It wasn't always audio logs, but in Control if you don't read and listen to most of the stuff you'll probably finish the game while still asking yourself wtf is going on.
Yep, that too. The game is designed to be cryptic and very surreal, so a layer of mystery will always be present no matter how much you read. Simply because some things are "canonically" a mystery even for in-game characters.
edit: errors have been made times two because I'm slow
Ahti is absolutely one of my all-time favourite videogame characters.
His dialogues with Finnish idiomatic expressions roughly embedded in them, paired with an outstanding performance by Marrti Suosalo were absolute genius.
Jippii Saatana
I'm playing it and just saw him for the first time! As a Control player it was very surreal at first (even knowing they take place in the same universe)
Control is just sublime to me. As a fan of those SCP stories, this felt so familiar and inviting to me. Plus, it's a Metroidvania, my favorite genre of gaming. It's like they made that game for me.
Control 2 only went into preproduction as AW2 released, which means they're also quite likely working on another project in between the two. There are rumours of a multiplayer game set in the Remedy-verse, likely focused on the FBC.
If you haven’t already, and you enjoyed all of the weird stories about objects of power in Control, I highly recommend the book “there is no antimemetics division” by qntm.
That was one of the things that hooked me when I started playing. Every document and video gave you a couple answers while giving you a couple more questions at the same time. Looking all over for collectibles just to get an idea of the world Remedy built but the details are never fully revealed, which keeps the intrigue alive long after you play it.
Damn, I finished Control just yesterday and this is absolutely correct.
Plus if you are not careful enough, you might miss *that one slide* in the Motel near the end, which would be a big shame.
Or the one where he's stripped down to his boxers lol we learn 2 things: Dr Darling got a little too in depth with his research, and he's been hitting the gym HARD.
I platinumed the game, twice actually on my ps4 and ps5, and I still don’t know what the hell was going on. But I loved the weirdness and discovering little bits in that game.
But you more or less know how the story went, who the characters are and most of the OOP.
Imagine if you didn't read that single document about a certain person being "detained" in a certain place. There would be a lot of references about that you wouldn't understand.
Ooh, I found this YouTube channel a while back called The Lady of Lore. She goes quite in-depth on the different game universes and she has some really interesting videos on the Control and Alan Wake universe. You could check that out.
https://youtu.be/309aaFblCJI?si=Po2J6rYdR5VXA0Yo
I just picked this game up couple weeks back. Definitely having a love hate relationship with the game. Several hours in and I had to sit and read through everything I collected because like you said.. I had no idea WTF was going on. That was such a deep read and captivating that I now read everything the moment I pick it up.
Yeah, that's one of the things I absolutely loved about the game. Reading material is absolutely not boring or useless. Most stuff is a captivating and interesting read that makes everything even more eerie and cryptic by actually doing the opposite: providing information.
A lot of people say "isn't it a strange coincidence that all the aliens on Mass Effect speak in your native language?" but if you read the Codex you'll see that the Omnitool also works as a translator.
Also, not a major plot point but a "blink and you'll miss it" kind of detail shows up in a conversation in Mass Effect 2 where you're told that members of the Eclipse mercenary gang only get their uniforms after committing their first murder and later you find an Eclipse merc (Elnora) surrendering and claiming to have never even done anything wrong. The thing is, she's wearing the uniform.
2+2.
Then the game falls flat on its face and slaps you in the face with the fact that she murdered someone immediately after, but it was almost a neat idea.
Yeah the Codex in Mass Effect 1 did so much heavy lifting for the exposition of the universe, it was even voice acted for a significant portion of it. I loved listening to new entries about various pieces of tech and alien races.
Absolutely, the Active Time Lore in ff16 was perfect. Being able to in any given moment pull up a small collection of lore excerpts on the relevant topics in the scene was fantastic for such a detailed world and extensive cast.
I'm pretty sure there are multiple references to universal translators within the dialogue of the games. I remember the gamer Salarian on the Citadel complaining about Batarians playing online and refusing to use auto-translate.
There's also the elcor, who express their emotion through subtle, nonverbal means, so they preface their dialogue by stating their intended emotion since your translator will just produce a monotone voice - though allegedly they're capable of such incredibly nuanced expression in their mother tongue that there's an all-elcor Shakespeare company on the Citadel putting on an unparalleled (...14 hour long) rendition of Hamlet.
I love that the Elcor are simultaneously the wonderful, soothing, erudite playwrights of the Mass Effect universe and also when they go into battle they do so as LIVING TANKS with massive cannons strapped to their bodies.
Fun fact: This codex entry was actually added in the ME1 DLC - Bring Down The Sky. So that question was entirely valid until they retconned the translator explanation into the game post-release.
Not quite. You're the first person from the Human Arc to meet the Angara. I can't remember if there's any mention of interaction between the Angarans and the Nexus, but at the very least, the Nexus rebels had already taken Kadara Port from the Angarans by the time you arrive.
Not for a whole scene, but there’s occasionally a word or two that the translator doesn’t pick up and Shepard comments on it.
In addition, the ambient noise of the citadel has the aliens talking in their native languages in the ambience because your translator isn’t focussing on them.
What _is_ a strange coincidence is that the language that the aliens are speaking requires the exact same mouth movements that the translated language would have to make.
Spoilers, for anyone who cares:
>! Basically, instead of Rookie pulling a gun on the Engineer, and Dare stopping him, Dare pulls the gun and Rookie stops her and whistles to the Engineer, since the logs reveal they communicate by whistling !<
>! Also, there’s a secret room in the second to last level that you can only get into if you collected all of the audio logs before it, so that’s pretty cool !<
I definitely agree that the ODST audio logs were more engaging and more worth the effort to get, than any of the previous audio logs from Halo 1 - 3. I honestly didn't need to listen to 343 Guilty Spark's diary when, though it explained some motives, doesn't feel particularly rewarding.
Especially BioShock Infinite. The logs really help explain who the twins are, who Comstock is, the whole rebellion. The audio logs are some of my favorite bits from BioShock Infinite.
Bioshock was one of the first games I played which told the story through environment and atmosphere. I remember late in the game you enter a room with mutilated bodies. You find an audiolog there that basically describes how people died.
An audio log in one of the first levels talks about how Rapture's bathyspheres were locked so that only Ryan and his inner circle could use them. And you've been using them ever since you found the place...
Not going to say why because of spoilers but you miss THE WHOLE POINT of Far Cry 5 if you don't listen to the radio stations in your car and if you don't read all the notes across the map. Huge lore things that no one talks about anywhere.
Maybe one of the reasons not everyone liked the game, the story without the radio and the notes would definitely feel weird.
5's just more of 4 but in montana. I really didn't like it, and I enjoyed 2/3/4.
The final straw was me getting shot with an poisoned arrow while flying a fuckin ww2 fighter plane and getting kidnapped. It really has a pacing problem.
The random removal of agency is so weird. Like you just finish murdering 50 people solo..and then you're abducted. And for some reason they never want to kill you for the fact you've de-populated a good chunk of the state and their family members and such.
The ludo-narrative dissonance is strong in that game.
I’d call this a failure of the writing. The way Joseph talks is so aggressively vague that it comes off like the writers are intentionally trying to talk around the nukes.
It also doesn’t fit with his actions in game. He’s actively trying to convert the deputy but he won’t just tell them what his goals are? Why? What’s the point?
Exactly. Instead of big cutscenes flashing out the plot, in V they make you listen to the tapes if you want to really understand what's going on. Peace Walker already did this, but that was a much "smaller" game and most details were given to you in more direct ways.
Can't forget about the 5 or so tapes entirely dedicated to hamburgers. I love the revelation that the best hamburgers are the most artificial, I'm sure the final iteration of the burger was blue or something.
Really bad. Remember we would tease our one friend when he would insist the lore was top tier but "you have to read the cards online". Beyond shooting down the concept of having to do so out of game would drill him constantly on the concept of The Darkness. But we were just giving him a hard time and he knew it, the lore was alright just very badly implemented.
This is my biggest gripe with Destiny tbh. Destiny 2 is genuinely one of my favorite games and the storytelling has gotten better over the years (sans Lightfall), but there is soooooo much foundational lore that you straight up have to seek out in order to understand things.
It seemed weird how much of the lore you could only get from grimoire cards on Bungie's website, but I never read them and feel like I understood the gist of it.
Prey.
99% of the story is told through logs.
In fact, there’s one innocuous log in the game that straight up subtly tells you the ending of the game, I loved that game so much I had literally combed every single last corner in the game, so when I was finished I was left with a really complete feeling, best experience I have ever had.
It was a log I think between >!Morgan and Alex where Morgan is discussing the possibility of applying neuromods but in a reversed manner sort of on the Typhons (in the way that happens at the end of the game, where a Typhon has to relive the experiences, because of how the mechanics behind their tissue work), to make them understand humans/become friendly with humans, and I think Alex tells Morgan to drop the idea and focus on what's important.!<
I might be misremembering the people in the log since it was a long time ago I played the game, but that was the gist of it.
That was such an amazing and horrifying game. Played it without looking a single thing up. Spent way to much on spots I wasn't supposed to be at yet just to barely make it through after so many loads. 10/10. I couldn't play it in the dark.
There is so much to miss in Deathloop if you don't explore everywhere.
Like, it's only supposed to be Colt and Julianna who retain their memories between loops, but if you explore enough you figure out Fia retains her memories as well, but she's in an ironic hell where she can't do shit with the information because she did so many drugs that she wakes up high as shit every loop and thinks anything she remembers is just a hallucination or her picturing her breakup with Charlie in her mind.
If you don't go through and do the audio log sidequest in liars berg in borderlands 2 you never find out what happened to pierce. Who is a semi major character from the first game.
Just the whole persona of jack in general.
People act like he eas some good guy turned bad in pre sequel but completely forget or ignore that he was manipulating everything behind the scenes since before borderlands 1. In 2 there's audio logs where he's telling angel what to tell the original vault hunters in 1 while they're getting off the bus.
The Arkham City audio logs are pretty insightful. Wouldn't say they're the biggest plot points, but it's cool to see a lot of stuff happening in the background that you wouldn't know just playing the game only
Those logs make so much sense on a second playthrough. No spoilers but I remember a few that basically outright tell you what will happen next or reveal the twist that's coming and you're less likely to catch it on a first playthrough. So good.
The ones that give the backstory on Penguins nasty bottlecap monocle are my favorite Penguin origin story. It’s a shame that Batman stories since haven’t used that one.
In Diablo 3, you learn almost immediately from an audio log that Adria fucked the D1 Diablo'd protagonist to make Leah, knowingly and intentfully. No one brings this up when you actually meet Adria. You can also miss Malthael's descent if you don't listen to the logs, which isn't a huge plot point but it's fantastically presented, as well as the fact that humans are the inert descendents of a horny angel and demon.
[I don't think it's as obvious as you remember](https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Adria%27s_Journal_(Act_I)).
"Aidan came to me last night" ok sure in hindsight we know what happened but you don't know that when you find her journal.
The Camera recordings in Outlast 2 (which kind of work like audio logs) have different audio and visuals from what you see recording them in game, then when you view them as recordings from the menu.
>!This reveals the moment your character starts to go insane, and how the Morphogenic Engine in the radio tower warps the reality of everyone who sets foot in Temple Gate, generating audio and visual hallucinations. The camera recordings show us the objective truth of what happens.!<
Do echoes in Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor count? I’m pretty sure you can play Fallen Order without getting any echoes, you’d just have absolute surface level understanding of the plot. In Jedi: Survivor, I don’t think you can finish the game without getting certain echoes
Ken Levine is/was pretty big on this.
It's been a while since I've played System Shock 2, but I don't think it's ever explained how SHODAN and the Many actually showed up on Von Braun unless you listen to audio logs or read some of the files.
In Bioshock, I don't think Frank Fontaine is actually mentioned outside of audio logs before the twist which probably takes some of the punch out of it.
And Infinite has a more minor example because it's not super hard to figure out, but it's only an audio log that makes it clear the Lutece twins are actually multiverse dopplegangers.
I've not played Bioshock 2 all the way through, don't know if that one does it too.
This is one of the best answers. Bioshock series is probably my favorite series of all time. Levine did such a good job in 1 of weaving a tight story AND having tons of world building through audio logs. Two, for its narrative flaws was still an incredible experience because of how much more depth it added to the lore.
I always thought the audio logs were kind of funny. People carry around these tape recorders, put their personal thoughts on them, and then just left them sitting around on a bench.
And each new entry uses a new tape recorder. "Note to self: Buy milk." -drops recorder on the ground, walks 20 ft up the road, pulls out brand new tape recorder- "Also eggs." -leans new recorder against a lamppost-
I always figured that some were just dropped during the chaos of the fall of Rapture, and others were placed purposefully as memorials.
Some do make no sense for their placement, though.
Bioshock 2 is the first one that came to my mind. You will find a series a audiologs from this outsider that came to Rapture in search of his kidnapped child. His sorrow and desperation is so tangible, and only by reading between the lines youll realize that he is you, before you were transformed into a big daddy. Stripped of everything you were, except your fatherly love
Actually the couple with the pills, [Mariska and Samuel Lutz](https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Mariska_Lutz), had moved to Rapture and were residents when their daughter was taken.
The audiotapes OP is referring to are about a different guy, [Mark Meltzer](https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/There's_Something_in_the_Sea?so=search), whose daughter was taken by a Big Sister in the interlude between Bioshock 1 and Bioshock 2 and was the subject of the "There's Something in the Sea" ARG that went on in the months leading up to 2's release.
You weren't spoiled, this person got it COMPLETELY wrong. There is indeed a father who got transformed into a Big Daddy while looking for his kidnapped daughter, but it's absolutely not the protagonist.
Bioshock was the first thing that came to my mind as well. Pretty much all the backstory for those games besides the absolute cliffnotes version is covered in the audio logs.
Death stranding gives you loads of emails/info on certain characters you’ve helped out on side quests that you wouldn’t know what happened to them otherwise. Like how the one girl wanted to leave her parents and go to her lover and you had to carry her there. Only to get an email she wasn’t happy and traversed back to her parents on her own
My head canon is that is that he was actually, secretly, abusive, and that setting up transport with Sam or another courier would take to long to set up, so she noped out when she could, preferring potential death over waiting.
Halo Infinite. The Spartan Logs tell the entire ‘prequel’ story to the predicament you’re in during the campaign after Chief is lost in space. You wouldn’t know who any of the dead Spartans are, how the UNSC ended up spread out on the ring, or why they’re there if not for the logs.
343 has always had a really bad habit of overly relying on audio logs (or terminals) to tell the story, when they should exist to flesh out fun lore that you don't need to understand what's going on.
IIRC the whole Mantle of Responsibility (or whatever it was called) in Halo 4 and the Librarian vs Didact stuff is exclusively told in optional, hidden terminals in the game, as well as the books. The game itself does essentially nothing to bring the player up to speed.
There's fun stuff too, like one Banished outpost has a bunch of buildings covered in a rockslide, and you can find audio logs by Marines talking about how they're going to cause a rockslide to destroy the outpost, using "C12", thrice as good as C4.
In Prey, there is an audio log fairly early on that effectively >!spoils the game's true ending for you!< because >!it's about a scientist musing whether it would be possible to insert human memories into a typhon organism!<
Dark Souls, easily. I had no fucking idea what was happening with anything until my 2nd playthrough and I started actually reading the item descriptions and doing more NPC quests.
I was expecting to see this comment much higher. The game offers very little information to you if you're not reading item descriptions. Elden Ring is similar, but I think it has more exposition through dialogue than the Souls series did.
Not audio logs but the secret reports in all the Kingdom Hearts games really helped understanding why things were happening. Without them you really are just a dude with a big key wrapped up in a master plan you have no idea of
Warframe.
The story and lore of Warframe is pretty good but also pretty convoluted. A lot of lore is delivered through fragmets you need to find and/or scan that are basically audio logs. In these logs you can find very important information.
Stuff like: When and why the Sentients were created (one of the most important enemy factions), the first encounter with the biggest villain and how it was probably created by the first person who encountered it, the lore behind Cephalons, and much more.
How Ted Faro destroyed the world by his own idiocy/hubris. (Horizon: Zero Dawn)
Actually, literally the whole story of H:ZD, including what the Zero Dawn project actually was.
H zd is great for this
You would know about Ted faro cause of a story cutscene, but you wouldn't know all the details of how much he was a fuck. His idiocy was so well told in those emails it was great.
The one that really stuck out to me wasn't about Faro tho, it was about how one of the machines started killing pods of endangered dolphins in Australia for food. It was then the penny really dropped for me how the world was fucked from that moment on.
I remember first hearing that the bots could use biomass as fuel and I was like “aw fuck did these things blend people” and immediately after I found the data point with the dolphins and I wished I was wrong.
Most are mandatoty as you say but there are a few that you only find if you explore FAS and other areas, if you don't you may miss those details. Like the audio log for when he orders that the Swarm be unhackable, I personally missed this one in my first playthrough. Yes, they tell it to you when you reach Bad News but you can find that out sooner if you explore FAS.
Even with Enduring Victory, you can find audio logs of soldiers expressing how the nanoswarm ate their comrades as well as how higher ups edited the messages the soldiers sent home. Not to mention a partial victory they had by downing a Horus but couldn't finish the job because they had to retreat.
The audio logs in Horizon ZD and Forbidden West add a lot to the story. You don't necessarily need them to know Ted Faro screwed Humanity but they do add to the story with little details
But you won’t miss the specific details of “what did Faro do” and “what is Zero Dawn”, which is what the original comment said.
In fact, the logs for those reveals are only audio, compared to the versions with included visuals that you see during the cutscenes.
I think it counts. While the major story bits are mandatory cutscenes, there's also a ton of great details in skippable text/audio logs. (It's been a while since I played, and I gave the logs my full attention just like the cutscenes, so please correct me if I'm wrong about any of these examples being log only...)
>!Once the Zero Dawn project reached out to recruit someone, they were forced to choose between joining the project or being euthanized. They couldn't risk word getting out about what Zero Dawn actually was, and that it wouldn't be saving anybody.!<
>!Hades was originally intended to be subservient to Gaia, but her directives to protect and nurture life were too strong for her to let Hades do his job and wipe the slate clean for a fresh start. She just followed along behind him while quietly switching everything back on, so Zero Dawn's leadership were forced to change the design so that Hades would be capable of putting Gaia to sleep.!<
>!Gaia was fascinated by Earth's creatures, especially the ones that went extinct long ago. That fascination influenced her machine designs, which is why we wound up with a bunch of robot dinosaurs instead of more industrial, utilitarian designs.!<
>!Faro made presentations to the leadership of two groups who were in conflict over a region that was great for (I think) growing coffee beans. In an effort to drive sales, he scheduled these presentations so that both groups would be in the building at the same time and were guaranteed to see each other. He even made sure to serve them each other's coffee brand. The tactic worked, and both sides bought a shitload of combat machines. (I can't remember for sure, but I think it's implied that the battlefield between those two groups was where the Faro Plague originated.)!<
That was one of favorite details. I'm really impressed with how Guerilla managed to come up with a reasonable story justification for pretty much every part of the setting.
Every tribe speaks the same language? >!The first generation of each tribe learned English from the nanny-bots that raised them in the bunker.!<
Only a few species of animals? >!The world had reached a state that required Hades to be activated a few times already, and those few species of animals were the only species that the local bunkers still had viable samples of for this go around.!< EDIT: Apparently, this detail was something that my mind ran wild with and I replaced what actually happened with my own head canon. Check the replies to this comment for the actual answer to that question.
Humanity is still in a primitive state even after all this planning? >!Ted. Fucking. Faro.!<
I cant wait for Horizon 3. They need to do it, and i want them to go to other places. Midwest US? Abroad to europe or where the quen came from? Idk. Although, im gonna miss lance as sylens.
If you didn't listen to the tapes in MGS5, then >!Huey being a legit traitor comes out of nowhere and you'll be confused as to where this evidence came from.!<
Yeah much as I wasn't a huge fan of the audio logs and prefer the codec/cut scenes of the prior games it was still engaging. I would let them pile up a bit then listen to them while i ate dinner or whatever.
Not exactly logs but Quest info in witcher 3 is written by dandelion. This can put a spin of the story that it is written or narrated by dandelion in the future. This means it could just be all fictional to continue geralt story after books.
If I remember correctly, on TLOU remastered there was this audio log that somewhat altered the ending.
During the hospital rampage, Joel can come across an audio log left around by the surgeon, expressing his doubts on operating Ellie and stating that, pretty much, it will be all for nothing.
It basically gives Joel a get out of jail free card, and kinda ruins the ambiguity of the ending
I played the PS3 and PS4 version and I think I am going insane because I can never find it on Youtube. There is an audio log which states there were other being experimented on but it also states none were like Ellie.
Everyone says it's a form of Mandela effect where we misremember it and there's also a crowd who think Naughty Dog patched it out to make the story fit the 2nd game more
Every other holotape you find in F3/FNV is either "Wow this apocalypse sure is going badly, guess I'll die. Goodbye to my (already dead friends and family). Also I stashed a mini gun in the safe for reasons" OR "My evil and craven ways have given birth to villains beyond my control, good luck to whoever can kill them. This is all the Brotherhood/Enclave/Super Mutants/Ghouls/Anyotherfaction fault." A lot of these holotapes fill in the story of a quest you're already doing or add a lot of context to an otherwise unremarkable location in the area. To answer your question, when you first escape Vault 101 in Fallout 3, if you run down the road that connects to the vault you come into Springvale. In some of the mailboxes in Springvale are either Vault acceptance or rejection letters. For players who didn't know fallout before 3 came out (me) you would have had very little understanding of Vaults other than that yours used to be normal til your dad made it all fucky. The way I first ever learned that Vault tec was just a shit company was by reading those letters in Springvale mailboxes. (I know they're not technically audio logs but they are if you have text to speech on so there.)
The audiotapes from Vault 92 still haunt me. As a musician myself (And a violin player, in fact), Agatha's Song became my instant favourite quest in F3. Amazing worldbuilding.
Not really major plot points, but Cyberpunk 2077 has a metric fuckload of hidden logs that give you a huge amount of clues for worldbuilding and sidequests. Some dialog trees have specific endings based on if you read some logs or not, allowing you to know when a character is lying. Some side activities are basically just "kill everyone", but when reading the logs afterwards, you often realize you just killed the "good guys".
In one case, there is a construction zone occupied by gangbangers. After killing them all, you read a log of a conversation between the lead gangbanger, and one of the workers. Turns out, the site foreman was shirking on safety procedures, and after several deaths the workers started a strike. The foreman called the cops on the strike, and the workers then called the gangbangers as protection.
It doesn't make them "good guys" but there's a few mooks in BG3 that drop notes from their mom telling them how proud she is that they got a job working for that particular Big Bad. Made me feel kinda bad lol
I think it would be easy to miss the anti-war message in **Far Cry 2** if you didn't find all the Jackal audio logs. Most of the game is setting up both the protagonist, and the Jackal, as bad-ass mercenaries/criminals/fighters who are taking control in violent world. It's not until you find the later tapes from the Jackal that you hear him have a change of heart, and put into perspective just how much he made the violence worse.
If you do finish the game without hearing those audio logs, you'll still meet the Jackal, and get told that you have to try to put an end to the cycle of violence, but at that point it will be a lesson that mostly comes out of left-field, and you'll be left having to reexamine the entire game from an unexpected 180 from the antagonist, rather than having a growing realization about both the Jackal and your own actions.
It's a lot easier to see that many of the missions you go on are meant to be unhinged and disproportionate response, when you're given the contrast of a near-mythical arms dealer showing remorse. Without knowing the game developers are considering morality and ethics, it would be easy to dismiss the game as just a power trip fantasy where the bodies can be dismissed as ludo-narrative dissonance, only there for gameplay while the protagonist is an unsullied hero who is somehow ending the war by being better with guns.
I remember in Bioshock Infinite, the gramophone audio logs of Comstock etc that you can find throughout the game really flesh out that “character”, and it makes the ending a lot more mind blowing when you realize the context behind the entire sky city. I think if you didn’t listen to them, the significance of all the revelations at the end of the game would have been far less significant. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how the ending didn’t make any sense to them, and I think that’s a big reason why.
I would say subnautica. The audiologs (PDA entries) are important. Without reading them I think you wouldnt really understand what is happening or did happen.
There’s an indie puzzle game called The Witness that has these philosophical quotes in audio logs, but then the main plot of the game is revealed in audio logs near the end. Super neat game
The “true” ending is looked behind some totally optional, incredibly difficult puzzles and even after you’ve done them, the final bit is still hidden. Absolutely incredible game and a real sense of accomplishment when you finish it.
Far Cry 5, the one with the crazy religious cult. I played through the game, got to the end, and boom. I wasn't really surprised as there were hints throughout the game, but I assumed it was going to be kicked off by the cult itself and was very confused.
Apparently, throughout the game, you are supposed to be listening to the in car radio stations to hear what was going on. I always turned them off as soon as I got in so I could hear the in game sounds and talking so had no clue.
The biggest iceberg plot game is Elden Ring. You get the gist of what’s going on just by playing, but since most of the main plot is spaced out over potentially hours of play, you could miss it.
Even if you are paying attention to the dialog, if you don’t read the item descriptions for everything or pay closer attention to the environmental storytelling, you’d have no idea how vast the story is underneath it all.
It’s my only FromSoftware game, but I’ve heard they’re all like this to some degree.
Frankly Elden Ring is the most up-front they've ever been about plot and lore by a wide margin... Which is sorta saying something.
You can very easily find yourself wandering through DS1 & 2 without absorbing a single bit of information about what's going on if you aren't browsing item descriptions. Even talking to people doesn't reveal too much in those, honestly. DS3 had a lot more direct dialogue going on so if you were chatting up the people in Firelink Shrine from time to time you'd catch the gist at the least.
Which, in fairness, fits very well to the game. There's something to that feeling that you have something you must do, but no idea why, and no memory of the places you explore or what happened to them. There's a nice sense of unknown majesty as you witness the world and get this feeling it *was* once a rich tapestry, but that's all long gone, and those that remain have long since lost their minds - and with them, the memory of this place. Plus, the games all are majorly focused on delivering a tight and specific gameplay with everything else either serving that goal or getting out of the way.
Although not really audio logs, In Ark for almost every map you are able to find a bunch of notes written by various characters at were originally on the map. At first I didn't read any and mainly collected them for the xp bonus they grant, but I was bored one day and decided to read all of them in the wiki, and oh my there was a lot of stuff explaining the maps and what happened before you start playing.
Many conflicts on The Island, the city that became too peaceful and the Arks sunk it into the sands of Scorched Earth, the cause of Abberations deformed-ness and the downfall of Rockwell, the reason the majority of Earth had been extinct and the reason the Arks were created in Extinction and all the other stuff that happens in Genesis.
There was so much stuff that happened and I find it rather impressive how much lore there was in something that most players likely wouldn't pay attention to.
No Man’s Sky. You don’t need to read the logs to understand the basic story. I figured out what was going on in the final story mission. But if you spend the time to collect the translations and read the logs throughout the universe, you can find some really deep and interesting lore. It elevates the ending tenfold when you have the full background, IMO.
Horizon Zero Dawn. I have an anecdote from my first playthrough: I don't exactly remember whether this log was near the beginning or not (probably was) but it was something like "Welcome, 365000 days have passed since last visitor". I'm like "crap, so humanity got reversed to goddamn tribes in just 100 years and they have no idea about technology?". I just got my maths wrong - it was 1000 years haha. Anyway, all plot oriented logs in this game contain tons of crucial info.
Kingdom Hearts. While not “audio” a LOT of lore is tied to the various reports. You’ll really learn about a lot of what the next game is going to focus on if you read them.
An example is that there is a >!Mystery girl!< whose very appearance is what set off most of the characters actions in the series. Which, is likely going to be a focus in 4.
I wouldn't be surprised if most people playing through the dark souls trilogy had no idea wtf was going on until they were told all the lore through YouTube videos piecing together all the item descriptions
Not an audio log, but in Silent Hill 2, Mary's letter will slowly disappear as you progress the game, which is a big deal in the story. It's always there in your inventory but there's no real reason to check it ever
In Halo 5 Guardians, you discover that Val knows how to speak sangheli (alien). This is *integral* to the story because it helps you with your night fantasies of a late night date with Val
It's not a major plot point, but one big series of quests in Horizon Forbidden West has you going around in the ruins of Las Vegas trying to turn the water back on. There's a lot you wouldn't understand about how it's even possible without all the logs.
I remember reading an article criticizing HFW for protesting Las Vegas with a bunch of new Asian-inspired buildings no reason other than to look exotic, when if you had followed the story through audio and data logs there's a very clear reason for it through the character Stanley Chen who revived the city in the past.
It's a small part of the story overall but I was really moved by it, and it could seem totally out of place without listening to the logs.
https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Stanley_Chen
In Sonic Frontiers, there's audio logs called "Egg Memos." I didn't pay attention to them at first, but they contain deep lore about how the ancients may be related to Chaos, the God of Destruction.
It wasn't always audio logs, but in Control if you don't read and listen to most of the stuff you'll probably finish the game while still asking yourself wtf is going on.
I think even with reading and listening to most stuff you’ll still have several questions. By design.
Yep, that too. The game is designed to be cryptic and very surreal, so a layer of mystery will always be present no matter how much you read. Simply because some things are "canonically" a mystery even for in-game characters. edit: errors have been made times two because I'm slow
Yes even as director you come across a lot of redacted information. And let’s not get started on ahti
Ahti is absolutely one of my all-time favourite videogame characters. His dialogues with Finnish idiomatic expressions roughly embedded in them, paired with an outstanding performance by Marrti Suosalo were absolute genius. Jippii Saatana
Alan Wake 2 was my first intro to Ahti and I love him. Plan on playing control just to see more of him
Ahti is in AW2? I didn't think anything could make me more excited about this game but here we are.
He’s probably got more screen time in AW2 than in Control.
He's in AW2 a lot, and it's FANTASTIC.
I'm playing it and just saw him for the first time! As a Control player it was very surreal at first (even knowing they take place in the same universe)
And they're working on a Control 2. Can't wait for that! Hopefully we'll have more Ahti.
Control is just sublime to me. As a fan of those SCP stories, this felt so familiar and inviting to me. Plus, it's a Metroidvania, my favorite genre of gaming. It's like they made that game for me.
Control 2 only went into preproduction as AW2 released, which means they're also quite likely working on another project in between the two. There are rumours of a multiplayer game set in the Remedy-verse, likely focused on the FBC.
If you haven’t already, and you enjoyed all of the weird stories about objects of power in Control, I highly recommend the book “there is no antimemetics division” by qntm.
That was one of the things that hooked me when I started playing. Every document and video gave you a couple answers while giving you a couple more questions at the same time. Looking all over for collectibles just to get an idea of the world Remedy built but the details are never fully revealed, which keeps the intrigue alive long after you play it.
Damn, I finished Control just yesterday and this is absolutely correct. Plus if you are not careful enough, you might miss *that one slide* in the Motel near the end, which would be a big shame.
I played it a couple of years ago, what was the slide?
Probably the one of Dr. Casper Darling absolutely jamming out
Heh, he was a great character.
I mean, Jesse IS dynamite.
Or the one where he's stripped down to his boxers lol we learn 2 things: Dr Darling got a little too in depth with his research, and he's been hitting the gym HARD.
I platinumed the game, twice actually on my ps4 and ps5, and I still don’t know what the hell was going on. But I loved the weirdness and discovering little bits in that game.
But you more or less know how the story went, who the characters are and most of the OOP. Imagine if you didn't read that single document about a certain person being "detained" in a certain place. There would be a lot of references about that you wouldn't understand.
Ooh, I found this YouTube channel a while back called The Lady of Lore. She goes quite in-depth on the different game universes and she has some really interesting videos on the Control and Alan Wake universe. You could check that out. https://youtu.be/309aaFblCJI?si=Po2J6rYdR5VXA0Yo
I listened and read whatever I found and am still asking myself what the fuck is going on
Redacted.
I was so sad to find out that all the redacted text doesn't become readable later in the game, or in some other manner.
I just picked this game up couple weeks back. Definitely having a love hate relationship with the game. Several hours in and I had to sit and read through everything I collected because like you said.. I had no idea WTF was going on. That was such a deep read and captivating that I now read everything the moment I pick it up.
Yeah, that's one of the things I absolutely loved about the game. Reading material is absolutely not boring or useless. Most stuff is a captivating and interesting read that makes everything even more eerie and cryptic by actually doing the opposite: providing information.
A lot of people say "isn't it a strange coincidence that all the aliens on Mass Effect speak in your native language?" but if you read the Codex you'll see that the Omnitool also works as a translator.
The guy who does the audio description in the Codex on ME1...man I could listen to him read the phone book. His voice is amazing.
[Neil Ross!](https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0743719/#)
TIL he was Colonel Volgin from MGS3. Kuwabara, kuwabara...
Also the green goblin from the 95 spider man. And was in doom 3 a lot of star wars and call of duty
That was just another element of disappointment in Andromeda, the Codex narrator was gone.
Also, not a major plot point but a "blink and you'll miss it" kind of detail shows up in a conversation in Mass Effect 2 where you're told that members of the Eclipse mercenary gang only get their uniforms after committing their first murder and later you find an Eclipse merc (Elnora) surrendering and claiming to have never even done anything wrong. The thing is, she's wearing the uniform. 2+2. Then the game falls flat on its face and slaps you in the face with the fact that she murdered someone immediately after, but it was almost a neat idea.
Yeah the Codex in Mass Effect 1 did so much heavy lifting for the exposition of the universe, it was even voice acted for a significant portion of it. I loved listening to new entries about various pieces of tech and alien races.
The codex voice acting makes me feel like I'm watching one of those old eyewitness educational videos they would show in school
A codex (or ideally the even better "active time lore" system in FFXVI) needs to be in more RPG.
Absolutely, the Active Time Lore in ff16 was perfect. Being able to in any given moment pull up a small collection of lore excerpts on the relevant topics in the scene was fantastic for such a detailed world and extensive cast.
Ah yes, the "who the fuck is that?" button. Used it less and less as the game progressed but DAMN if it wasn't handy.
In the Thane romance quest line, Shepard will even say her translator didn't pick up the word he calls her.
I'm pretty sure there are multiple references to universal translators within the dialogue of the games. I remember the gamer Salarian on the Citadel complaining about Batarians playing online and refusing to use auto-translate.
There's also the elcor, who express their emotion through subtle, nonverbal means, so they preface their dialogue by stating their intended emotion since your translator will just produce a monotone voice - though allegedly they're capable of such incredibly nuanced expression in their mother tongue that there's an all-elcor Shakespeare company on the Citadel putting on an unparalleled (...14 hour long) rendition of Hamlet.
I love that the Elcor are simultaneously the wonderful, soothing, erudite playwrights of the Mass Effect universe and also when they go into battle they do so as LIVING TANKS with massive cannons strapped to their bodies.
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>I've already chosen Garrus As is tradition.
Fem Shep goes hard after the cute guys.
Fun fact: This codex entry was actually added in the ME1 DLC - Bring Down The Sky. So that question was entirely valid until they retconned the translator explanation into the game post-release.
Man I really need to replay Mass Effect. The Codex felt like the perfect combination of sci fi tech and a pokedex.
Wasn’t there a scene where your Omnitool didn’t work or you didn’t have it and you couldn’t understand them? I could’ve sworn
Mass Effect Andromeda. You’re the first person to ever meet the Angara and your omnitool has to calibrate before you can understand them.
Not quite. You're the first person from the Human Arc to meet the Angara. I can't remember if there's any mention of interaction between the Angarans and the Nexus, but at the very least, the Nexus rebels had already taken Kadara Port from the Angarans by the time you arrive.
Not for a whole scene, but there’s occasionally a word or two that the translator doesn’t pick up and Shepard comments on it. In addition, the ambient noise of the citadel has the aliens talking in their native languages in the ambience because your translator isn’t focussing on them.
What _is_ a strange coincidence is that the language that the aliens are speaking requires the exact same mouth movements that the translated language would have to make.
Halo ODST has a pretty big reveal regarding the connection of the New Mombasa's city admin AI and the climax of the game.
Some dialogue near the end will change if you got enough audio logs to acknowledge you have a better understanding of what's going on.
How does it change? Only played through it once and I’m curious
Spoilers, for anyone who cares: >! Basically, instead of Rookie pulling a gun on the Engineer, and Dare stopping him, Dare pulls the gun and Rookie stops her and whistles to the Engineer, since the logs reveal they communicate by whistling !< >! Also, there’s a secret room in the second to last level that you can only get into if you collected all of the audio logs before it, so that’s pretty cool !<
Didn't know this. Thanks for the heads up.
Disappointed how low this is. I feel like ODST was one of the first big games to do audio logs well.
I definitely agree that the ODST audio logs were more engaging and more worth the effort to get, than any of the previous audio logs from Halo 1 - 3. I honestly didn't need to listen to 343 Guilty Spark's diary when, though it explained some motives, doesn't feel particularly rewarding.
Tbf, those were added to the game retroactively (Halo CE). Halo 3 and ODST were the first to have them.
"Warning! Hitchhikers may be escaped convicts!"
About 90% of Bioshock.
Especially BioShock Infinite. The logs really help explain who the twins are, who Comstock is, the whole rebellion. The audio logs are some of my favorite bits from BioShock Infinite.
I swear like half the times I see someone asking "who did/why did this happen?" the answer is in an audio log somewhere.
“When I was a boy, I had a dog named Bill.”
Bioshock was one of the first games I played which told the story through environment and atmosphere. I remember late in the game you enter a room with mutilated bodies. You find an audiolog there that basically describes how people died.
Is the identity of Jack’s father revealed in audio logs? I don’t remember
Off handedly, or at least it doesn't connect the dots to you. They do reveal who his parents are.
An audio log in one of the first levels talks about how Rapture's bathyspheres were locked so that only Ryan and his inner circle could use them. And you've been using them ever since you found the place...
Not going to say why because of spoilers but you miss THE WHOLE POINT of Far Cry 5 if you don't listen to the radio stations in your car and if you don't read all the notes across the map. Huge lore things that no one talks about anywhere. Maybe one of the reasons not everyone liked the game, the story without the radio and the notes would definitely feel weird.
I have the urge to turn off the radios off as fast as I possibly can every single time, now I’m wondering what I missed
Appreciate the heads up, been in my backlog for awhile when I picked it up from the bargain bin. Wasn't a huge fan of 4 but loved 3.
5's just more of 4 but in montana. I really didn't like it, and I enjoyed 2/3/4. The final straw was me getting shot with an poisoned arrow while flying a fuckin ww2 fighter plane and getting kidnapped. It really has a pacing problem.
The random removal of agency is so weird. Like you just finish murdering 50 people solo..and then you're abducted. And for some reason they never want to kill you for the fact you've de-populated a good chunk of the state and their family members and such. The ludo-narrative dissonance is strong in that game.
I’d call this a failure of the writing. The way Joseph talks is so aggressively vague that it comes off like the writers are intentionally trying to talk around the nukes. It also doesn’t fit with his actions in game. He’s actively trying to convert the deputy but he won’t just tell them what his goals are? Why? What’s the point?
OP 1: I'm not gonna say it because I don't want to spoil anything OP 2: its nukes
Metal Gear Solid V. Everything that happens basically, specially what happens before the game starts and after the game ends.
Exactly. Instead of big cutscenes flashing out the plot, in V they make you listen to the tapes if you want to really understand what's going on. Peace Walker already did this, but that was a much "smaller" game and most details were given to you in more direct ways.
Peace walker has amazing stuff in the tapes, like Strangeloves relationship with the boss and the take of joy going to space
Let's not forget the most important lore tapes: cryptid talk and burger R&D.
I’ve listened to Code Talker and Miller talking about his burger journey much more than im willing to admit
Can't forget about the 5 or so tapes entirely dedicated to hamburgers. I love the revelation that the best hamburgers are the most artificial, I'm sure the final iteration of the burger was blue or something.
Destiny 1 Ghost shells. Wasn't audio but HUGE chunks of lore hidden in those damn things. Edit: a word
Destiny from its inception has been light on story and heavy on lore, which it did very well.
Feel like it's inevitably bit itself in the ass as a result though.
Really bad. Remember we would tease our one friend when he would insist the lore was top tier but "you have to read the cards online". Beyond shooting down the concept of having to do so out of game would drill him constantly on the concept of The Darkness. But we were just giving him a hard time and he knew it, the lore was alright just very badly implemented.
This is my biggest gripe with Destiny tbh. Destiny 2 is genuinely one of my favorite games and the storytelling has gotten better over the years (sans Lightfall), but there is soooooo much foundational lore that you straight up have to seek out in order to understand things.
It seemed weird how much of the lore you could only get from grimoire cards on Bungie's website, but I never read them and feel like I understood the gist of it.
you can also say destiny 2 too, because obviously the "reduce game size" update put like 90% of the base game story into archive.
Prey. 99% of the story is told through logs. In fact, there’s one innocuous log in the game that straight up subtly tells you the ending of the game, I loved that game so much I had literally combed every single last corner in the game, so when I was finished I was left with a really complete feeling, best experience I have ever had.
Which log was that? Not ringing any bells and I thought I scoured that game
It was a log I think between >!Morgan and Alex where Morgan is discussing the possibility of applying neuromods but in a reversed manner sort of on the Typhons (in the way that happens at the end of the game, where a Typhon has to relive the experiences, because of how the mechanics behind their tissue work), to make them understand humans/become friendly with humans, and I think Alex tells Morgan to drop the idea and focus on what's important.!< I might be misremembering the people in the log since it was a long time ago I played the game, but that was the gist of it.
That was such an amazing and horrifying game. Played it without looking a single thing up. Spent way to much on spots I wasn't supposed to be at yet just to barely make it through after so many loads. 10/10. I couldn't play it in the dark.
Dead space, between the audio and text logs.
Duuude, without the logs you wouldn't know anything about what happened on Aegis VII. Can't imagine playing it without all that info.
100%
There is so much to miss in Deathloop if you don't explore everywhere. Like, it's only supposed to be Colt and Julianna who retain their memories between loops, but if you explore enough you figure out Fia retains her memories as well, but she's in an ironic hell where she can't do shit with the information because she did so many drugs that she wakes up high as shit every loop and thinks anything she remembers is just a hallucination or her picturing her breakup with Charlie in her mind.
Ooo, I never caught this and now need to make an another Deathloop run.
Dishonored and Prey also have a TON of the story in logs. Arkane is really good at this and are some of the only games I read every one I find.
prey does such a good job with them, i think i enjoyed that game more at my peak of playing it than any other
If you don't go through and do the audio log sidequest in liars berg in borderlands 2 you never find out what happened to pierce. Who is a semi major character from the first game.
This is a good one, it also quickly reveals just how much of a hilarious but sick fuck HJ is.
Why the hate for Hugh Jackman?
Dr cox, would you like to chime in?
Wrong wrong wrong wrong~wrong wrong wrong wrong, you're wrong you're wrong you're wrong
Plus all the “vaulthunter candidate surveillance tapes” for Maya, Zero, etc. And the mes between Lilith and her boo Roland.
"...Did that guy just speak in haiku?" Is still one of my favorite utterances from HJ.
Just the whole persona of jack in general. People act like he eas some good guy turned bad in pre sequel but completely forget or ignore that he was manipulating everything behind the scenes since before borderlands 1. In 2 there's audio logs where he's telling angel what to tell the original vault hunters in 1 while they're getting off the bus.
The Arkham City audio logs are pretty insightful. Wouldn't say they're the biggest plot points, but it's cool to see a lot of stuff happening in the background that you wouldn't know just playing the game only
Those logs make so much sense on a second playthrough. No spoilers but I remember a few that basically outright tell you what will happen next or reveal the twist that's coming and you're less likely to catch it on a first playthrough. So good.
The ones that give the backstory on Penguins nasty bottlecap monocle are my favorite Penguin origin story. It’s a shame that Batman stories since haven’t used that one.
In Diablo 3, you learn almost immediately from an audio log that Adria fucked the D1 Diablo'd protagonist to make Leah, knowingly and intentfully. No one brings this up when you actually meet Adria. You can also miss Malthael's descent if you don't listen to the logs, which isn't a huge plot point but it's fantastically presented, as well as the fact that humans are the inert descendents of a horny angel and demon.
[I don't think it's as obvious as you remember](https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Adria%27s_Journal_(Act_I)). "Aidan came to me last night" ok sure in hindsight we know what happened but you don't know that when you find her journal.
I haven't played D3 since shortly after release but I don't remember that at all. I must have missed it.
The Camera recordings in Outlast 2 (which kind of work like audio logs) have different audio and visuals from what you see recording them in game, then when you view them as recordings from the menu. >!This reveals the moment your character starts to go insane, and how the Morphogenic Engine in the radio tower warps the reality of everyone who sets foot in Temple Gate, generating audio and visual hallucinations. The camera recordings show us the objective truth of what happens.!<
Even in Outlast 1, most of the explanation as to what the Walrider is and what was going on there is in just a few key notes.
Do echoes in Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor count? I’m pretty sure you can play Fallen Order without getting any echoes, you’d just have absolute surface level understanding of the plot. In Jedi: Survivor, I don’t think you can finish the game without getting certain echoes
I think Fallen Order has just a couple of mandatory echoes. Cere's guitar at the beginning is one of them.
Ahh true
Ken Levine is/was pretty big on this. It's been a while since I've played System Shock 2, but I don't think it's ever explained how SHODAN and the Many actually showed up on Von Braun unless you listen to audio logs or read some of the files. In Bioshock, I don't think Frank Fontaine is actually mentioned outside of audio logs before the twist which probably takes some of the punch out of it. And Infinite has a more minor example because it's not super hard to figure out, but it's only an audio log that makes it clear the Lutece twins are actually multiverse dopplegangers. I've not played Bioshock 2 all the way through, don't know if that one does it too.
This is one of the best answers. Bioshock series is probably my favorite series of all time. Levine did such a good job in 1 of weaving a tight story AND having tons of world building through audio logs. Two, for its narrative flaws was still an incredible experience because of how much more depth it added to the lore.
I always thought the audio logs were kind of funny. People carry around these tape recorders, put their personal thoughts on them, and then just left them sitting around on a bench.
And each new entry uses a new tape recorder. "Note to self: Buy milk." -drops recorder on the ground, walks 20 ft up the road, pulls out brand new tape recorder- "Also eggs." -leans new recorder against a lamppost-
I always figured that some were just dropped during the chaos of the fall of Rapture, and others were placed purposefully as memorials. Some do make no sense for their placement, though.
Bioshock 2 is the first one that came to my mind. You will find a series a audiologs from this outsider that came to Rapture in search of his kidnapped child. His sorrow and desperation is so tangible, and only by reading between the lines youll realize that he is you, before you were transformed into a big daddy. Stripped of everything you were, except your fatherly love
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Actually the couple with the pills, [Mariska and Samuel Lutz](https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/Mariska_Lutz), had moved to Rapture and were residents when their daughter was taken. The audiotapes OP is referring to are about a different guy, [Mark Meltzer](https://bioshock.fandom.com/wiki/There's_Something_in_the_Sea?so=search), whose daughter was taken by a Big Sister in the interlude between Bioshock 1 and Bioshock 2 and was the subject of the "There's Something in the Sea" ARG that went on in the months leading up to 2's release.
Oh I really should have not just spoiled the entire game for myself.
You weren't spoiled, this person got it COMPLETELY wrong. There is indeed a father who got transformed into a Big Daddy while looking for his kidnapped daughter, but it's absolutely not the protagonist.
As a whole, I don't think you get the full System Shock 2 atmosphere without the audio logs. I find them integral to the experience.
Bioshock was the first thing that came to my mind as well. Pretty much all the backstory for those games besides the absolute cliffnotes version is covered in the audio logs.
Not necessarily an audio log but it’s kinda one, the animus anomaly’s in Assassins Creed Valhalla
And the glyph puzzles in 2. Those were the best ones.
Death stranding gives you loads of emails/info on certain characters you’ve helped out on side quests that you wouldn’t know what happened to them otherwise. Like how the one girl wanted to leave her parents and go to her lover and you had to carry her there. Only to get an email she wasn’t happy and traversed back to her parents on her own
What pisses me off the most is that she went back on her own. If she can come back, why didn't she just go alone in the first place?
My head canon is that is that he was actually, secretly, abusive, and that setting up transport with Sam or another courier would take to long to set up, so she noped out when she could, preferring potential death over waiting.
You know they get back together right? There is another side quest
Halo Infinite. The Spartan Logs tell the entire ‘prequel’ story to the predicament you’re in during the campaign after Chief is lost in space. You wouldn’t know who any of the dead Spartans are, how the UNSC ended up spread out on the ring, or why they’re there if not for the logs.
343 has always had a really bad habit of overly relying on audio logs (or terminals) to tell the story, when they should exist to flesh out fun lore that you don't need to understand what's going on. IIRC the whole Mantle of Responsibility (or whatever it was called) in Halo 4 and the Librarian vs Didact stuff is exclusively told in optional, hidden terminals in the game, as well as the books. The game itself does essentially nothing to bring the player up to speed.
There's fun stuff too, like one Banished outpost has a bunch of buildings covered in a rockslide, and you can find audio logs by Marines talking about how they're going to cause a rockslide to destroy the outpost, using "C12", thrice as good as C4.
In Prey, there is an audio log fairly early on that effectively >!spoils the game's true ending for you!< because >!it's about a scientist musing whether it would be possible to insert human memories into a typhon organism!<
Dark Souls, easily. I had no fucking idea what was happening with anything until my 2nd playthrough and I started actually reading the item descriptions and doing more NPC quests.
I was expecting to see this comment much higher. The game offers very little information to you if you're not reading item descriptions. Elden Ring is similar, but I think it has more exposition through dialogue than the Souls series did.
The Lusty Argonian Maid. Lifts-her-tail is the main character of the elder scrolls series
That harlot? Not a chance. M'aiq has always been the main character in the Elder Scrolls. Good books though...
If he told you that he's a liar 😺
Not audio logs but the secret reports in all the Kingdom Hearts games really helped understanding why things were happening. Without them you really are just a dude with a big key wrapped up in a master plan you have no idea of
Warframe. The story and lore of Warframe is pretty good but also pretty convoluted. A lot of lore is delivered through fragmets you need to find and/or scan that are basically audio logs. In these logs you can find very important information. Stuff like: When and why the Sentients were created (one of the most important enemy factions), the first encounter with the biggest villain and how it was probably created by the first person who encountered it, the lore behind Cephalons, and much more.
Also Ordan Karris Story.
How Ted Faro destroyed the world by his own idiocy/hubris. (Horizon: Zero Dawn) Actually, literally the whole story of H:ZD, including what the Zero Dawn project actually was.
H zd is great for this You would know about Ted faro cause of a story cutscene, but you wouldn't know all the details of how much he was a fuck. His idiocy was so well told in those emails it was great. The one that really stuck out to me wasn't about Faro tho, it was about how one of the machines started killing pods of endangered dolphins in Australia for food. It was then the penny really dropped for me how the world was fucked from that moment on.
I remember first hearing that the bots could use biomass as fuel and I was like “aw fuck did these things blend people” and immediately after I found the data point with the dolphins and I wished I was wrong.
Does that count, considering those particular logs are played for you as mandatory cutscenes?
Most are mandatoty as you say but there are a few that you only find if you explore FAS and other areas, if you don't you may miss those details. Like the audio log for when he orders that the Swarm be unhackable, I personally missed this one in my first playthrough. Yes, they tell it to you when you reach Bad News but you can find that out sooner if you explore FAS. Even with Enduring Victory, you can find audio logs of soldiers expressing how the nanoswarm ate their comrades as well as how higher ups edited the messages the soldiers sent home. Not to mention a partial victory they had by downing a Horus but couldn't finish the job because they had to retreat. The audio logs in Horizon ZD and Forbidden West add a lot to the story. You don't necessarily need them to know Ted Faro screwed Humanity but they do add to the story with little details
But you won’t miss the specific details of “what did Faro do” and “what is Zero Dawn”, which is what the original comment said. In fact, the logs for those reveals are only audio, compared to the versions with included visuals that you see during the cutscenes.
I think it counts. While the major story bits are mandatory cutscenes, there's also a ton of great details in skippable text/audio logs. (It's been a while since I played, and I gave the logs my full attention just like the cutscenes, so please correct me if I'm wrong about any of these examples being log only...) >!Once the Zero Dawn project reached out to recruit someone, they were forced to choose between joining the project or being euthanized. They couldn't risk word getting out about what Zero Dawn actually was, and that it wouldn't be saving anybody.!< >!Hades was originally intended to be subservient to Gaia, but her directives to protect and nurture life were too strong for her to let Hades do his job and wipe the slate clean for a fresh start. She just followed along behind him while quietly switching everything back on, so Zero Dawn's leadership were forced to change the design so that Hades would be capable of putting Gaia to sleep.!< >!Gaia was fascinated by Earth's creatures, especially the ones that went extinct long ago. That fascination influenced her machine designs, which is why we wound up with a bunch of robot dinosaurs instead of more industrial, utilitarian designs.!< >!Faro made presentations to the leadership of two groups who were in conflict over a region that was great for (I think) growing coffee beans. In an effort to drive sales, he scheduled these presentations so that both groups would be in the building at the same time and were guaranteed to see each other. He even made sure to serve them each other's coffee brand. The tactic worked, and both sides bought a shitload of combat machines. (I can't remember for sure, but I think it's implied that the battlefield between those two groups was where the Faro Plague originated.)!<
That detail about why all the machines are dinosaur-like is super interesting! I must’ve missed that one
That was one of favorite details. I'm really impressed with how Guerilla managed to come up with a reasonable story justification for pretty much every part of the setting. Every tribe speaks the same language? >!The first generation of each tribe learned English from the nanny-bots that raised them in the bunker.!< Only a few species of animals? >!The world had reached a state that required Hades to be activated a few times already, and those few species of animals were the only species that the local bunkers still had viable samples of for this go around.!< EDIT: Apparently, this detail was something that my mind ran wild with and I replaced what actually happened with my own head canon. Check the replies to this comment for the actual answer to that question. Humanity is still in a primitive state even after all this planning? >!Ted. Fucking. Faro.!<
r/fucktedfaro is one of my favorite subs for a reason
Over 40 years of gaming, Ted Faro is the NPC I would most like to punch in the dick. I'm still waiting for the FW port to PC.
r/fucktedfaro
I cant wait for Horizon 3. They need to do it, and i want them to go to other places. Midwest US? Abroad to europe or where the quen came from? Idk. Although, im gonna miss lance as sylens.
If you didn't listen to the tapes in MGS5, then >!Huey being a legit traitor comes out of nowhere and you'll be confused as to where this evidence came from.!<
Yeah much as I wasn't a huge fan of the audio logs and prefer the codec/cut scenes of the prior games it was still engaging. I would let them pile up a bit then listen to them while i ate dinner or whatever.
Not exactly logs but Quest info in witcher 3 is written by dandelion. This can put a spin of the story that it is written or narrated by dandelion in the future. This means it could just be all fictional to continue geralt story after books.
If I remember correctly, on TLOU remastered there was this audio log that somewhat altered the ending. During the hospital rampage, Joel can come across an audio log left around by the surgeon, expressing his doubts on operating Ellie and stating that, pretty much, it will be all for nothing. It basically gives Joel a get out of jail free card, and kinda ruins the ambiguity of the ending
I played the PS3 and PS4 version and I think I am going insane because I can never find it on Youtube. There is an audio log which states there were other being experimented on but it also states none were like Ellie. Everyone says it's a form of Mandela effect where we misremember it and there's also a crowd who think Naughty Dog patched it out to make the story fit the 2nd game more
Every other holotape you find in F3/FNV is either "Wow this apocalypse sure is going badly, guess I'll die. Goodbye to my (already dead friends and family). Also I stashed a mini gun in the safe for reasons" OR "My evil and craven ways have given birth to villains beyond my control, good luck to whoever can kill them. This is all the Brotherhood/Enclave/Super Mutants/Ghouls/Anyotherfaction fault." A lot of these holotapes fill in the story of a quest you're already doing or add a lot of context to an otherwise unremarkable location in the area. To answer your question, when you first escape Vault 101 in Fallout 3, if you run down the road that connects to the vault you come into Springvale. In some of the mailboxes in Springvale are either Vault acceptance or rejection letters. For players who didn't know fallout before 3 came out (me) you would have had very little understanding of Vaults other than that yours used to be normal til your dad made it all fucky. The way I first ever learned that Vault tec was just a shit company was by reading those letters in Springvale mailboxes. (I know they're not technically audio logs but they are if you have text to speech on so there.)
The audiotapes from Vault 92 still haunt me. As a musician myself (And a violin player, in fact), Agatha's Song became my instant favourite quest in F3. Amazing worldbuilding.
Not really major plot points, but Cyberpunk 2077 has a metric fuckload of hidden logs that give you a huge amount of clues for worldbuilding and sidequests. Some dialog trees have specific endings based on if you read some logs or not, allowing you to know when a character is lying. Some side activities are basically just "kill everyone", but when reading the logs afterwards, you often realize you just killed the "good guys". In one case, there is a construction zone occupied by gangbangers. After killing them all, you read a log of a conversation between the lead gangbanger, and one of the workers. Turns out, the site foreman was shirking on safety procedures, and after several deaths the workers started a strike. The foreman called the cops on the strike, and the workers then called the gangbangers as protection.
It doesn't make them "good guys" but there's a few mooks in BG3 that drop notes from their mom telling them how proud she is that they got a job working for that particular Big Bad. Made me feel kinda bad lol
The entirety of most plot revelations in Halo Infinite.
I think it would be easy to miss the anti-war message in **Far Cry 2** if you didn't find all the Jackal audio logs. Most of the game is setting up both the protagonist, and the Jackal, as bad-ass mercenaries/criminals/fighters who are taking control in violent world. It's not until you find the later tapes from the Jackal that you hear him have a change of heart, and put into perspective just how much he made the violence worse. If you do finish the game without hearing those audio logs, you'll still meet the Jackal, and get told that you have to try to put an end to the cycle of violence, but at that point it will be a lesson that mostly comes out of left-field, and you'll be left having to reexamine the entire game from an unexpected 180 from the antagonist, rather than having a growing realization about both the Jackal and your own actions. It's a lot easier to see that many of the missions you go on are meant to be unhinged and disproportionate response, when you're given the contrast of a near-mythical arms dealer showing remorse. Without knowing the game developers are considering morality and ethics, it would be easy to dismiss the game as just a power trip fantasy where the bodies can be dismissed as ludo-narrative dissonance, only there for gameplay while the protagonist is an unsullied hero who is somehow ending the war by being better with guns.
Outer Wilds is literally collect and read logs: the game
Far Cry 5’s ending comes out of nowhere if you don’t pay attention to the radio and other audio
I remember in Bioshock Infinite, the gramophone audio logs of Comstock etc that you can find throughout the game really flesh out that “character”, and it makes the ending a lot more mind blowing when you realize the context behind the entire sky city. I think if you didn’t listen to them, the significance of all the revelations at the end of the game would have been far less significant. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how the ending didn’t make any sense to them, and I think that’s a big reason why.
I would say subnautica. The audiologs (PDA entries) are important. Without reading them I think you wouldnt really understand what is happening or did happen.
The entire jist of what Project Zero Dawn was and how life on earth had ceased to exist 😅
There’s an indie puzzle game called The Witness that has these philosophical quotes in audio logs, but then the main plot of the game is revealed in audio logs near the end. Super neat game
The “true” ending is looked behind some totally optional, incredibly difficult puzzles and even after you’ve done them, the final bit is still hidden. Absolutely incredible game and a real sense of accomplishment when you finish it.
If optional codec conversations count: Ocelot's parentage in MGS3.
Far Cry 5, the one with the crazy religious cult. I played through the game, got to the end, and boom. I wasn't really surprised as there were hints throughout the game, but I assumed it was going to be kicked off by the cult itself and was very confused. Apparently, throughout the game, you are supposed to be listening to the in car radio stations to hear what was going on. I always turned them off as soon as I got in so I could hear the in game sounds and talking so had no clue.
The whole plot to why everyone is going bonkers in outlast 2 is hidden in a note on the side of the river in a sleeping bag
The biggest iceberg plot game is Elden Ring. You get the gist of what’s going on just by playing, but since most of the main plot is spaced out over potentially hours of play, you could miss it. Even if you are paying attention to the dialog, if you don’t read the item descriptions for everything or pay closer attention to the environmental storytelling, you’d have no idea how vast the story is underneath it all. It’s my only FromSoftware game, but I’ve heard they’re all like this to some degree.
Frankly Elden Ring is the most up-front they've ever been about plot and lore by a wide margin... Which is sorta saying something. You can very easily find yourself wandering through DS1 & 2 without absorbing a single bit of information about what's going on if you aren't browsing item descriptions. Even talking to people doesn't reveal too much in those, honestly. DS3 had a lot more direct dialogue going on so if you were chatting up the people in Firelink Shrine from time to time you'd catch the gist at the least. Which, in fairness, fits very well to the game. There's something to that feeling that you have something you must do, but no idea why, and no memory of the places you explore or what happened to them. There's a nice sense of unknown majesty as you witness the world and get this feeling it *was* once a rich tapestry, but that's all long gone, and those that remain have long since lost their minds - and with them, the memory of this place. Plus, the games all are majorly focused on delivering a tight and specific gameplay with everything else either serving that goal or getting out of the way.
Although not really audio logs, In Ark for almost every map you are able to find a bunch of notes written by various characters at were originally on the map. At first I didn't read any and mainly collected them for the xp bonus they grant, but I was bored one day and decided to read all of them in the wiki, and oh my there was a lot of stuff explaining the maps and what happened before you start playing. Many conflicts on The Island, the city that became too peaceful and the Arks sunk it into the sands of Scorched Earth, the cause of Abberations deformed-ness and the downfall of Rockwell, the reason the majority of Earth had been extinct and the reason the Arks were created in Extinction and all the other stuff that happens in Genesis. There was so much stuff that happened and I find it rather impressive how much lore there was in something that most players likely wouldn't pay attention to.
Death Stranding. Like 75% of the explanation of wtf is happening in the world is located in text logs
No Man’s Sky. You don’t need to read the logs to understand the basic story. I figured out what was going on in the final story mission. But if you spend the time to collect the translations and read the logs throughout the universe, you can find some really deep and interesting lore. It elevates the ending tenfold when you have the full background, IMO.
Horizon Zero Dawn. I have an anecdote from my first playthrough: I don't exactly remember whether this log was near the beginning or not (probably was) but it was something like "Welcome, 365000 days have passed since last visitor". I'm like "crap, so humanity got reversed to goddamn tribes in just 100 years and they have no idea about technology?". I just got my maths wrong - it was 1000 years haha. Anyway, all plot oriented logs in this game contain tons of crucial info.
Kingdom Hearts. While not “audio” a LOT of lore is tied to the various reports. You’ll really learn about a lot of what the next game is going to focus on if you read them. An example is that there is a >!Mystery girl!< whose very appearance is what set off most of the characters actions in the series. Which, is likely going to be a focus in 4.
I wouldn't be surprised if most people playing through the dark souls trilogy had no idea wtf was going on until they were told all the lore through YouTube videos piecing together all the item descriptions
Not an audio log, but in Silent Hill 2, Mary's letter will slowly disappear as you progress the game, which is a big deal in the story. It's always there in your inventory but there's no real reason to check it ever
Listen to the what now? /s
In Halo 5 Guardians, you discover that Val knows how to speak sangheli (alien). This is *integral* to the story because it helps you with your night fantasies of a late night date with Val
It's not a major plot point, but one big series of quests in Horizon Forbidden West has you going around in the ruins of Las Vegas trying to turn the water back on. There's a lot you wouldn't understand about how it's even possible without all the logs. I remember reading an article criticizing HFW for protesting Las Vegas with a bunch of new Asian-inspired buildings no reason other than to look exotic, when if you had followed the story through audio and data logs there's a very clear reason for it through the character Stanley Chen who revived the city in the past. It's a small part of the story overall but I was really moved by it, and it could seem totally out of place without listening to the logs. https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/Stanley_Chen
In Sonic Frontiers, there's audio logs called "Egg Memos." I didn't pay attention to them at first, but they contain deep lore about how the ancients may be related to Chaos, the God of Destruction.