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Are Game Guides Dying?
Thanks to GameSpot for their guest GameSpotting feature discussing whether the print-based game guide is a thing of the past. According to the piece: "As long as there have been games, there have been game guides to help players beat them. Over the years they have evolved into slick, glossy (and thin) books with tons of valuable information and high-quality screenshots and maps... Guides make tough games easier. But are they worth it?" The author references a videogame-store friend laughing: "Why buy a game guide when I can just download the FAQ for free?" Is there any new presentation of paper-based game guides that might make you tempted to pay for them, or are they truly dying out for good?
buying a guide for RTS games is probably an absolute waste. Blizzard games, for example, go through major revisions before release, so that the artwork on the box is usually out of date by the time the game goes gold (as boxes are done months in advance) (siege tanks shooting battle cruisers on the SC box, for example). i imagine books are on a similar schedule, so the information in such a guide would be useless.
then you get into the whole realm of strategies which are very much an evolutionary thing, changing dramatically over time, particularly with each balance change introduced.
Another great advantage of Gamefaqs is that there are typically many different faqs/walkthroughs for the same game. I often find it useful to read a couple of different authors' explanations of a difficult part of a game. If one author offers a confusing or difficult solution, I can simply jump to another faq to look for a better explanation or a more elegant tip. With a print guide, if you don't get what the author is trying to have you accomplish (or if the proposed solution is difficult or klugy), you're screwed.
"The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program." - Niven
The old Infocom games had the best hint books...
They used special pens to reveal hidden answers so you couldn't accidentally read something you didn't want to.
There were some great red herring questions to keep people honest, too.
Of course, they are all Online now, too...
I buy game guides for most of the console games I purchase. Not so much for myself, but for my daughter. Guides for Gran Turismo 3, and the FIFA games have helped her get up to speed in a game quickly. Hard to read a FAQ on the PC from across the house she says. Since I wait for them to go on sale, the cost is negligible for me.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
It's not so much that the content is available for free as it is that the guides cost on the order of $20+ USD and that's quite expensive! I really don't care about the glossy print nor artwork on a guide. It means nothing to me. The ASCII format is wonderful because I can format it if need be and I can search it easily too.
I have console gaming friends and I would always be printing out GameFAQ guides and cheat codes for them. Once they found out they could just ask me for the content, they stopped buying the crazy guides. Half the time they are so gaudy you have trouble reading the damn things due to lack of contrast!. i.e. Dark page with dark print or very tiny print.
I use GameFAQ constantly! I generally try not to use it until I've beaten the game on my own but sometimes you get stuck on something really stupid and can't figure out how to get past it. I look up what I need and I go back to the game. This mostly happens with poorly designed levels that are darn near impossible to understand without a guide.
It's possible, perhaps even likely, that games companies will become the dominant producers of guides. Why should they let third-parties profit off the back of their hard work? Plus of course there are two revenue streams available to them, not just the one available to third-parties...
1. Selling the guide on its own.
2. At a later date, when sales of the game and guide have dried up, bundling them together (perhaps with a DVD or soundtrack CD) and selling them as special editions, gift packs, etc. Third-party guide publishers generally don't have this option available to them, so the shelf life of a guide is relatively short.
George Broussard of 3D Realms has already talked about preventing third-parties from publishing guides to Duke Nukem Forever, by not allowing them to use screenshots. (Sure they can still publish the guide, freedom of speech 'n' all that, but who's going to buy a guide without screenshots?) That would suggest 3DR intends to produce their own guide at some point, and if a big developer like 3DR starts the bandwagon rolling then we can expect to see a lot of other developers piling up on the back of it. And quite right too.
It's just another way to fleece the customers. And the fact is, FAQ's evolve, the printed guides you have to pay $20 for are obsolete by the time you leave the store in many cases.
When I bought Warcraft 3, I bought the strategy guide as well. Mainly because it was on special, and I've always condemned them, but figured it was about time to see if I was correct in my disgust.
And I was. The guide is mostly useless. There's guides to the single player games, stats for all the units etc... The ONLY part of the guide that is any use if the 6 pages devoted to multiplayer strategy. The stats are kind of interesting, but as soon as Blizzard released a patch, it's game over for the stats being useful. Now, with Frozen Throne out, the build times and costs have changed, which means most of the guide is now useless.
On GameFAQ's you can find a wealth of information, and it's fluid. When Blizzard change costs etc... The author can update it.
Game Guides are a horrible idea whose time is coming to an end thankfully. The question remains though as to whether the game companies will do the decent thing and start providing a decent manual, or if they'll just give up and essentially let the fans write the manuals.
If you bought any game in the last few years, think back to how many came with a decent manual. Very few I bet.
I am not a big fan of guides in most cases since to me, getting a solution without finding it yourself defeats the entire purpose of playing the game in the first place. I do however purchase guides under certain circumstances. Some RPGs for example have just absurd amounts of complexity and having some charts to organize information can be welcome indeed.
Dark Cloud 2 springs to mind. If you have never played it, the game boasts a number of very deep side games and a robust item crafting system that could take you years to completely chronicle yourself. Having a reference for fish breeding, and inventing can save me from a lot of boring repetitive experimentation. While I think the fishing is neat, I have no desire to spend 40 hours doing it. Am I cheating? I guess but I prefer to think of it as speeding through something I don't find as entertaining in favor of spending more time beating monsters with my wrench.
Most games however are not this complex, A typical FPS has you wandering through a fairly straight-forward maze shooting and killing things and looking for some way to open a door at the end of it. Do I really need a guide to tell me that in order to finish the Last stage of Halo I need to drive really fast and not hit obstructions? Is it any mystery that I am supposed to shoot everybody I see when playing Red Faction 2?
Are guides dying? Not anytime soon. While the store charges you $15-$20 a piece for them, keep in mind that they only pay about a dollar a piece from the publisher so the huge markup balances any losses incurred from unsold stock. Besides, every on-line FAQ that appears in the first week of a game's release is plagiarized straight out of a guide anyway. If guides were gone, the FAQs would shrink up as well.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
But sometimes the ASCII is better. For example, in GTA: Vice City there are hidden packages to be found. I had the print guide version, but all it shows is a screen shot and a general description of where it is (e.g., on top of building X). But the GameFaqs guide actually made it easier to find things. Instead of just saying it's on top of building X, it told you how to get there, which is sometimes not obvious.
I think most everything has been covered. Online FAQs have the limitation of (a) being text-only, and (b) not being able to start the FAQ until they get the game in stores. However, they have the advantage of being EXTREMELY easy to update. As a corollary, if it's a good writer, mistakes will be corrected fairly quickly.
I think some of the posters here have forgotten the REAL reason game guides won't die out any time soon: tech savvy. When I was 6 years old, I wouldn't know enough about the Internet to go looking for a game guide, especially if I wasn't very adept at finding things on the Internet.
Game guide publishers still have two very big things going for them: impulse buyers (read: parents and small children) and low-tech appeal. Searching through a 100KB+ text document for one paragraph can be rather difficult for some. (I should know, people STILL send me questions about my Oracle of Ages guide that could be answered with a simple copy/paste.) But flipping through 108 pages is comparatively easier when you can look for the big section headings.
In other words, online game guides are like Linux. Sure, they're free and (sometimes) better than the expensive stuff, but it scares off a lot of people. That's why Windows... er, game guide publishers have nothing to worry about.
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