Ingame encyclopedias

What are your opinions when games include encyclopedias (or intel/data/info/diary depending of how they call it)? Sometimes it to let you check tutorials, some other times to check lore or weapons details, some others are just historical facts…

Do you enjoy it? Do you actually care about it? How do you like encyclopedias in games?
I'm thinking about adding one to my own game so I would like some feedback about good examples.

I enjoy it when the codex or whatever you wish to call it is something the character actively adds to. Pic related for instance is what I mean.

sure a bit of lore and backstory can't hurt but a whole encyclopedia is just too much. if I wanted to read a book, I'd read a book.

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I appreciate the effort when developers write up extra back story like that. The first Mass Effect did this really well, adding a bunch of small details and some cool scientific data about the game universe.

There's a dungeon crawler called Mordor, with a small description of every monster with stats tracked about it.
Mordor 2, which was never finished, also features unique art for most items/monsters, as well as flavor text for everything too>>14269824

Bestiaries used to be my shit. I would spend more time reading through all the descriptions of items and monsters than I would playing the actual game.
Lately that sense of discovery has been muted. I don't enjoy them as much as I used to, but I still appreciate their presence.

Avalon Code revolves in part around compiling the encyclopedia-esque Book of Prophecy by "Code Scanning" whatever you can (people, enemies, items, weapons, armor, etc), as well as visiting everywhere in the world (every "screen" gets its own set of map pages). While this is useful for gameplay in letting you duplicating items, weapons, and armor for your own use, as well as manipulate things to your advantage via the acquired codes, it also comes with a ton of (mostly) optional flavor text in the pages, giving backstory, enemy stats and weaknesses, people's likes and dislikes, etc. Main drawbacks being that despite being an encyclopedia, while there is a table of contents and bookmarks you can move around, there's no index for directly jumping to a given page, and there's no quick way to find what page has what code.

The autopsies from Eternal Darkness are bloody amazing. That's mainly due to the character that narrates them though.
I like encyclopedias in vidya, it gives me something else to complete and also sheds light on the lore. It helps give games character, which is pretty lacking in todays industry.

Might as well embed.

Yeah, the narration for those was superb. Maximillian's VA was great. Shame Hootkins died a few years after voicing him, and didn't do much video game voicing in general (namely Dingodile and Max).

Realizing that every book can be read is one of the magical feelings of playing an ElderScrolls game for the first time. Short books or articles that give advice in a game can be a great way to teach or expand the story without a tutorial or exposition dump.
Mass effect had a fully voiced codex that was expanded the furthe you got and to which you could listen while doing other tasks. I forgot if the sequels had one and I don't feel like checking.

Pikmin 2's Piklopedia and Treasure Hoard are pretty great. In addition to Olimar's thoughts on each enemy and item, the Treasure Hoard has the ship's sales pitch, and the Piklopedia has unlockable recipes for the enemies.


It doesn't help that, aside from recipes/titles that require them, the only relevant codes are elemental codes (for making enemies/your weapon elemental), stone/metal codes (for making enemies/your weapon strong), and ill codes (for making your enemies/weapons shit). I know its a DS game and not terribly complex (and Judgement Link is too over powered) but it would have been nice if the brown or purple codes were used for changing enemy behaviors or other personality traits. Too bad it will never get a sequel and the developers are consistently trapped in mobile hell.

Yeah, it's a bit of a rough game, but one with a neat concept. And Matrix Software actually pulled themselves out of mobile-port-bitch-hell the last few years. Latest games for actual systems they've made being Omega Labyrinth and Omega Labyrinth Z (the latter of which has shockingly been picked up to come west).

Wish there was some upload of the opening for Avalon Code in visual quality higher than the DS' screen could output.

Age of Mythology had an interesting one with bits of history for every technology, unit, building, god and natural resource.

Even the cheaty joke units had good descriptions, too

Here's my wishlist for Avalon Code improvements (since we'll never have a thread about it and I'm probably not going to make a video or article about it)

Forgot about the Judgment Link sharing the "inspect" button. So much attempting to knock nothing into the air when you're looking for non-obvious points of interest on a given screen to record. Either give it it's own button or keep them on the button, but disable the ability to attempt a link if there's no enemies left (former would probably be the more preferable).

Judgement Link is just really questionable as a mechanic. Instead of going in to combat and getting basically nothing but maybe some points for your book, Judgment Link
The only reason you wouldn't want to use Judgement Link is because Judgement Link is really boring and has kind of obnoxious music, or if you really wanted to use the kind of shallow combat (which is more interesting than Judgment Link). Even having a few basic combos with the weapons could be interesting. One weapon type could even get enemies in the air so you could juggle them yourself. Maybe you could make one weapon type stun before you can launch them. It would give you a reason to use anything other than two of the most powerful weapon of your preferred type in both hands. Doesn't need to be great, just competent.

Yeah, I'll admit it needed some work. And as for Judgment Link, I mainly wound up using it to restore MP on the go so I could use other things as need be.

That's fair, you're less autistic than me, hah. The fact that managing code takes MP is a little questionable, but since that's kind of a big deal I'm not sure I mind it having a cost. Now that I think of it, some non-screen-clearing magic would be fun to toy with. Since modern handhelds have a D-pad and a stick, the stick can be used for movement while the D-pad has four elemental spell options on it.

I like it when it's an integrated part of the game, and not just a meta perspective of characters in the pause menu.
Dragon age Origins did it well, with the codex being part of the journal and looking like an actual handwritten entry. It also didn't have any pictures and instead had a single quote for flavor text, which I think was nice.

It's pretty useful for things like that, but utterly worthless when used to explain the majority story or background in an insane "Read not tell" approach, fuck you FF13.

Best

AoM encyclopedia was comfy as fuck, I literally spent entire afternoons reading it when I was a kid

Xenosaga 1 and 3 had pretty big databases.

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Haven't played Xenosaga myself yet. Did 2 have a smaller one in comparison, or somehow have none at all?


Of course, I have no clue how closely the western Pokedex entries follow the Japanese ones, so maybe that was something the western RBY team came up with that stuck around.

There is no Vulpix with a single white tail in the games either.

These are my favorite parts of games if done well.

Pharaoh had descriptions of Ancient Egypt. It was accurate historically too.

Jagged Alliance 2 had a story for every mercenary. And in fact they had an effect on gameplay as well - for example certain mercenaries would dislike some others, or get drunk and lose stats.

Pokedex sucks - it's full of lies and shit that doesn't affect gameplay or even contradicts it.

True, but starting out in the series, you couldn't breed Pokemon either to begin with (leaving any Vulpix caught in RBY to have already matured some). And when the series started to allow for that, there's no aging involved (thus no multiple sprites). In retrospect, it does seem like a description that ought to have been changed as of that option.


So is the guy that created it.

I've actually learned a lot of mythology from it. Very nice.

I really love games with in-game encyclopedias, especially RPGs.
It's an easier way for devs to immerse the player in the world/lore they created.

Even simple things like monster descriptions are good enough for me.
The in-depth ones like in those RTS games like AoM and AoE2 got me interested in reading about the real thing.

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Well, they're more convenient than out-of-game encyclopedias, but by the same token - you don't get a free encyclopedia out of it. I'd say out of game encyclopedias are better, since it's more fun flipping through an actual book to find the solution to a puzzle than it is to flip through menus, and you can use it for other things outside of the game.

Except these days you're lucky to even get a physical manual with your game outside of an even more expensive CE (though I think most of those these days, if they have a printed book, are just an artbook or walkthrough, and leave what manual there is to be digital), assume the game even sees a physical release at all, even if you were to buy a CE ("Game not included").

Brigador has a good one. But that's because because there's where all the LORE is.

They also have it written by in-universe characters, which makes for fun entries like pic related

Prism just so happens to be the hands down best agrav. Good choice.