And as for gunfights? Instead of a bunch of red dots saying 'shoot me' you have to look for the puffs of smoke coming from behind rocks and trees to know where bandits are. You get to look at your horse and the landscape, not staring at the red GPS line on the minimap in the corner of the screen. As soon as you ditch the minimap you have to navigate by heading for landmarks, following roads, reading signposts. The gold standard of turning off the HUD remains Red Dead Redemption. A rapidly scrolling box of names that you don't have time to read when you should be just enjoying shooting mans. It's off by default on console, but I see people turning that shit on like PC players. I don't need to be told I got 100 points when they died, to let me know they died, because I shoot at the mans and mans fall down.

I don't care that I got 20 points for shooting someone, I'm immersed in mu'fugging Star Wars. The first Star Wars Battlefront was greatly improved by turning off the constant stream of points gained info which was placed right in the middle of the screen. The minimap isn't needed at all, you still get the in-game elevated waypoint line if you place an objective marker. You just need to remember which button is the climb/mantle button, but not seeing numbers popping out of targets or constantly being visually nagged that you can roadie run to that bit of cover over there, makes it all much better. You can turn off SO MANY things in the options, and it's still kinda cluttered, but far more immersive. The Division had one of the most obnoxiously cluttered HUDs ever. The more HUD elements I can remove (while keeping the game playable) the better. I love minimalist HUDs, and wish more games were designed in a way that you could turn off most/all of it.

Dark souls hud png