.

Casualties Unknown