• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Who reads all this shit?(journals and notes)

I do.

If i don't, i feel like i am missing something from the game. Chances are i am not missing something important but still i can't help it.
 
It depends on how pertinent it is to MY experience. If it's referencing things that have no real sense of place in the space I'm inhabiting, it's a hard pass.
 
I think the last time I played Horizon: Zero Dawn I picked up a book in town that took like 15 minutes to read. I haven't felt the urge to play the game since. I'm not sure if these two things are related.
 
If its good, its a nice bonus. If its not, its painlessly skippable.

All upside and no downside in my view; and the truth of the matter is words by themselves can be powerful things. The potential is very high, and good writing is an extremely cost effective way of adding value to a game.
 
Well Skyrim is releasing on the n-th platform, so probably quite a number of people does enjoy reading extensive ingame stuff.
 
Entered the thread to say I do, but reading it, yeah, I'm with you, OP. I'll only care about it if they're short enough to grab my attention and be interesting, making me want more. When I'm playing Souls or The Last of Us, to use one of your examples, I'm always excited for the next lore note, or item description, or even NPC dialogue. When I'm playing Witcher 3, there are so many goddamn books that I just tuned out and eventually stopped reading anything.

I don't mind that they're there, since there are people who enjoy it, but yeah, no interest.

I'll always read item descriptions, though, no matter how useless they are.

Clear said:
If its good, its a nice bonus. If its not, its painlessly skippable.

All upside and no downside in my view; and the truth of the matter is words by themselves can be powerful things. The potential is very high, and good writing is an extremely cost effective way of adding value to a game.
Click to expand...

There can be a downside if the game relies on long text too much. I didn't play Quantum Break yet, but from what I've seen, there's a considerable amount of fundamental story information that are part of long ass e-mails, and that helps to make the game a chore to play. You're literally watching a TV show during the game, and when you're done and enter the actual game part, you'll find forced slow walking and a bunch of text to read. It's painlessly skippable, as you said, but if you're missing on important story stuff by doing so, then I would say it's a downside.
 
I like when they play with the format, like in Uncharted or The Last of Us. I don't like it so much when it's just a huge encyclopedia of text stuff I've picked up.
 
I love to read. At one point I read 300 books in a year. Used to go in to my local library and take a bag full of books with me. I read everything from philosophy to children's books.

I love to read in games, and I prefer text to spoken dialogue. I am old school like that.

I know that people in the US are not so fond of reading, they don't need subs in their movies or series and the whole culture is more about rapid little things and instant gratification (the whole world is moving into that direction, which is a pity).

We who don't speak English as a first language get used to reading subs when we are young. Nowadays I listen more than read (and gringe at the bad subs, their quality has gone bad...) but when you develop the ability to read and watch/play at the same time it pretty much sticks with you.

Usually they can put a lot more text in to a game than audio. You can have huge conversations if they are written, you get to use your imagination and you read at your own pace so immersion doesn't break when you skip the spoken dialogue because you've already read the subs (in games I use subs always, EN/EN).

One of the reasons I love Elder Scrolls as a series is the books and lore. You can find anything from love letters to theological masterpieces. And they are always skewed (like those travel guides, the writer is maybe a little biased and/or racist).

And The Real Barenziah is the GOAT game book series. Fight me. Daggerfall version, I might add

EDIT. I think that this topic highlights differences between RPG crowd and the console/action game crowd. RPG games (especially older ones) always have relied on text.
 
Skyrim intimidated me by the crazy amount of books there were. I fell a sleep a few times reading those XD
I think TLOU and Witcher 3 had a pretty good balance and lengths with their notes.
 
If I'm interested I'll read them, or at least the portions that interest me. If it feels like a lot of shit to go through that I don't care about I'll skim then move on. Or ignore entirely depending on context (there's a reason people compiled the books on games like Skyrim into ePubs.)
 
I read them in Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Bayonetta, DOOM 2016, Uncharted, TLOU, and probably many other games that I don't remember. Also listened to most audio logs in Bioshock 1, Infinite, FEAR, Dead Space, etc.

Done right, it can really add to the game. Somehow I didn't see it coming, but it was really cool in Bayonetta
when you find out in the last journal that it was written by Luka's dad
.
 
I do since I like to read and learn more about the game I'm playing. This is such a weird thing to complain about since nobody is forcing people to read them.
 
I prefer reading to listening to an audio log (at least give me an option), but lord, being bombarded with dozens of journal entries about what just happened, lore, terminology, genealogies, and so on is offputting. Especially when the story doesn't introduce these aspects well enough and just expects you to know some of the terms being thrown around (subjective but hi, Final Fantasy XIII).

This is an issue I have every time I try to play Dragon Age: Origins. I get it's just kind of a WRPG thing, but it felt like every five seconds, I got some "JOURNAL UPDATED" message with about ten new five paragraph essays about some little detail about the world. It's very offputting early on in the game - at least let me get invested and figure out the basics for myself through scenarios and character interactions before expecting me to break out the fictional dictionary.
 
I always try to but I rarely ever get anything out of it and just end up feeling like i'm wasting the time I could be having fun in the game. It used to bother me because I was skipping content I paid for but I've since learned to just enjoy playing games the way I like and accepted that stuff like that isn't for me.

My tastes in games has always favored gameplay experiences rather than story telling, with exceptions of course.
 
When I was younger I would try to read stuff but as I've gotten older I have way less patience for it. I use to love adventure games and would speak to every NPC in an RPG but now I just skip through cutscenes. Generally I just don't care about a game's narrative anymore and outside of rare exceptions, the attempts at world building and history through diaries/audiologs/etc are just banal garbage that reads like whoever wrote it barely gave a fuck.
 
Strangelove77 said:
Seriously who reads all the journals, notes, and item descriptions that come along every 15 minutes in a lot of games?
I'm ok if it's a paragraph or a small scribble, but fuck reading multiple screens of text. I get that you're trying to flesh out your game with background information, but I'm not going to disrupt my game by reading a book's worth of backstory. Just let me play my game.
Does anyone read all of it and enjoy it?
What about the people tasked with writing all this? How boring is it?
Is it fulfilling to write so much and have people skip over it without thinking twice?

Bioshock did it right with everything being voiced while you actually keep playing the game instead of disrupting.
And even TLoU managed to do it right by making these notes really short and actually making a compelling narrative(Ish) outside of the main one.
Click to expand...

You even admit that it can be done right as in The Last of Us. Did it ever strike you that different people have different levels of tolerance for text length and different levels of interest in the lore of any given game? They are skippable. Skip if you aren't interested.
 
When I played The Witcher 3 I used to go back to character bios and quest journals all the time if it had been sidetracked from stuff for too long or if I just wanted background info.

For most other games I can't say that I've bothered much though.
 
I do when I find the game world interesting and they are well done/written. In most games I start off reading them all, but I often end up stopping this due mostly to them not grabbing my attention. I still read them all every time I replay the first resident evil for example because they did it so well and it added so much imo.
 
99% of the time I skip the words diarrhea. Only ones I can remember are resident evil, new doom and vampires bloodlines.
 
Lunarwhale said:
I prefer reading to listening to an audio log (at least give me an option), but lord, being bombarded with dozens of journal entries about what just happened, lore, terminology, genealogies, and so on is offputting. Especially when the story doesn't introduce these aspects well enough and just expects you to know some of the terms being thrown around (subjective but hi, Final Fantasy XIII).

This is an issue I have every time I try to play Dragon Age: Origins. I get it's just kind of a WRPG thing, but it felt like every five seconds, I got some "JOURNAL UPDATED" message with about ten new five paragraph essays about some little detail about the world. It's very offputting early on in the game - at least let me get invested and figure out the basics for myself through scenarios and character interactions before expecting me to break out the fictional dictionary.
Click to expand...

I definitely agree with that. I'd say it's the fiction's job to get me interested in the world, I'm not the one who should be putting in work in order to be interested. Same reason why I dislike stories starting with a lore dump.
 
I only read the really weird ones. Morrowind was good with this.

But 99% of them? Totally pointless for me.

To add, I have never really found reading that enjoyable in any form. I lack the patience.
 
I think the last game I read absolutely everything in was Wolfenstein: The New Order. That stuff was dope.
Sure, not at all that much text in that game, but it could have been triple and more the amount and I still would have read all of it..
 
Depends on the game and the execution, but I like them generally.

There are some fantastic notes in horror games, I think it's telling a dozen or so notes from these games came to mind with this topic and I can recall them and the impact they had on me. Done right, they can add a lot.

But I think there are ways to do it wrong, and while my attention span is better than others, one can certainly make this material go on for too long and outstay its welcome and interest. Also unless I'm REALLY into the background story, the moment I find like, a document that's a whole book page per page with 5+ pages to read, I do groan. Especially if there's a lot of these and I'm just not feeling it.

I feel they work best when they compliment the game world rather than when they try to BE the game world, if that makes sense.
 
I don't mind as long they are not long but not like this:
maxresdefault.jpg

you cant expect me stop my game and read all that.
 
Strangelove77 said:
I'm not going to disrupt my game by reading a book's worth of backstory. Just let me play my game.
Does anyone read all of it and enjoy it?
What about the people tasked with writing all this? How boring is it?
Is it fulfilling to write so much and have people skip over it without thinking twice?
Click to expand...
I'm more likely to skip repetitive combat encounters than I am to skip background, depends what you want from the game really. If it's a shooter then I'm less likely to delve into backstory than I am in an rpg where details often pop up again in sidequests or obscure parts of the map.

Bestiaries are something I read all the time, lots of RPGs have good ones, as does Monster Hunter etc. Something about the fantastical ecologies of game worlds that I find endlessly entertaining!
 
I don't read it in-game, but I'll read transcripts on wikia. Usually on the toilet or before I fall asleep in bed.

The idea of stopping my video game to read some background flavor text strikes me as really, really bizarre. I know that audiologs are incongruous, but shit, maybe have someone on your earpiece read that nonsense to you? Or an AI buddy that can text-to-voice that shit? I don't care that much about the Krogans dude
 
Games should give you option to read text or make it read to you (as in mind of the charecter you are playing. Silent protagonist can make it difficult though) .

Edit:/ Ofcourse it makes main actors job much bigger but I think it would be worth it.
 
How dare this video game ask me to read. HOW DARE!

I have no problems with reading. It's quick and requires little effort. It's happening right now to anyone reading this.
 
I can't think of too many games where the notes exceed more than a page or two and force you to read through all of them. There's the Elder Scrolls stuff but those that offer buffs just need you to open them and that's it.
 
I used to, but I have so little patience for it these days as a great majority of cases have them being a terrible way of getting across information and are things that go in one ear out the other. Prey is a recent example of it actually engaging me but otherwise I can not give less of a care these days about finding snippets of things sprinkled across killing dozens of mooks and the game expecting me to care.
 
I try to. I certainly did when I played tomb raider 2013 and rise of the tomb raider. Also did when I was playing the original bioshock.
 
I've been reading most of the stuff I pick up in Divinity: Original Sin 2, but my character's journals I tend to ignore since it's my character and I'd rather imagine my own personal entries.
 
I feel it's usually too invasive to the game to have to stop and read all the time. I usually just ignore stuff like this if it's too frequent.
 
I also feel that in many games the quality of the writing or the contents of all the journals/emails/documents don't warrant the time it takes me to read them.
Don't mind if it's there but tend to skip over a lot of them.
Really liked Rise of the Tomb Raider's solution of giving you a short one or two sentence summary on top of every audiolog or letter that you found.
 
Sch1sm said:
I'll never forget him then explaining the entire Star Wars universe, in the vaguest way, and largely incorrectly.
Click to expand...

what part was incorrect? I'm surprised you're both talking about the same person. was it the part where skywalker was trying to knock up his sister?
 
I hate both the text and audio formats of this. Whichever it is always ends the same way. I can either stop for a few minutes to read a bunch of stuff I'm unlikely to care about or have the audio version which also means stopping as otherwise you'll be fighting over the speech or trigger a second piece of audio that plays over it.

If it's important put it in the game front and center, otherwise I really don't care for bloat and will likely skip it since 90% of it tends to be meaningless filler.
 
I never read journals, books and so on in rpgs etc. I Also suck at reading dialogue if its not voice acted. I guess im too impatient..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

  • Poll
Who all has a Series X/S console
2 3 4
194
1K
DEAD ORIGINAL replied
  • Poll
Where did all the people who loved Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament go?
2 3
146
2K
Justin9mm replied
Nintendo wins lawsuit against player who kept streaming pirated Switch games and taunted ‘I can do this all day’
2
90
2K
Bonkerzzz replied
Playing at 40hz is garbage. Who started this shit?
2 3 4
153
10K
LavitzSlambert replied
Type A/B1/2 shit
Cringe  2
56
423
ContrarianAsshole replied
Top Bottom