They are extremely easy to create, more players will listen to an audio log rather than read a written log, all while offering the advantage of letting the player keep playing while the log plays out.
It really sounds great. Except that it's often very poorly executed and ends up being the most annoying story delivering mechanic in the game.
What really bugs me with audiologs is how little they make sense most of the time. Why the FUCK would someone record themselves being chased by zombies? why would they leave the recording on this bookshelf? What?
The only time they make sense is when its an answering machine message or scientific research notes. Random people recording random conversations and leaving them in random locations. It's so stupid.
....
Game developers just want so bad to share their world with you. Often times in the development of a game a veritable tome will be written describing the world, its history, small stories of the characters, and much more. In the end, a critical slice of this will inform the main narrative, and some of it will color the dialog, but the rest will be left to collect dust. This is one reason we see audiologs. The other, and more common reason we see audiologs comes from a really interesting catch 22.
BioShock and System Shock, these are probably the two most famous audiolog games. Not to be pedantic - but what do these games share in common that they do not with The Last Of Us, which has been brought up as an example of "no audiolog"?
Bingo! Cutscenes. The games that lean on audiologs most tend to not have or have very little cutscenes. They are of the Half-Life school of thought that says all (or nearly all) narrative should happen while the player is in control. The audiolog solves a good number of problems that come up with this style of game, namely, If the player is always in control: You cannot expect them to see or hear any given event. It's up to them to pay attention.
That makes sense but I think the problem in the scenario you describe is that if you've developed an intricate back-story that a 'critical slice' goes on to miss out, and if missing that stuff out is to the detriment of the player experience, then this is a huge shame and possibly a design mistake. However, I do not think that random audio recordings, hidden inside arbitrary objects, left in bizarre locations as collectibles, can do that job as well as including things in dialogue, environmental design or character expression. Certainly a cutscene can give a lot of context but there is an alternative that some games have success with and that's the ambient dialogue with and between NPCs. The Last of Us did that super-well with things like Ellie's jokebook and the environmental button cues that lead to conversation between Joel and Ellie. These are optional but I ended up playing that game trying to find every one of those conversational points because they felt like something that would happen in the context of the game world. Conversation between two people as they journeyed together. More than that, they linked the characters to both the world of the present and the pre-apocalypse world (along with Joel's past within it) in a really great way.
Another game that comes to mind that did this kind of thing well was Halo. I remember feeling really motivated to keep the marines alive just to hear the things they'd say, how they react to both what I'm doing as a player and what is going on in the game world.
I don't mind them, but they've never been much different than a cutscene, or a bit of text, to me. Whenever I activate one, I just come to a dead stop until it's over because there's almost always something that might interrupt it. Whether it's a cutscene, or scripted event, or just noises (gunshots and whatnot) or people talking.
....
Game developers just want so bad to share their world with you. Often times in the development of a game a veritable tome will be written describing the world, its history, small stories of the characters, and much more. In the end, a critical slice of this will inform the main narrative, and some of it will color the dialog, but the rest will be left to collect dust. This is one reason we see audiologs. The other, and more common reason we see audiologs comes from a really interesting catch 22.
BioShock and System Shock, these are probably the two most famous audiolog games. Not to be pedantic - but what do these games share in common that they do not with The Last Of Us, which has been brought up as an example of "no audiolog"?
Bingo! Cutscenes. The games that lean on audiologs most tend to not have or have very little cutscenes. They are of the Half-Life school of thought that says all (or nearly all) narrative should happen while the player is in control. The audiolog solves a good number of problems that come up with this style of game, namely, If the player is always in control: You cannot expect them to see or hear any given event. It's up to them to pay attention.
That makes sense but I think the problem in the scenario you describe is that if you've developed an intricate back-story that a 'critical slice' goes on to miss out, and if missing that stuff out is to the detriment of the player experience, then this is a huge shame and possibly a design mistake. However, I do not think that random audio recordings, hidden inside arbitrary objects, left in bizarre locations as collectibles, can do that job as well as including things in dialogue, environmental design or character expression. Certainly a cutscene can give a lot of context but there is an alternative that some games have success with and that's the ambient dialogue with and between NPCs. The Last of Us did that super-well with things like Ellie's jokebook and the environmental button cues that lead to conversation between Joel and Ellie. These are optional but I ended up playing that game trying to find every one of those conversational points because they felt like something that would happen in the context of the game world. Conversation between two people as they journeyed together. More than that, they linked the characters to both the world of the present and the pre-apocalypse world (along with Joel's past within it) in a really great way.
Another game that comes to mind that did this kind of thing well was Halo. I remember feeling really motivated to keep the marines alive just to hear the things they'd say, how they react to both what I'm doing as a player and what is going on in the game world.
I love those parts of TLoU.
I kept trying to rephrase this but fuck it here goes: do you think TLOU has a bit of an "unfair" advantage by having two people present almost at all times? In the original BioShock and most FPS you're all alone, so an environmental interaction button would just be your player speaking out lout to themselves or who's present... which could be ok?
In many ways my time with TLOU proved that games that have NPC Allies (Mass Effect, etc) have such a story telling advantage because people are such a natural conduit for, you know, talking.
To go back to the audio stuff though I feel maybe it's unfair to say that missing audiologs is to the detriment of the player but missing environmental interaction or Ellie Jokebook stuff is not. It depends on the player I think.
I agree about the context problem though. Often times the audiologs just don't make a lick of sense. Why they exist is suspect, where you find them can be hilarious, and it goes on and on.
In Science Fiction games it tends to be a lot easier to justify them (like maybe you intercept cell phone transmissions or hack a phone message out of someone's phone).
Because using this is better to talk over the game to convey information than interrupting the player, forcing them to sit on their hands and be inactive listening watching a CGI cutscene play out.
This. And also, while it's silly to imply that all of these crucial characters to the plot happened to record their thoughts in convenient 90 second blurps and scattered them about in places where the player character finds them most convenient, it at least tells the story inside the gameplay, without interruption to moving forward, which is what games like Bioshock and Dishonored put focus on. Movies have the luxury of cutting between scenes to show multiple characters and their interactions to pace the story telling. With games, your audience is generally stuck controlling one character in a linear fashion and you need a way to dole out information periodically in a way that makes "some" sense. Thinking about it, though, I wouldn't mind seeing more games try to use an outside narrator.
Also, cheaper than cutscenes.
Because they haven't played South Park yet.
There are good and bad implementations of audio logs, I think there are more games that use it well than what use cutscenes and/or quick time events, and generally, the games that have had good audio logs have also used environmental storytelling like what was mentioned about Deus Ex 3 - you can tell a lot with little environmental details, and System Shock 1 and 2 were games that did that really well, but it's hard to tell in detail what has happened using that, and the System Shock games mostly used audio logs to fill in the gaps.
That said, we've had some games in recent years that have done audio logs particularly poorly - one that comes to mind is Singularity, where the logs didn't sound convincingly like what somebody would ever say, and the locations you found them in generally didn't make a lot of sense, neither did the medium - giant reel to reel tape recorders, that people apparently had lugged around in their dying moments.
I don't know but I want it to stop. I also want helper/guide on the radio constantly yakking at me throughout game to go away. And also npc buddy character performing same task, that must go as well.
It feels like ages since I last played a game where I felt I was alone to tackle the game's challenges by myself.
@stealthmaster86: thats entirely false. In fact an issue alot of people had with Bioshock Infinite was that it was a game where the audio logs were seen as "optional" but a ton of core information that leads to understanding everything in a huge way required you to find some specific audio logs where that info was not disclosed anywhere else.
GZ may use it in a way of forcing you to listen to it making it a key part of the story, but its hardly the only game around that it hides critical information in, and I wish it would stop honestly. Audio logs are just so lame.
@slag: I'll accept that they're cheaper and easier than some other things, but really I don't feel like Audiologs being cheap and easy are why they are used so often in games, that's really what I felt was being missed.
Plus, both writing and recording short bits of dialogue like this can be as difficult as a cutscene conversation (how to jam info into a small space but not have it be contrived yet still interesting). And placement in the level is actually super hard, hence all the comments in this thread that mention how lame it is when you pick up an audiolog only to walk into a wall gunfire and have the sound drowned out.
Sorry for italics overuse, it's weirdly addicting to emphasize stuff.
The original question of the thread was Why do devs keep using Audiologs?
I think this is really fascinating actually, so forgive me for being bummed at the cheap n easy remarks. I know y'all are good peeps anyways :D.
Game developers just want so bad to share their world with you. Often times in the development of a game a veritable tome will be written describing the world, its history, small stories of the characters, and much more. In the end, a critical slice of this will inform the main narrative, and some of it will color the dialog, but the rest will be left to collect dust. This is one reason we see audiologs. The other, and more common reason we see audiologs comes from a really interesting catch 22.
BioShock and System Shock, these are probably the two most famous audiolog games. Not to be pedantic - but what do these games share in common that they do not with The Last Of Us, which has been brought up as an example of "no audiolog"?
Bingo! Cutscenes. The games that lean on audiologs most tend to not have or have very little cutscenes. They are of the Half-Life school of thought that says all (or nearly all) narrative should happen while the player is in control. The audiolog solves a good number of problems that come up with this style of game, namely, If the player is always in control: You cannot expect them to see or hear any given event. It's up to them to pay attention.
An event could be a main character or side character talking, someone dying, a monster appearing, anything. In the case of monsters and explosions, these things tend to catch our attention. People talking? Not so much.
BioShock is a great example because no body on this forum or any other can suggest a way to present the information in those audiologs in a way that isn't text, a cutscene or a character physically present, talking, saying the same thing. You cannot environmentally say all the things that we can say in words. It's just not possible. So if the design rule of your game is to not have cutscenes, and if you want to say something too specific to say environmentally, and you don't want to stop the player for them to read text or do an NPC dialog tree... well, then what?
no worries man, it's my bad for using sloppy language. I can see how it sounded like I was saying something other than what I meant. I meant no disrespect to creators and am sorry that it came across that way.
on your point about environmental story telling, as a player not a creator, I do think there are other ways to do story telling without cutscenes or a heavy reliance on audio logs. e.g. maybe something like an Assassin's Creed type setup where a player jacks into an Animus and plays through an event from the past etc. Obviously not appropriate for everytype of story but an example of a narrative tool that allows for continuous play without taking control from the player to show an event from the past.
A game I though that was really good at environmental story telling was King Kong. You don't hear many people talk about that one. Definitely didn't have the deepest story though, but what it did have kept me locked in.
All that being said I don't mind the audio log. Like any tool it all depends on how they are used. I just think too often they are perhaps relied on too heavily in some games. Bioshock (which I just played through last month) I actually spent too much of its' world building efforts through those. In Bioshock it was a little too obvious for my liking that they were only strewn about as a tool to world build for the developer. I didn't mind because I wanted to know more about Rapture, but they did feel a little contrived. I get that they need to be hidden so the player can hear the recording, but it would be nice if there was an in game reason for why they are so strewn about.
I personally enjoy them best as a bonus, something that fleshes out the world more, not as a primary story telling device. I like scripted events (I think that's what they are called) much better (like the scene with Andrew Ryan in Bioshock, which I felt may have been the most powerful moment in the game) or even the quick time events from something Walking Dead or Heavy Rain. Then I feel more engaged with the story.
The Thing I liked about a lot about Walking Dead was that it found a simple way to make conversations interesting. One thing cutscenes seem to do often better than scripted events is conversation because you can see NPC faces in a more conversation friendly camera angle. In scripted events the guy on the radio and the walk and talk banter loses a lot of its' power to me since you often can't see the NPC's face or read their body language. When it comes to communicating faces are really important you know? You don't get that from an audio log.
I mean, System Shock 2 did them better than most back in 1999. That was 15 years ago. 15.
I reckon the audio logs in system shock 1 were even more impressive, and that came out 20 years ago in 1994.
They're fine when used appropriately, although in this day and age when there are so many other ways to tell your story, they do feel a bit lazy in most cases.
I agree wholeheartedly. Recently replayed System Shock 1 and 2 back to back, and I was actually way more impressed by the audio logs in 1. Not only was it amazing for its time, but it still holds up. The actor they picked for Edward Diego is just perfect.
@geraltitude said:
....do you think TLOU has a bit of an "unfair" advantage by having two people present almost at all times? In the original BioShock and most FPS you're all alone, so an environmental interaction button would just be your player speaking out lout to themselves or who's present... which could be ok?
In many ways my time with TLOU proved that games that have NPC Allies (Mass Effect, etc) have such a story telling advantage because people are such a natural conduit for, you know, talking.
Yes it does have that advantage. But I would say that if a developer wants to really develop characters, story, and context then the most natural way to do that is... (just as it is in real life) through conversation. But conversation doesn't mesh so easily with first person shooter gameplay so perhaps this is another narrative advantage that the more stealth-oriented, slower-paced, third-person TLoU has over say, Bioshock Infinite.
Another way of looking at this, for instance, is that (apart from the fact that it would be creepy) we could hypothetically learn a little context about someone by listening to their voicemail. Perhaps we might see some CCTV footage of them doing something? Maybe we could read their e-mails...?
Under normal circumstances we neither get the chance, nor would we find it particularly appropriate to learn things about people in those kinds of ways. Unless we're supposed to be playing a Sam Fisher role or something then it makes far more sense to have an option to talk to an NPC.
@slag: I decided to reply to this in a format heavy way lol, bear with me duder! Your text is indented, mine is not.
I do think there are other ways to do story telling without cutscenes or a heavy reliance on audio logs. e.g. maybe something like an Assassin's Creed type setup where a player jacks into an Animus and plays through an event from the past etc. Obviously not appropriate for every type of story but an example of a narrative tool that allows for continuous play without taking control from the player to show an event from the past.
I like this too. It reminds me of playing games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect and wishing that instead of NPCs telling me their life stories I would somehow go into their lives and play a 5-10 minute slice. Obviously a lot of work but yeah, I like the idea of playing through the past or memories a lot.
A game I though that was really good at environmental story telling was King Kong. You don't hear many people talk about that one. Definitely didn't have the deepest story though, but what it did have kept me locked in.
Waaaaaiiit. Wait wait wait. Hold on. King Kong? You need to come back and explain this dude. What was the environmental storytelling like?
Bioshock (which I just played through last month) I actually spent too much of its' world building efforts through [audiologs]. In Bioshock it was a little too obvious for my liking that they were only strewn about as a tool to world build for the developer. I didn't mind because I wanted to know more about Rapture, but they did feel a little contrived.
So I italicized that line because I feel that it's the most important part of this whole audiolog debate. Straight up - if a world is interesting to you, you will devour its story anyway the developer can deliver it. In the first BioShock I would stop to read every piece of writing on every wall, every signpost. I just wanted more, and getting an audiolog was exciting, like seeing those ghosts. Ultimately most gameworlds are not this interesting to most players.
You're right about how nonsensical it is. I mean, the audiologs are massive. Like 1 foot by 1 foot almost. Who would carry that around? And each one only holds one tape? But we're talking about a game where you eat Hotdogs and Ice Cream you find in garbage cans so... suspension of disbelief I guess? There's something a little arcade about BioShock that makes all that stuff seem OK to me.
I personally enjoy them best as a bonus, something that fleshes out the world more, not as a primary story telling device. I like scripted events (I think that's what they are called) much better (like the scene with Andrew Ryan in Bioshock, which I felt may have been the most powerful moment in the game) or even the quick time events from something Walking Dead or Heavy Rain. Then I feel more engaged with the story.
Oh man. That Andrew Ryan moment. The amazing thing about BioShock that Infinite lost was that all of your interactions (few as they were) with other humans were so tense in BioShock. Cohen dancing in the apartment comes to mind. Infinite also does commit the crime of having incredibly important information in the audiologs. It would have been amazing if instead of audiologs you ran into survivors in Rapture you could speak to very briefly, but that may have ruined the feeling of being pretty much on your own in a nightmarish place.
The Thing I liked about a lot about Walking Dead was that it found a simple way to make conversations interesting. One thing cutscenes seem to do often better than scripted events is conversation because you can see NPC faces in a more conversation friendly camera angle. In scripted events the guy on the radio and the walk and talk banter loses a lot of its' power to me since you often can't see the NPC's face or read their body language. When it comes to communicating faces are really important you know? You don't get that from an audio log.
Very true. This is what I liked about the MGS codec (sad it's gone). I know people got annoyed with the Gears of War Slow-Down-And-Talk (and I did too) but I appreciated that it allowed me to see Marcus closer, see him talk. If only there had been a projection of the person on the other end of the line like in Dead Space - which I'm surprised I haven't mentioned until know. Because that game did audio and videologs and npc conversations really well as I remember.
Thanks for reading! :D
Because Bioshock was really well liked.
@geraltitude said:
....do you think TLOU has a bit of an "unfair" advantage by having two people present almost at all times? In the original BioShock and most FPS you're all alone, so an environmental interaction button would just be your player speaking out lout to themselves or who's present... which could be ok?
In many ways my time with TLOU proved that games that have NPC Allies (Mass Effect, etc) have such a story telling advantage because people are such a natural conduit for, you know, talking.
Yes it does have that advantage. But I would say that if a developer wants to really develop characters, story, and context then the most natural way to do that is... (just as it is in real life) through conversation. But conversation doesn't mesh so easily with first person shooter gameplay so perhaps this is another narrative advantage that the more stealth-oriented, slower-paced, third-person TLoU has over say, Bioshock Infinite.
Another way of looking at this, for instance, is that (apart from the fact that it would be creepy) we could hypothetically learn a little context about someone by listening to their voicemail. Perhaps we might see some CCTV footage of them doing something? Maybe we could read their e-mails...?
Under normal circumstances we neither get the chance, nor would we find it particularly appropriate to learn things about people in those kinds of ways. Unless we're supposed to be playing a Sam Fisher role or something then it makes far more sense to have an option to talk to an NPC.
Yeah I actually really like the voicemail idea and if I had to guess Watchdogs will take advantage of that. It's just a weird thing to justify. Unless the person is a target of some sort, why would anyone care about their voicemail? Though you could almost make it work in The Last of Us if it was somehow about loneliness, like the world is so empty you listen to voicemails to remind yourself of other human voices... O.o
But yeah, hard to use in a "regular setting".
It does seem like FPS are at a disadvantage for this stuff.
@geraltitude said:
@slag: I like this too. It reminds me of playing games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect and wishing that instead of NPCs telling me their life stories I would somehow go into their lives and play a 5-10 minute slice. Obviously a lot of work but yeah, I like the idea of playing through the past or memories a lot.
Yeah that’s a mechanic I think games can do well that other mediums can’t nearly as well. That is one reason I like it so much. It’s something I think people appreciated about Brothers, was that you weren’t just watching the events unfold, you also "felt" parts of the story through the controls.
I do admit I actually really liked that character building through conversation in Dragon Age (Mass Effect is criminally on my backlog). I think there is sometimes a tendency in video games to over-explain and show everything. Sometimes less is more, A little mystery helps keeps me engaged more with the fiction. It's one thing to hear a story, it's another to try and figure if it's true or not. Plus if you are trying to tell a story in a game that would feel like you would be experiencing it yourself (something games can offer that movies can’t), then finding out past details through conversation is way that is very similar to real life.
Then you are in the same situation as the player character is, e.g. early on you don't know if Leliana is being truthful about her background . And when you find contradictory or supporting evidence it resonates the way it would if you had found that out about one of your own friends.
Like a lot of things there’s a time and place for it. I'm sure if I were making a game I'd want to show the player the whole I'd created, even if they maybe isn't always the best thing for a story.
@geraltitude said:
Waaaaaiiit. Wait wait wait. Hold on. King Kong? You need to come back and explain this dude. What was the environmental storytelling like?
Yeah the Ubisoft one based off the Peter Jackson Movie.Bear with me here it's been a very long time since I played it so some of the details are fuzzy.
Well first keep in mind King Kong the Movie itself did have not a particularly great or deep story. So I didn't want to give an impression that the story itself was amazing.
However I thought the game did a pretty good job conveying what was there particularly at making the pace of the events feel desperate , by today's standards it's probably nothing special, but by late Ps2/Gamecube era console standards it was pretty rad. Pacing I imagine must be really tough to do in games, because you never know when a player will get stuck, breaking the rhythm of the story for that player. King Kong's solution seemed to be to make the game easy to better service the pacing.
What the game did incredibly well was immersion. There was no HUD, ammunition was incredibly scarce reflecting conditions that would make sense for an undiscovered island. When Jack needed ammo he would yell silly things (5 rounds left!) or you could check what you had left manually with a button press, a little goofy but it worked well enough. There were basically no cutscenes, but a ton of scripted events. Stuff was constantly happening around you. The way the game handled It was the scripting often seemed to restricted you to being in a boat in a river with strong current (or across a valley etc), so you kind of watched these things happening on the shoreline that you couldn't intercede in. It felt a bit like a Disneyland ride at time
And to give the player a bit more perspective on the unfolding plot, it switched back and forth between Kong and Jack's perspectives, forcing you to play as one or the other through various parts of the movie. They had wildly different playstyles. Jack was a pretty run of the mill FPS, Kongs was third person brawler kind of like an Giant Ape version of God Of War
Not a lot of characterization, but a fun thrillride wise plot wise. A lot of this is old hat today, but 9-10 years ago on a console game? It felt a bit Revelatory to a non-PC gamer.
Peter Jackson's heavy involvement in the game really helped, the fidelity to the movie was incredible in a way that’s much more common today. It is probably one of the better game adaptions of a movie ever (I can’t think of any better off the top of my head). It's just too bad the source material was so mediocre. If it was a better story, I think it would have gotten more notice.
@geraltitude said:
@slag said :I didn't mind because I wanted to know more about Rapture, but they did feel a little contrived.
@geraltitude said:
So I italicized that line because I feel that it's the most important part of this whole audiolog debate. Straight up - if a world is interesting to you, you will devour its story anyway the developer can deliver it. In the first BioShock I would stop to read every piece of writing on every wall, every signpost. I just wanted more, and getting an audiolog was exciting, like seeing those ghosts. Ultimately most gameworlds are not this interesting to most players.
I totally agree that Rapture is one of the better gameworlds ever created, especially in recent memory. Like you man I hunted down all those details. The libertarian/Atlas Shrugged angle was a brilliant foundational aspect to the mythos.
I do disagree about the wanting to know more being the most important part of the debate though and perhaps should have explained my play style. To me I think the most important aspect of the debate is whether or not these tools are being used effectively or being used in situations where they are the most appropriate story telling tool to use for a given scene or story.
Maybe it's just a perspective unique to me, since I'm the type who loves world building and seeks it out in every game regardless of my perception of the game's quality. I'm the kind of guy who shoots for an S-rank, reads every log, listens to every audio log, looks at silly things like the architecture, flora and fauna of level, watches every cutscene, lets every eavesdropped conversation play out till the very end, will replay parts to see how the story will unfold from every outcome, will replay it on harder difficulties for a new ending, and then when I'm done read all the game wikis etc about the game. So I'm a nut, a definite outlier as I will happily consume these regardless of quality.
e.g. Final Fantasy Xiii relied heavily on datalogs for its’ world building extremely to the game’s detriment imho. I have no problem with text, searching for it or reading it. A lot of the best older games had no other tools and they worked just fine. But it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to make the context of certain major plot intelligible only through diligently checking the datalog submenu of the pause menu.
Like a lot of tools, it all comes down to how they are used.
@geraltitude said:
You're right about how nonsensical it is. I mean, the audiologs are massive. Like 1 foot by 1 foot almost. Who would carry that around? And each one only holds one tape? But we're talking about a game where you eat Hotdogs and Ice Cream you find in garbage cans so... suspension of disbelief I guess? There's something a little arcade about BioShock that makes all that stuff seem OK to me.
You know honestly the look and size of them didn’t bother me. Because video games. There does have to be some allowance for world breaking things just to keep things mechanically fun (like your hotdog health pickup in trash cans). I could have just used an in fiction reason for why everyone was recording themselves and why these things ended up all over the place. It didn’t have to be a particularly good reason, but a reason would have helped especially in a game talking about fairly adult things. I would have believed it, it just seemed like recording these things would have been out of character for some of the principals. That’s where the suspension of disbelief broke down some for me.
In a game that wasn't so self serious, it wouldn't have been as noticeable to me.
@geraltitude said:
Oh man. That Andrew Ryan moment. The amazing thing about BioShock that Infinite lost was that all of your interactions (few as they were) with other humans were so tense in BioShock. Cohen dancing in the apartment comes to mind. Infinite also does commit the crime of having incredibly important information in the audiologs. It would have been amazing if instead of audiologs you ran into survivors in Rapture you could speak to very briefly, but that may have ruined the feeling of being pretty much on your own in a nightmarish place.
Yes! The Cohen stuff was gold!
Re:survivors- yeah I think you're right. More survivors would not have helped in this instance. I actually liked the Ghost scripted event mechanic they used (that you mentioned earlier). In an odd way it seemed more believable to me than the audio logs, because they generally were tied to a very specific location.
some of the audio logs were too, but some weren't.
@geraltitude said:
This is what I liked about the MGS codec (sad it's gone). I know people got annoyed with the Gears of War Slow-Down-And-Talk (and I did too) but I appreciated that it allowed me to see Marcus closer, see him talk. If only there had been a projection of the person on the other end of the line like in Dead Space - which I'm surprised I haven't mentioned until know. Because that game did audio and videologs and npc conversations really well as I remember.
Yeah I hear you, I loved the codec. That was easily my favorite part of MSG2:SoL. The nice thing about it vs the audio logs was that the codec worked so well with the fiction. There was no dissonance there, You could see why Snake needed it and would use it. and you could more or less consume as much or as little of it as you wanted without it seeming out of character for any involved.
Of course the downside is that it more or less is a cutscene device since it does take you out of the gameplay screen even if that choice to do so is primarily the player’s.
Never played Gears but I could see how that mechanic might be grating. Dead Space I still need to play, sounds like I should bump it up the list.
@geraltitude said:
Thanks for reading! :D
Same man thanks for humoring a gamer, always appreciate hearing your perspective on things.
Because sometimes you have a bit of information you want to convey that would be too complex to relay environmentally, too lengthy/complex/interesting to relegate to a text field, and too ancillary/tangential to the main plot to warrant stopping the action with a cut scene.
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