I can relate, I've worked for several councils. One of the engineers doesn't even know the captain's name. Most characters never meet, would never expect to meet, even after months on board. While engineers fret about safety hazards and corner-cutting, and officers jostle for political influence, others are just bored at work. Some audio logs serve no purpose but to tell you who everyone is, and what their part was in the incident. She would be a hateful villain in a lesser story, but she can only go on what she knows, and realises too late that "this is bigger than my life and the lives of my men". Melanie Bronson, the uncompromising security chief who guns down the heroes because she can't tell whose side they're on. Prefontaine, the audibly terrified biologist who clings to his diary, recording his observations to distract from the appalling death he knows is coming. Siddons and Suarez, the sickening power couple of low-rank nobodies who fight their separate ways to find each other and escape. They're short, simple, and full of distinct people. The personality condensed into a mere handful of logs is incredible. It's the brevity of the characterisation that does it. There are some standard tutorial ones, but many are purely for flavour, and others combine both. But I maintain that even the most wearying, hackneyed uses of audio logs, those mouthbleating story breadcrumbs, haven't diminished what Looking Glass did 20 years ago. It's that thing where Mad Max 2 seems boring and obvious because it's been copied so much since, or Cracker comes across like another gritty 2000s anti-hero detective despite predating them by a decade, or people who insist that Nirvana are worth bothering about today (I will fight you all). After two decades of games using them, I imagine new players may be less impressed. System Shock 2 benefited from being one of the first games to use audio logs. They're clumsy, they're silly, and they're usually badly done, to the point where it's tempting to insist that they be consigned to history altogether. "Audio logs", said a game designer, eliciting a chorus of involuntary groans from absolutely everyone.
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