I've been playing a lot of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel’s Midnight Suns recently, and spending far more time becoming friends with superheroes than I have smashing skulls of bad guys. It's a pleasant surprise to see 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the ♑character side of the game so well supported, a quality backed up by the depth offered to the world-building. There are journals to find scattered about the place, as well as excerpts from books to read in the library, and a constantly active social media platform that also in💯cludes private messag🉐es between heroes. There is so much extra writing going into this game, whether it be world building, descriptions of quests and experiments, or flavour text on the various upgrades and attacks. I don't read any of it, but I am so glad it exists.
The work in filling up the social media platform especially will not have been a task of hours, but instead days, probably weeks, with lots of pushback and workshopping in-between. I didn't really read it, but that does not mean it is not worth it. It adds a rich depth to the game, and when I get quest related private messages, I have a little scroll and flick through some of these posts. The world feels so much more alive when these things live in the background.
I don't think anyone expected that many (if any) players would sit and read every single message every time a new one appeared. If you did, you are setting your expectations too high for a medium where players skip cutscenes then complain about the plot. The realists among these developers probably thought few people would bother and even fewer would thank them. Well, I am. Thank you for your work. I didn't read it, but thank you anyway.
This is not a joke - there is a lot that goes into video games that I don't pay attention to or use, but I'm still glad it's there. I've written a lot in praise of the game's character writing and battle mechanics, but the less glitzy parts of Midnight Suns are just as important as the ones that stand on their foundation. And of course, this is so much larger than Midnight Suns. That's just the most recent game to make me appreciate the things I never appreciated. Pretty much every RPG you've ever played, as well as hundreds of games in other genres, has this text hidden away in codexes and diaries and email inboxes, and while you've probably never played a game and came away thinking the fake email to HR from one of the goblin captains was a high point, they're a crucial part of making it all seem real.
It's often said that making a video game is like conjuring magic. It exists as nothing, and piece by piece, line by line, numbers and letters are strung together on computers until a video game pops out. While there is a lot of work behind the scenes in other industries, music can be boiled down to a person singing into a microphone, and movies into people talking in front of a camera. There isn't an alternative in video games. It exists as magic.
And yet the most powerful thing in the most devastating games is the oldest form of media we have in the world - telling stories. The magic is propped up by the words underneath it all. The background writing, where the deepest wells of characters are plumbed and the most revealing lore exists, is not a flashy or even noticeable part of the overall magic, but it's magic all the same. Thank you, game developers, for everything I ignore.