BioWare on Mass Effect 3’s HUD

Little is known of BioWare’s final chapter in the Mass Effect trilogy, but senior designer Brenon Holmes appears more than willing to share thoughts on the game’s HUD design and development.

Previous entries in the series have used a traditional HUD, overlaying important information, but it’s possible the third title could switch to a more translucent in-world approach similar to that seen in Visceral’s Dead Space.

“We actually had the exact same thought during ME2 development and did a few prototypes of a health and shield indicator in world on Shepard’s armour,” Holmes explained in response to a fan post on the BioWare forum.

“The end result was not as great as we’d hoped…”

Holmes went on to describe why it didn’t quite work: “It was OK when Shepard was out of cover, like in the image you linked. The issues started to crop up once you popped into cover, with the way that the camera was positioned and with Shepard’s orientation changing we had to do some fairly crazy stuff to get the health indicator to display in a reasonable position.

“Even then it ended up being rather confusing to reference when you were in the middle of a fight. I think if we’d simplified our health system so we only had one meter or bar it might have been easier to represent it on the armour (like on Isaac’s back in DS).”

However, all this doesn’t mean BioWare has given up on improving the HUD.

“All that said, we’re still really interested in trying to move information into the world,” said Holmes. “That’s one of the things that I love about Dead Space; the interface… it feels really immersive. I just want to touch the hell out of those buttons.

“So we are still investigating ways of putting some of our HUD elements into the environment… we’ll see what we end up with.”

Mass Effect 3 will be released this holiday season for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.