If DAI and Mass Effect Andromeda taught me anything, is that dying people...

I dunno, I think I might have larger concerns at that moment.  Like trying to stay alive.

Yeah I always found it a little odd these people took their last moments to partake of some correspondence they have no idea if anyone will ever find.

To whom it may concern,

I am taking the time to write on this datapad or leave an audio file of my final moments instead of finding a way to stay alive. Tell my friends, family I love them all and hope they understand.

Your truly

Whoever.

The realistic thing people would do is instantly wipe their explicit image and video folders to avoid posthumous embarrassment.

"Pathfinder, this datapad has been wiped. Metadata suggests it was 8 zetebytes of video."

Well, if you're a fucking spy and you're pretty likely to die, the least you can do to sick it to the enemy is to make sure to give your team the info they needed.

Do you honestly as a lone soldier or engineer expect to outrun and survive a kett patrol who up till now have shown themselves to be rather technologically and militarily advanced?

They took out each ark one by one. They wiped the first Eos settlements. They dismantled the angaran army and government.

Do you think hiding in a cave of some planet chockful of radiation or freezing to death is going to make it any better?

It's tricky though. I guess most of the time any location with dead bodies would just be mysteriously dead unless there was some intricate way to gather clues, but I suppose this is where SAM could really come in handy to fill in the blanks. Of course, SAM wouldn't be able to add concrete information to provide context, just speculation. Like with the dead angara on Kedara. You'd never figure out who did it unless the angara had surveillance or something.

This is more of a videogame problem than a BioWare problem. You can level the complaint against nearly any game that features text/audio logs or written notes, e.g. Witcher 3, Bioshock, Deus Ex, etc.. In a lot of ways, it's just a conceit of the medium kinda like obnoxious hacking visuals you see in movies (This hack is 98% complete...); the writers need a shorthand to tell an engaging story and unfortunately, it isn't especially realistic.

However, death notes are clearly exacerbated by open world design. Environmental storytelling is quite difficult, as it requires a decent number of assets and development to actually amount to anything, and the result might go completely unnoticed depending on the story being told. When you have an open world to build, it's more time effective just to have the writers whip up a monologue and send it to the level designers so they can make a quick vignette for it.

More importantly, it requires a greater degree of collaboration between the writers and level designers, and I think it's fair to say that inter-developer communication is something BioWare Montreal probably need to work on.

Nope. MET had several "last notes, last recordings." I don't think it's exclusive to Bioware, either.

This is, in general, a bad AAA games trope that needs to burn in hell.

They arent in English.

If you read the pads it will says "Translated from Shekesh" for instance on Angaran notes.

The coming of the grim reaper is always sudden and unpredictable. If the devs want those chars / NPCs to matter, have the pages of their lives revealed in in-depth emails and journals.

Bioware ... Mr Walters .... good writing ... Surly you jest?