Item Stories
I haven’t seen a single post (albeit I haven’t dug too deep) on the storywriting in any of the games. My standpoint comes mainly from RoR2 and I have read almost item description in the game and nearly every log, i at least skimmed the rest, and i am always taken aback by a surprising story behind every item. Almost every pick up item has a little story the game says is a Data Echo, others will just have a blatant story attached with little formatting (the details on decrypter used, dates, data scrapers, etc) does anyone read these?
Some awesome examples i find are
- Gasoline: the story goes through two survivors of the contact light and how they are fueling a fire with gasoline to cook some monster meat they got
- Shaped Glass: Just like the trend of lunar items suggest, its a concept told by some higher deity. The piece explains that as you fold something over itself, it will be twice as strong, but also be twice as weak.
- ATG Missile Launcher: This one tells the tale of a fighter, armed with the ATG and it tells how he manages hordes of enemies with it and his trusty shotgun.
It’s not just Items either, i love the rest of the descriptions for the characters to enemies and the areas are in depth too! (I really only have examples that i remember from survivors though)
- Engineer: Engi’s description tells the story and situation of what is happening on core habitat planets, AKA home, how ever since cybernetic enhancement became so common and overused that the thought of “where does the machine end and the human begin” started an entire movement, and engineer is one of those fighters, who chooses not to use cybernetic enhancements to hold onto that humanity, ironic for an engineer.
- R3X: It is described here that R3X, just like Mul-T is one of many standard robot models, R3X was designed to care for plants, the one on its back is that of a genetically modified (described as flawed) cabbage. R3X began wandering around the habitat ship with the plant as the crew felt bad for him because “It’s just trying so hard to keep it alive” to the captain replying to shut him down for going against protocol, and leaving hydroponics
- Acrid: (Love this one a lot but i try little bias) Acrid is acquired from beating the void fields, so it is a deity telling us a story, it describes the fields and it as a quantized system, saying something is off and “leaking” and then describes acrid in the final quote of “we imprisoned something that could not be contained”
I, however, love all of the survivors descriptions, ive read all the ones I’ve beaten with, Heretic is a good one but I recommend going into that one blind.
My point is that I’ve never seen anyone commenting on not only how good this writing seems, but that IT ALL CONNECTS, its not telling the story of the game, but the universe and timeline it takes place in, and I’m baffled that, for a game that tells story similar to Dark Souls and other titles like it, nobody really argues or tries to put things like these story elements together, and yes i do see all these like a puzzle, each a flat, 5 sided piece to a huge picture that I think is worth exploring.
Check em out, and anyone that does read, what one’s your favorite?