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

I read a story in which a girl, who was pretty much being dragged off, dying, by a animal, was able to call her mother, so yeah, it can be a reflex.

To me there's nothing more uninteresting and "meh" inducing than the part in any modern 3D game where I enter a room and pick up on a bunch of texts or audio logs as some form of lazy exposition or plot-development. I never liked it but I also never hated it but my indifference towards it makes me realize that I just kinda hate it now that we're talking about it.

It's the same as graffiti. Sweet mother of 3D Studio Max, stop making those immersion-breaking "HELP US!" scribbles on walls. Okay, tangent there, this has nothing to do with Andromeda but still.

I guess I dislike these things because I see it as a form of overdesign. There doesn't need to be clues everywhere as if that enriches the story. One of my favorite games ever, ICO, says so many things with almost no words and I distinctly remember games like Drakan that I played on PS2 where you'd enter a swamp area and there'd just be dead humans on spikes in an area full of goblins and that in itself is enough exposition to tell me what happened. There's just no creativity in making a generic room that looks like all other rooms (like the Kett "houses" in MEA) and then randomly placed bodies and a log that shows the final diary entries and sometimes it's not even that smart but it's just some email or other stupid shit.

It probably bothers me the most because it's a design-thing that you see in all AAA games right now. If it were just a quirk for a BioWare game who cares, but there's a sense of lethargy to booting up another game made by another dev and then seeing them do the exact same things beat for beat as the guys who made Far Cry or that specific part in The Last of Us. Mass Effect 1 didn't put in logs everywhere on Eden Prime where workers describe the sound of indoctrination to each other.

While I think the premise of all of these victims leaving their last moments on a datapad may seem silly, it's obviously there for more practical reasons of bringing life and history to the environment. I always appreciate the notes, as I feel it brings a presence to the area you are inhabiting. It's environmental storytelling by providing more context and background to where you are and what happened there. I've never had a particular issue with it.

I don't have a problem with it, as a few people have said it is hardly just a game/movie thing, there are examples of this kind of behaviour in the real world. You just have to watch the news to see examples of people in plane crashes/ferry sinkings/car accidents leaving phone messages to loved ones.

"Pathfinder, there are couple of generators in near vicinity, which, if activated, will enable me to restore some of the data."
"SAM, lock the door!"
"Locking the door, Pathfinder"

I thought the message left by Jonah's mother in ME2 was an excellent example of this being done well. But in general it is over used, especially in text where it often makes little to no sense.
Escape, fight or desperate typing? I'll take desperate typing every time, thank you.

I can't believe I forgot to mention this:



This is an utterly amazing moment in the trilogy, using characters that maybe you spend 5 minutes with. I can sum all "last notes" from DAI and MEA that it won't scratch the surface of this scene.

So the problem is not with "death notes", but how they were used in these games.