Days Gone in survival mode.
It's hard 2 mode (which is tough as nails anyway)
as well as:
In the Days Gone Survival Mode has the following features:
- No Survival Vision feature which normally helps you locate enemies and items on other difficulty levels.
- No fast travelling
- No HUD.
- Map waypoints are removed.
- Extremely scarce resources.
- Enemies have an incredible amount of health.
- Many enemies can kill you in one or two hits.
- Freakers can smell you from a mile away.
- Can't lower difficulty.
I am currently playing this. Its super hard. The big brute enemies (the breaker) take FOREVER to kill.
the issue with modes like these is that the games weren't designed with that in mind usually, which in return means the leveldesign/world design isn't working well with all the UI elements removed that usually tell you where to go.
the prominent waypoints markers and minimap icons are not only there to help bad players, it's often also just a bandaid slapped onto the game to hide the fact that the Leveldesign is shit/lazy.
the same is true with UI elements like button icons appearing everywhere. sometimes it's just the devs having no faith in the intelligence of the players sure. but usually, and more often, the controls aren't intuitive enough to work without constant button promts and button icons for every interaction.
which is also a design flaw of many modern games.
One game that proudly advertised the decluttered UI was Ghost of Tsushima, and it simply didn't have the world design/leveldesign to work well with it.
never in my life did I have to open my map more often than while playing Tsushima, simply due to the fact that you often are somewhere that has zero identifiable landmarks, just generic forest or generic field as far as the eye can see.
the game also had no compass on screen, so I often had to open the map to reorientate myself because there was just nothing in any of the cardinal directions to naturally help me keep myself oriented.
the only way to solve this is to mark something and then just follow the wind, which was a cool way to replace waypoint markers, but in the end, functionally it's just a waypoint arrow that's prettier.
Meanwhile, Breath of the Wild, which has a minimap and compass had the world design down well enough for me to almost ignore those elements completely while playing.
so we have one game where the elements are missing but were needed due to suboptimal Level/World design, and another that had these elements but didn't need them due to really good Level/World design.
so it's not as easy as just turning off elements of the game and call it a day,
the game needs to be designed with low amount of UI elements from the beginning and has to be competent in its design, if it isn't both of those you will end up with an annoying experience.