Divergent Design Decisoins: The HUD

This week's Microsoft Gamer's Day event saw new details emerge about some of Microsoft Game Studio's biggest impending releases. Something struck me as interesting as I was perusing the screen shots and reading previews.

Firstly, Peter Molyneux has his own interpretation of how a game should appear on screen from a preview with CVG:

It's a beautiful, striking-looking game, but what first catches our eye is how clean everything looks. There's no HUD to speak of, no health indicators, no item counts, not even a mini-map.

"If we're going to make a game that's really going to be dramatic, making people feel like they're not just looking through a portal at this world is really important. One of the problems with that is the mini-map," says Molyneux.

"We had one of those ghastly, distasteful things in the top corner of the screen, and our levels were getting so detailed that we realised that our mini-map was getting bigger. So we said, 'let's just get rid of it'."

And it does look amazing as indicated in the following screen shot.
On the other hand, Silicon Knights have taken the completely opposite approach when it comes to the "head's up display."
Wow! There's a lot going on in that image.

I love the simplicity of Fable2's design and will definitely be purchasing the game. However, I'm quite interested in Too Human as well but this screen shot is a bit overwhelming. I'm not sure if there's going to be a demo or not but I'm leaning towards trying before I buy this one.