Best in game journal/notes system in an RPG?

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
KotOR was very good for this sort of thing because recorded each every bit of dialogue and you could review it all if there was a point you missed.

Divinity as well. *Very* handy when solving riddles !

The Jade Empire journal also recorded dialogues; you could read or re-listen to what had been said… quite handy.

Div Div. Very good system.

Definitely DivDiv.

Also like Sacred's, especially the map system. The only thing it's missing is user notes. Not that you need them in Sacred as it's such a straight-forward game, but as a system it would be the best ever, I think, if it just had user notes.

yes divine divinity had a good journal among other things. sadly i found the ghastly amount of broken quests to be akin to watching a marvelous theather performance when suddenly the curtains close in act ii and when they open half of the cast lie crumpled on the floor like expired automatons.

The patched version of Morrowinds journal got the job done very well. In almost all games I miss the option to actually add my own journal entries - this would be good both for utility - to help my memory along in between game sessions, as well as for roleplaying purposes - a MW mod actually added that option. The same applies for automaps: since Ultima Underworld, I haven't seen a similiarly well annotatable map again.

I find automaps to be much better than journals on average. Baldurs Gate II is for instance quite good with landmarks for sights in the cities that should be well known (its frustrating to search for shops and such), but I felt they sometimes relied too much on the map rather than giving hints to where a place is (for instance it doesnt make much sense for the player to automatically know where Valygar's home is, one should have to ask around for that info, in a way this is like Oblivions compass on a smaller scale).

Even though its not an automap I like the realism of Gothic's system where one is given a map rather than magically automapping… But that system could sure use manual annotations.

As for journals I realise that it's nice to have the option to just record any dialog into the journal by clicking a button during the actual event. Some games incorporate this, but I dont recall which ones…