Where most games tack on a heads-up display that's nothing more than a flat texture overlaid atop the game's visuals, Dead Space does it differently with its diegetic user interface.
Mass Effect programmer Brenon Holmes said on the BioWare forums that the designers are presently looking into adapting Dead Space's diagetic (or environmental) HUD into Mass Effect 3.
“We’re still really interested in trying to move information into the world,” said Holmes. “That’s one of the things that I love aboutDead 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.”
According to Holmes, the studio attempted to implement health and shield indicators into Commander Shepard's armor in the early phases of Mass Effect 2's development to little avail.
“It was ok when Shepard was out of cover, like in the image you linked," he said in response to a forum member. "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).”
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