No, I Don't Want to Stop Playing to Listen to An Audio Log | Extra Punctuation 

Bioshock had this completely figured out. It even gave you a hotkey to replay the most recent audio log you picked up in case a sentence or two got drowned out by screams and gunfire.

Random documents and audio logs: We find them stuck to notice boards, We find them under dogs. We're gonna put them in a file And give it a review When we're bored of all the gameplay, But we've nothing else to do. *head drops on table*

Bioshock mastered this years ago! For me, a crucial part of that game’s atmosphere is the sound of the audio logs playing as I’m creeping through the halls of rapture.

That stealth game point at the end makes me think we need a stealth game where the protagonist also has to juggle his busy social life. Your sneaking past a security guard can be ruined by a sudden ringtone if you forgot to set your phone to silent before the mission, occasionally your clingy girlfriend texts you asking where you are and you have to find a cupboard to hide in and reply or else you sleep on the sofa that night.

Heh. I've got a fun memory from Bioshock. I played audiolog at Lower wharf of Neptune's plaza and that's when Atlas began talking to me on radio. And that's when pile of splicers attacked. Who then aggroed the Big daddy that was lurking around. The end result was a glorious cacophone of spoken memoirs, game objectives, combat noises and enemy screams. I think I also died at the combat so not much of info on pomegranate trade of Rapture was gained that day.

i was annoyed how i couldn't listen to music in death stranding without staying in a menu compared to being able to play while listening like in MGS5

Halo 3 ODST audio logs were my favourite, they play once picked up and unlocked in order despite which order you collected them in

I've played so few new Triple A games in the last 8 years, I didn't even know this was a problem. I remember playing Subnautica and listening to Degasi logs while ransacking their bases, collecting their leftover supplies as they talk about journeying deeper, wondering about what could make 3 people so desperate as to leave what looks like a good life. If I had to stop and listen, I likely would have forgotten most of what they said, and the connection between story and world would've been severed. I certainly wouldn't remember it well enough to mention it now

The epitome of this for me is in Spiderman, where the audio logs not only happen while you are swinging, Insomniac had two recordings for each convo: one in which you're swinging and Pete is straining and sounds a bit winded and one if you are standing still. Yeah, blew my mind once I figured that out. Dedication.

This is why any argument made zero sense to me. As the designer, you can just put the 2 minute audio log right before a 1 minute room search, a 2 minute hallway walk, a 3 minute combat encounter, and 15 minutes between any important story segment. You are LITERALLY the designer! YOU control where things go!!! Also minor aside but this annoyed me in Control with the TV segments too. Y’all really spent the time and money filming these but you won’t let us play them on a little window in the corner of the screen? 😐 Edit: Didn’t realize how much attention this got, so I’d like to reemphasize that yes, this is a _psychotic_ level of user testing, but if a dev is psychotic enough to care about this, they should just go all the way and delegate one QA engineer to spend a few hours to move stuff around. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of Yahtzee calling you a twat on the internet.

Playing audio logs of the intimste feelings of your Friends/Comrades from massive loudspeakers on your helicopter while flying over enemy territory in MGSV sure hit different!

Worry not, our friend Hideo's here! Of all the things MGSV did wrong, one of them was cramming almost the entire story in audio logs, BUT the great thing about them is you can literally do whatever the hell while you're listening. And if you missed something because of spicy gameplay or because Ocelot drowned out the audio, you can pause and rewind by sentence. Sentence, Yahtzee! Not saying all games should be like this, but it worked in that game and like others have said, it's not unheard of to just play something over gameplay.

It's awesome to hear others finally talking about this stuff. Been a problem for years.

It's funny cause the dead space games had it so when you picked up an audio/video/text log you had a button to immediately play or pull it up

Horizon Zero Dawn was soooo frustrating to me because they got it half right. When you pick up an audio log, it would auto-play over gameplay, but they overloaded the button for “pick up this item” with “stop playing this audio log”, and I accidentally hit that ALL THE TIME when I was collecting stuff. Then if you wanted to go back and play the audio log again because you accidentally stopped playing it, there was no way to play it outside of the inventory menu! I think I listened to maybe 3 audio logs in that entire game because of that problem, which is sad because I’ve heard that game had some cool world building in the audio logs.

I was actually taken aback when I realized I had to stay on the menu to listen to audio logs in Callisto Protocol. Absurd behavior

God, I couldn't agree more. Another thing I hate is that audio logs get interrupted because you walked too far and a set piece starts. Please design the length around the walking distance to the next big thing so it doesn't get interrupted, like, I dunno, an actual game designer. Or go the GoW way and at least try to pause the dialogue naturally. Edit: Spoke too soon. It also got mentioned.

Fallout does this perfectly. Have the audiolog and then if the player doesn’t want to listen to it right away, then they can go into the menu, stick the log in the pip boy with a nice animation and then it plays over the gameplay. Smooth and consistently fits into the world immersively

i remember bioshock doing this well by giving the player a prompt to play a log when picked up, which really helped, because sometimes i wanted to listen to it and sometimes i didn't.

The journal that Arthur keeps in RDR2 is one of the best story bits of the game that I didn't even bother looking at until my third playthrough. I wish they could just be read outloud to you by Roger Clark as you gallopped half way across the map for the 700th time.

MGSV allowed you to play the cassettes in any order, at any time, while you were in the heat of intense stealth or riding in your copter or wandering the desert. I loved how it did that

South Park SOT got this right. And they were making a joke about useless audio logs.

i liked the part in "stick of truth" on the spaceship/ufo where, i think its randy, in one audiolog even says that he doesnt even know why hes not looking for an escape or something but instead records audiologs about whats happening to him ^^

I use these extra punctuations as audio logs I can listen to in the background while I get on with the gameplay of cleaning my bathroom

Yahtzee's Persona waifu being Chie is both surprising and completely expected at the same time

The thing that’s extremely annoying with colisto’s audio logs, is that DEAD SPACE, a game the team worked on before. Allowed you to walk around with audio logs.

The first Infamous did this pretty well, I think. The audio logs were little sidequests in their own right, so you were in the right mode to listen to them during continued gameplay. I do remember one time in the first Lone Echo that an audio log and Important Plot Dialogue were happening at once and it drove me mad enough to take the headset off for a few minutes. Something about the clash was extra aggravating in VR, maybe because they were both right in your ear. That said, you've never been truly bored until you've waited for something to finish in VR since you can't even glance at your phone without taking the headset off. So maybe just don't have audio logs at all in VR.

I really wish there was an audiobook equivalent for the books in Skyrim, I know it would not make sense from a setting perspective but there is so much lore I skipped because I don’t want to stop playing to sit down and read 😂

I love the way they did it in Halo 3 ODST. Hold interact to play, press to just pick up.

Honestly, a one-line description of what the audiolog seems to be about and a prompt of "do you want to listen to this right now?" would do wonders, especially if when I click "yes" I can keep playing the game. I'm also a big fan of mixing the audio so that if something more important starts happening, the audiolog is greatly diminished. As you said, we can always go back afterwards. But this is also something that could be in a settings menu regarding them... let the player choose if it pauses, is diminished, or keeps playing as-is during these moments.

Oh, how I miss good ol' Cave Johnson's "recordings". Well placed, well orchestrated, funny as hell, and RELEVANT. That's how you do audio logs. We seriously need his combustible lemons.

If you press TAB instead of Escape to close the menu, it keeps playing as you move around. It's a bug not intentional.

For being touted as a successor to Dead Space, which DID play audio logs during gameplay when you picked them up (I don't recall offhand if you could play with the audio going if you replayed it later from the menu), the fact that The Calisto Protocol doesn't do the same thing surprises me to say the least. I mean, were they trying to convey that whatever device he's using is so cumbersome that he has to stop to use it with any practicality? I mean, it looks like it uses holographic projections, so it can't be that low tech and cumbersome. Some games it's more tolerable at least, like in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which I belatedly recently finished. You can relisten to podcasts that'll pop-up while traveling because sometimes parts will get drowned out by traffic if you're swinging low or it cuts out completely if you trigger an activity like a crime in progress or other story beat. You can replay them in the menu (and I believe stay in the menu), but they're pretty short and largely inconsequential, so they're things you catch up on when you just want to take a little break from what you're doing to listen to that podcast audio that got cut off halfway through before deciding on what activity you want to tackle next. But it's a different type of game, and you don't "collect" the podcasts, they just pop up semi-randomly while traversing and then get added to your collections for later review if interested. I agree though, especially for survival horror, if there are audio logs to find and collect, as long as there isn't an established lore reason why the audio can't be played on the move, the logs should either be played automatically over gameplay, or the player given a prompt to play now which goes away if they ignore it, and then have the audio play to the end unless actively paused (or automatically paused in the case of a cutscene or otherwise important story beat). That way, the player has the option to stand there and listen if they want to put all their focus on the audio, or multi-task if they desire, and the log stays in the inventory to be played again at any time. If you want me to stand still and listen, then the audio better be coming from a non-portable device that I have to be in proximity of to listen to making me choose whether I want to stand and listen or move on (AKA, I'll stay if I care about background lore and move on if all I care about is the shooty shooty bang bang).

This makes me think of Remnant and Control. The log would just play right there from the device. You'd leave the room and come back and it would still be playing. Like it would in real life. When I first noticed that in Remnant I thought it was pretty cool. Also, if you haven't played Remnant: From the Ashes go play it now!

The thing is, this is not something unheard of. Batman Arkham Asylum did it. And it was great.

From what you described as bad audio logs, would a close to a perfect execution in audio logs ( simply not telling them is not an option in this case) be the audio logs from the original BioShock?

Making the Dead Space comparison again, audio logs in that game were handled BEAUTIFULLY. They almost never meandered, with the longest ones going on slightly over a minute and they were paced out to end right around when you made it to a part of the game that threw enemies at you or an important cutscene was about to happen. They also were more prevalent during puzzles, giving you some downtime to listen to them while you were putting out a fire or something similar.

I can't help but imagine solid snake sitting behind cover playing tetris, and when the guard spots you, it plays a sound effect and gives you a bit longer to react, because the guard is so confused as to why anyone infiltrating the heavily guarded compound, would sit around a corner playing tetris of all things.

I love the Lore in Control, I know is more "Imersive" that you need to stay close to the sound source to hear the audio, but for god sake I want to keep exploring!!! Just turn the audio into a podcast I can hear while playing!!!

Wow, exactly how bad was the Callisto Protocol? I've never seen him need to kick a bad game twice.

*I don't know if this is possible on PS5* but on PC you can actually listen to the audio logs while moving around. However, you need to press Tab instead of Escape after you start playing it. Both Escape and Tab perform the same action of closing the inventory, but if you press Escape, the audio log stops playing. Specifically Tab needs to be pressed for it to continue playing. Fun. Also Yahtzee, fun fact: if you go to the video "How The Callisto Protocol's Gameplay Was Perfected Months Before Release | Ars Technica" and go to 5:20 into the video, you'll actually hear a UI/UX designer talk about why she chose to go with just a notification over auto-play, and they even show a snippet of gameplay where there are UI elements actually made for auto-playing! And they still chose not to go with it! They actively developed and finished the feature and decided against it. Even though playing while in gameplay is possible if you specifically press Tab, that "waveform" UI that is visible in that video does not exist in the final game, and you still MUST navigate your way to the audio log you just picked up (if you can remember it) and start playing it before you can even listen while playing. Just very odd decisions. If they're not gonna implement auto-play, why not just make the inventory screen automatically open to the audio log we just picked up for us to play?! There should never be an issue as you never pick up more than one audio log at once as far as I am aware and they're always during downtime moments anyway. Why do I have to try and memorize which one I picked up in case I can't listen to it at that exact second, and then go and try to find it in the menu? It's just more additional unnecessary slow down for no reason!

Random documents and audio logs We find them stuck to notice boards, we find them under dogs We’re gonna put them in a file and give it to review When we’re bored of all the gameplay but we’ve nothing else to do *thud*

If the thought process is that; if you aren't sitting and intently listening to the audio logs with nothing to distract you, you might miss important details, it's been proven multiple times that this thought process is a load of balls.

I really love these. They are such nice little nuggets of thought that spur discussions on interesting topics. Of course these discussions are done in my head so they get drowned out by anxiety and depression, but it's a nice distraction for a few seconds anyway!

I kind of like the fallout method, you can do both, either play it as soon as you get a holotape or just pick it up. Most of the time I just want it to play like bioshock but sometimes I want to just listen to it while walking around or something, but I don't understand the stop in menu to listen.

"What if design problem possibly occurs" that...is in the job description....of the designer, to design things well :)

My favorite ones are when an audio log let's you keep playing but then stops when you walk an arbitrarily short distance away.

Although it is nearly 8 years after the fact, I created more lyrics for Yahtzee's Random Documents & Audio Logs song from the Talos Principle episode of Zero Punctuation because I love that jingle: Random Documents and Audio Logs We find 'em stuck to noticeboards We find 'em under dogs We're gonna gonna put it in a file And give it a review 'Cause we're bored of all the gameplay but we've nothing else to do. Random Documents and Audio Logs They're hidden in the basement They're cast out into bogs We shuffle 'round the floorboards Until we've stubbed a toe Looking for that box With that cursed Audio Random Documents & Audio Logs Got us spinnin' 'round 'n round Like Sonic the Hedgehog We'll boggle at the lore 'Til we're all blue in the face Now, get my baseball bat So I can put in its place. *THUD* What do you guys think? Should I record it? & yes I know that I posted this yesterday on ZP's The Callisto Protocol video but I figured it would be relevant here too!

Something I equally hate is when banter, that is plot important/character development important. Doesn't happen fast enough , that you can outpace it while moving forward and trigger the next part of the conversation. Because the developers didn't take five seconds to realize you could walk faster than necessary (much like the annoyance of having NPCs escort you somewhere, and they walk slower than you, or walk slightly faster than you, but not as fast as you run.)

You actually CAN listen to the audio logs during gameplay in Callisto Protocol, you just close the inventory with tab and it keeps playing.

You can do many creative things with the audios playing, for example, creating a jumpscare is a silent corridor, or making it play the robot guard sounds at the same time as one is close by to mess with the player, make someone creeply sing a song to make ambient while you have to run from monsters.Make someone in the audio tell a lie that can be figured out if you watch the scenary close enough, give vague clue of what the next enemies abilities are...

What’s even funnier is that the thing Callisto is attempting to copy, (Dead Space) already handled audio logs perfectly by holding the pick up button when you get it.

Have a memory menu, where you can "remember" witnessed encounters.

Well I just thought of a good idea for a extra Punctuation video, are the best video games made in this small window where the technology is new? As in between the NES and ps3 Era of consoles, because if I would have created a game A linear game the game Playloop doesn't matter, the biggest question for me is how would you handle transitions? Because I believe that we have been in this era of open words for so long, I don't think that they would be able to make a "good" game without it having a 12 Minutes problem.

I think Arkham Asylum has my favourite use of audio logs. Even though it's mostly narration of the graphic novel the game is loosely inspired by, it adds a lot more history to the decrepit asylum, and the game's gloomy atmosphere makes the dialogue even more melancholic. Also, getting all the audio logs and finding out who you actually been listening to is a cool reward.

I'd say the ability to quickly pause or stop the audiolog with a simple button press would solve basically all the contrarian issues brought up. I think Space Marine did that, although I'm also pretty sure that if you stopped the log prematurely, the only way to go back and listen to it later was to go into the menu again.

I think you can disable the controller speaker in the PS5 options. I know the PS4 did it too and i disabled it immediately, so the PS5 should too.

Most folk do not like this design pattern. So it's pretty amazing how it keeps perpetuating

I remembered Yahtz's song on the Talos Principle Random documents and audio logs: We find them stuck to notice boards, We find them under dogs. We're gonna put them in a file And give it a review When we're bored of all the gameplay, But we've nothing else to do.

I love System Shock's implementation of audio logs. Not only you get all of your objectives and hints from audio logs in the remake you have the option to auto-play audio logs as soon as you pick them up which is so convenient.

The fewer submenus I need to access, the better the gameplay can flow, and the more I'm engaged and immersed. BioShock did it perfectly, and the fact that games still insist on doing it worse kinda makes me sick. Also _great_ call on that point about handheld minigames for the protagonist! If I'm waiting for unskippable BS, it's a lot less grating if I can beep and boop on my little PDA friend in the meantime :3

Remember when there was actual environmental storytelling in games? Nowadays, everyone seems to think that environmental storytelling is just putting a letter or log on the ground that tells you what happened.

There was also a bug at launch (don't know if they fix it) where you could pause the game and close the menu to make the recording keep playing outside the menu. So if you did this you could keep playing and listen to it at the same time. What makes this funny is that they had it so you could do it in the code, but gated the player from it for some design reason xD

I remember one of the Dead Space games let’s you press a button to play audio logs you just picked up.

In games that allow audio over gameplay I usually hang around in the room I've been searching in in case moving on triggers anything, never a probl5for me. As you said let people play the game how they wamt

Here's a thought, game designers... Don't put your audio logs that close to important cutscenes and dialogue moments. If you put a 60 second audio log 20 seconds away from a vital scene then maybe redesign your level layout a bit.

I was going to make a comment bringing up System Shock 2 and then you went and brought it up yourself. It's been 20 years since I played the game and I still have strong memories of hiding in a corner terrified to move because I could hear one of those bloody psychic monkeys nearby. I love how the mini-games were all inexplicably pig-based.

The idea of sam fisher in the last splinter cell game, pulling out that smart phone he had, and playing RAID shadow legends while waiting for the alert level to go bad down has me rolling.

Sonic Frontiers is guilty of this too. If you want to hear the Egg Memos that flesh out Eggman and Sage’s relationship, not only do have to grind for fishing tokens to buy them, but you have to look them up in the Fish-O-Pedia, which makes no logical sense for them to be there, given the whole fishing thing is an optional thing for resource grinding. It would have made more sense for a bunch of to be at each of the Eggman camps. I personally like Frontiers, but that’s one of the game’s weird quirks that hold it back from true greatness.

I wonder why designers never tried this: what if during a quiet part of the game the Protagonist just automatically starts the next audiolog collected to fill the dead air?

Arguably, the banter of modern games like God of War Ragnarok is the spiritual sister of the audio log seeing as how they fulfil largely the same purpose, that being fleshing out the characters and/ or the world.

Idea for audio logs interrupting main events. have them play when you initially pick them up, but have them be in a side menu that you can close and still have the audio log play for replaying them/playing them after the story event. Hell even add a bookmark feature or a fast forward/rewind feature so that you can get to where you want to in said log

It's like Yahtzee knows what my counterarguments are going to be before I do.

Yahtzee, if you're reading this, maybe your next video essay could be on how games keep fumbling when it comes to comedic writing (see High on Life and Forspoken as the most recent examples)

This was the main reason why the patient interviews in Arkham asylum were my favorite collectables.

The whole time I was thinking about how Unknown Worlds did their audio logs in Subnautica completely right and exactly the way Yahtzee described it when talking about how to do it right

I absolutely agree with this. I’d even go the extra step and have it play in the game world. So if you’re sneaking, the guard would be like “what the fuck is that radio playing? Who’s there?” And if you get stuck in combat and don’t want the player to miss audio, have the radio fly off the character and start hissing with static every other encounter or something. You hired writers and voice actors - why skimp on the creativity when implementing? I’m 100% with you on all of this, Yahtzee.

If the audiologs start playing when you pick them up, you can simply not place audiologs one room away from the important character scene.

I've been playing System Shock Remake, and seeing this, I realized how much I like being able press (or hold) a button to play the auto log I just picked up, so I can keep wandering the room I'm in, picking stuff it up and vaporize it for money, and defend myself if something ugly approaches.

On the topic of crouching behind cover in a stealth game and waiting for a guard to turn around - I’ve been thinking about a time control mechanic for games like the new Hitman trilogy. One where you can fast-forward and rewind time, cause there’s nothing like missing a very time-constrained window of opportunity and then having to wait 5-10 minutes in one spot for another one.

Unless it's Returnal. Because the audio logs in Returnal are incredible.

Magic here: you actually can listen to the audio log out of the menu, just play it there then close the menu(using "tab" key in PC, "option" for playstation maybe) And it brings new problem: first, whenever you want to use that menu for I dunno, inventory maybe? You will have to close that audio log which will stop it from continue playing and manually navigate back to the inventory screen; Second, dead space as it's father and a game that release about 20 years ago, is capable to let you play the audio log when picking it up. "Devs from dead space" haha

I love listening to audio logs IF I can do so while playing the game. They should auto start on pickup and also have a button to pause/stop them in case we need to focus on playing.

My fav audio logs and music is mgsv because you have big stretches of forest or desert To explore and it gives like a podcast through a hike

I'm suprised so many people like audio logs in any form whatsoever

Personally I'm actually quite fond of Naoto but she shows up way too late such that by the time she's romancable most people are already committed to Chie

LOLed at the imp using a pomegranate speech balloon over a PoP cutscene!

The moment I tend to like recreating in Fallout 4 sometimes is listening to the one soldier's audio log as I don power armor for the first time. It hits something different.

for how much yahtzee claims to not be a weeaboo he sure makes a lot of excuses to tell you about his favourite waifu

Playing an audio log over a cutscene? Easy, if a level has an important cutscene don’t put any audio logs in it, or at least put them far enough away from the trigger point that they should finish before the player gets there. If the player goes into the menu and starts one up on their own, well you the designer can’t control that. Its on them.

3:15 - Well, was there any audio logs some poor bastard put his heart into writing?

I agree with this so hard. Although I must be one of the select few who can't pay attention to dialog in the midst of combat. I think that's why I have zero recollection of the events of Borderlands 2. I swear, Handsome Jack would only ever get on the comm as soon as you were getting swarmed. I just can't remember any of it

"I accept the consequence of my own actions" is not a sentiment you hear that often from mainstream audiences. I'd be willing to bet that many devs agree but the way these things function is largely a product of focus testing that caters to the lowest common denominator and/or time and budget constraints. I suspect this was the cast with combat in Callisto too, which has the bones of a more complex dodge-based melee system but appears to have had all the actual mechanics sanded off - they either ran out of resources or it tested badly with audiences, bc there's no way something that shite could have been the intended outcome.

The first and still best audio log implementation i found was Halo 3 ODST. Its all one continuous narrative, you can play it immediately or store it, play it as you do gameplay or watch it as they even had the decency to give some visuals if you wanted to stick around in the menu screen.

I was playing Doom 3 yesterday, and besides you having to dig through a menu to find what you picked up, it actually allowed the audio to keep playing out of menu. It was surprisingly refreshing for a game so ancient.

Glad you brought up System Shock, because the timing on those audio logs, e-mails and occasional radio communications was usually something that they actually put some thought into. First audio log in System Shock 2? Tells you immediately that there's something off about throwing some grunt (you) into cryosleep and then gives you the code to the door. Most communications you get from other characters tell you something about the area you're in and usually give you a moment to take stock of the area you're in, what you've got to do next, and how you're going to go about doing it. There's a LOT of e-mails and audio logs in that game, but there's very little story for story's sake. Even the guy rambling about virtual hookers tells you he left his nanites in the holosuite. It's not just something that might be useful, it's usually short enough to explore the environment you're in without running into too much trouble.

There are also pacing issues when game indicates I have things to search. So then it becomes about searching collectibles in expense of what storytellers want you to do. Rush to the next story part. So many scenes in video games where I'm supposed to control whatever character to chase someone and then I just turn around to check if there are something to collect first.

I guess Jacob wasn't the guy that came up with that in Dead Space, one of the best features.

I was missing Zero Punctuation yesterday, really looking forward to the yearly 'Best, Worst & Blandest' list, so this is a nice compensation to tide me over until next week.

I replayed Dead Space recently, and that game makes use of both audio logs and text logs. Audio logs would play on pickup, but text logs required going into the inventory (which doesn't pause the game) and reading it. Since part of Dead Space's horror design was you were never sure when a monster was going to drop out of a vent, finding a text log sucked all the tension out of the room because the developers knew that if you were rooting for a text log in your inventory, you weren't prepared to deal with a sudden threat, so finding a text log meant you weren't going to get jumped. Of course, later entries in the series didn't follow this rule which led to me stashing the logs to read later and just never doing it.