Contextual UX: Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore (ATL)

UX is not just about making menu look good or enabling game play mechanics, it’s about about one thing: Psychology. It’s about making the player feel safe, powerful, and smart. If your player feels like an idiot because they forgot who "Duke Von Boring-Name" is, you’ve already lost.

Active Time Lore (ATL). Is essentially Amazon X-Ray for video games. You can pause the game and a contextual dynamic menu of current useful information about the world of the game and people in it can be viewed.

  • Does it ruin the surprise? No, it only tells you what you already saw 🙈.

  • Is it hard to make? Yes, it's like writing a second, tiny book for the game ✍️.

  • Do all games need it? Only the ones with really big, confusing stories 📚.

  • Why do we like it? Because it makes us feel smart without doing homework 🧠

"Not knowing why certain people are here... players will just give up on the story at that moment, and we didn't want that." - Naoki Yoshida

"If you pause before a character says a line it won't give you the information in that line, but the minute after... you'll get a different entry." - Koji Fox

"We wanted to make things clear for players... and [ensure it] wouldn't take them out of the game." - Naoki Yoshida

The player is in A high-stakes political meeting. The player holds the Touchpad. The screen blurs, and 3-4 "Cards" pop up with portraits and 2-sentence bios.

  • The Reality: In a 100+ hour RPG, your player’s memory is a leaking bucket.

  • UX: Most games force you to quit to a out of game "Journal" UI menu to remember a name. That’s a flow-killer. If your player has to go to a Wiki to understand your plot, your game isn't a story; it's a textbook.

  • The solution: The ATL screen changes. Before a plot twist, a character is "Friend." After the twist, the card updates to "Traitor." Progressive Disclosure at its finest. You aren't dumping a 400-page Codex on them. You are giving them the exact page they are currently reading.


Just on Amazon Prime Video the X-Ray feature shows the actors on screen right now, ATL only shows the lore relevant to the current conversation.


⚠️ Consideration

  • The Update Trap: Keeping these cards updated for every scene is a massive dev burden. If a card shows "Old Info" by mistake, the player stops trusting the system.

  • The "Crutch" Effect: When writers know ATL exists, they can get lazy. They stop writing natural dialogue because "the player can just read the card." UX is a tool, not a replacement for good writing.

  • Text accessible: Text info need to be visually accessible. If that text is size 8 font it doesn't exist.


Good game UX can be about making the player feel powerful but it can also be about making them feel powerless.

Here is another article how horror games use UX against you.
https://www.iabdi.com/designblog/2025/5/22/menu-anxiety-how-horror-games-weaponize-interface-design-against-players

Conclusion

The "Safety Net" Confidence: When a player knows the ATL is there, they actually pay more attention to the cutscene. Why? Because the "anxiety" of forgetting a plot point is gone. They are more relaxed, more immersed, and more likely to finish your game.

Abdi Jama