How Strategy Guides Affected Gaming

Heartless Gamer writes "2old2play has another great story up looking into how games have become more complicated due to strategy guides. From the article; "Strategy guides have affected gaming by making games harder for all of us. That's right, it's not a typo — strategy guides have created more difficult games. Lend me your eyes and attention spans, and I'll explain. Admittedly, it may be a rambling explanation, but bare with me and we should get there eventually." Ya know I always find a strategy guide for things like Final Fantasy just because some puzzles are just ridiculous and I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters. But there really is somethign to this.

Comments

Benefit of Strategy Guides

[Innova]

The reason I use them is because I appreciate how much time is put into making a modern game. I want to make sure that I don't miss any parts of the game.

Usually I will play through the game once on my own, but then use the strategy guide to go through a second time and hit all the side quests.

Re:Can't write a procedure guide

[w33t]

That is a good point.

But a good deal of what makes a story great are the characters.

Perhaps with good enough AI the idea of writing a "story" will be less about the story-line, and more about the detailed crafting of individual personalities.

This way only half the "story" work is being done by the algoritm. The "drivers" of the story would be exquisitely crafted by writers/designers.

Think about Han Solo, for example. I think he's a fantastic character, and many many stories can stem simply from him as an entity and from the decisions he would make and thus the situations he would find himself in.

I could see then a game where you know the attitude of certain characters, and get to know them as "people". But perhaps with good enough AI, quality procedural stories can emerge simply on account of the strength of the character design.

In fact, I think in this kind of environment where individual actions and decisions affect the "story" that the players own personality would likely have a large impact on the flow of the game. This type of impact would be much subtler than choosing the A-D answers from a menu which make your character simply become more "evil" or "good". The ability to have your personality impact a story would make the game have many shades of personal depth that a human writer could only achieve if he or she knew you personally.

Writing this kind of software?...well, that's what I believe theoretical physicists refer to as, "an engineering problem" ;)