It seems to me to be a small trend in the action/adventure genre lately to reduce the HUD as much as possible and in many segments not have it at all. I'm thinking of games like Tomb Raider and TLOU for example. When you are not engaged in combat there is typically no HUD at all. In combat the HUD is small and discrete. Messages do not pop up during gameplay (Naughty Dog even stopped trophies from showing). There are few markers in the games and they are fairly discrete.
I know AC1 was designed to be played with no HUD. AC3 was clearly not as you runned into trouble when you disabled it (for example some checkpoints you needed to pass were very small). AC is an open world game which complicates thing as you have to help the player more with directions. Still when I watch the AC4 gameplay vids and think back on AC3 I feel bombarded with un-organic visual cues. Markers, messages, extra objectives, hints, your ranking on leaderboards etc etc.
To me this is very immersion breaking and a fairly big problem. I try to disable as much as I can, but it's hard to customize the HUD the way I want to, as the game is not built for it. I wish AC tried to move away from the news program visual style it currently has.
I know AC1 was designed to be played with no HUD. AC3 was clearly not as you runned into trouble when you disabled it (for example some checkpoints you needed to pass were very small). AC is an open world game which complicates thing as you have to help the player more with directions. Still when I watch the AC4 gameplay vids and think back on AC3 I feel bombarded with un-organic visual cues. Markers, messages, extra objectives, hints, your ranking on leaderboards etc etc.
To me this is very immersion breaking and a fairly big problem. I try to disable as much as I can, but it's hard to customize the HUD the way I want to, as the game is not built for it. I wish AC tried to move away from the news program visual style it currently has.