Been playing around in my settings on the 360 and decided to give turning off the HUD a try. By turning off I mean to move the translucency slider all the way down such that none of the HUD appears. No Health, Magica, or Stamina bar. No compass. No cross hair. No enemy bar with the enemy's name and remaining health.

I like everything, but for one disadvantage. You can't necessarily tell what you are about to activate or pick up. Am i going to open the drawer or pick up the iron dagger sitting on top of the dresser? With the HUD you get info about an object when you center the cross hair on it; The object's name and values. Not so when the HUD is off. You get nothing. Is that door a locked door? Is it an interior door or a door to Skyrim?

What pros and cons have you run into with the HUD off?

I am on PC, but I always need something to tell me what is what. However, I use the SkyUI mod so the HUD is not so much in my face, but small enough for me to take a quick glance at something.

I love playing without the HUD. Makes the game more challenging and even more so immersive.

I do hate when I go to talk to a store owner and I accidentally steal his stuff at first. I've gotten attuned to approximating where stuff is now though.

I wish the compass could be turned off but leave the other stuff on. I like seeing that I didn't steal the bread when talking to an npc siting at a table. or when my stamina/magic/health are getting low.

I love playing without the HUD but I've been playing with it on while getting used to being on PC. I've never accidentally activated the wrong thing.

I like it too. Most things I can adapt to well. The lack of door info has been the nuisance. I know most interior zones pretty good so I know which doors are interior doors and which lead outside. But it's annoying when I get it wrong and have to go through two load screens unnecessarily.

Most of the time I have the HUD turned off, sometimes it's just turned way, way down. It doesn't bother me to turn up the HUD when I enter a town, which is what I generally do. I know I'm going to be interacting with NPC's and I don't want to accidentally steal something.

As for the rest of the time, I turn the music off that way I can hear birds singing, bee's buzzing and my characters heart beating when his/her health is low. If I just have to pick up one thing in a cave or fort, I turn the HUD up, most of the time I will just pick up the item I wanted and if it takes a try or two and I pick up other things, then I just put them in a drawer or something.

Use Gopher's iHud (Immersive HUD) like some posters have mentioned.

Switched off most of the time.

Finally had to switch it on to get the last 9 Stones of Billybennyraise-ya.

I did that through a winced face Sir.

I'm a big fan of having no HUD whatsoever, but I'm on PC and use a popular mod so that it's context sensitive. There's a key to toggle the HUD, which I rarely use, and otherwise you only get health/stamina/magicka bars display when below 100 (or a user-defined amount). The cross-hair is also context sensitive, and only appears for certain behaviors like casting a targeted spell, or hovering over an item that can be interacted with.

So my current setup is ideal for me, but if it came down to it, I'd probably try an invisible HUD over the default.

A simple thing like making the HUD invisible improves the game so much.

I don't like this trend where modern games are effectively shipped out in an inferior state by default though. It seems a bit backwards to me. Things like markers should be off by default because they're a detriment to the open world genre. They should only be switched on if the player chooses easy mode or specifically goes into the menu to enable hand-holding options. It's also bad game design to design an open world game under the assumption that all players will be following markers around, which is the impression I get sometimes reading journal notes for quests.

I use a mod called iHUD that removes the HUD when I don't need it.

I only see the crosshair when I've got a weapon/spell drawn or when I'm close enough to activate something. I only see my magicka/health/stamina when they are not full. I toggle the compass on and off with a hotkey. It's great. I've also made all the HUD elements half invisible so they are very unintrusive when they show up.

I'd recommend it for anyone who plays on PC.

For me they're pretty much all pros. I don't mind not being able to see my health.

Could be a problem on my new Orc Legendary playthrough though...

The Item picking up is a problem for anyone who tries playing without HUD for the first time.

Let me tell you, Once I turned HUD off, I have never gone back (at least not for a consistent amount of time), and I got used to everything. I can pick up anything I want with ease, Manage my Health quite easily... and those are just about the only two things that mattered.

There's the other thought too. Being on legendary it's as simple as if I'm hit, I'm dead. I surely better not be thinking about getting hit twice. Who needs a health bar?

I like the sound of the MODs you guys are mentioning. I'd like to lose everything but the cross hair info. I'd even lose the cross hair, but still have the info pop up when I get centered on something.