At any given moment in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16, you are never more than a button hold away from having your most pressing questions answered. That’s thanks to Active Time Lore, a new mechanic that makes it extremely easy to get a primer (or reminder) on all the information you want to know, or at least feel you really should know, about♑ Valisthea and the large cast of characters that inhabits it.
You can access it at any time by hold▨ing down the DualSense touchpad to bring up circular thumbnails for each of the elements in that scene that you might have questions about. Click on them, and it gives you a quick rundown about whatever topic you’re interested in, plus a picture so you have a visual represen🌺tation of whatever the words are describing.
A few games have previously offered this kind of in-the-moment glossary. I first remember hearing about it when Pyre did it back in 2017, allowing you to hover over an underlined word in a sentence and read a quick definition of what it meant. And Obsidian’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pentiment had the same system. These games were significantly smaller in scale than Final Fantasy 16, and that's why Square Enix's approach seems like an evolution in the kind of game this can be applied to.
In Pyre and Pentiment, this kind of thing was easier to implement because the narrative doesn’t move on until you press a button to advance to the next text box. But, in Final Fantasy 16 (and most triple-A releases), cutscenes move at their own pace. You can pause the game, but you don't have time to move a cursor over words in the captions. So, Final Fantasy 16 implements a different version of the same idea, allowing you to pull the Active Time Lore tab up at any time, even during a cutscene. It's a smart tweak that makes the Pyre system work for triple-A.
Though I've never played a game with a system like FF16's Active Time Lore, it did remind me of UI I've seen outside of video games — it's a lot like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Amazon Prime's X-Ray system. Amazon owns IMDB, and it uses that brand synthesis to make Amazon Prime's user interface significantly more informative than its competition. If you're watching a series on Prime and spot an actor you recognize but whose name you can't place, you can pause the show and find out that, yes, that is Haley Joel Osment, the little kid from The Sixth Sense, all grown up and with a big beard in The Boys. Everyone looks that kind of stuff up on their phone, but Prime builds the Google search it anticipates you'll perform into the product itself.
When we play lore heavy games, we often do the same thing. We're not usually wondering where we've seen an actor before, but we may be wondering what a proper noun means or — because games are a medium that we experience over multiple sittings — we may just not remember a story detail or who exactly a character is. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green had a fix for this 20 years ago, but it's still rare to see recaps implemented in modern games. Since Active Time Battle has cracked that particular problem, I hope every triple-A developer rips it off.