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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.
strategy guides have created more difficult games.
I remember those, form the early 80's. When you had to buy Invisi-Clues to solve InfoCom games. It struck me that some of these puzzles were so far from obvious you were going to fail without the booklets and their magic markers (which made the clues visible.) Why would I put this object in there? Where's the in-game hint there I should try such a thing? After all, there were probably 1.07e22 possible combinations...
I don't remember a strategy guide for Space Invaders, but one for patterns to Pac-Man was a near best seller.
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.
Well, you seem to have hit the nail on the head with the video games -- you're getting pretty poor return on your entertainment dollar if you beat the game the day you bought it, thanks to a guide which tells you where to get the Spear and Magic Helmet you need and where the wabbit is hiding so you can kill him. Everyone is in a big hurry these days. Some is just impatience ("I want my reward, now!") and some of it is competitive ("George has already got the magic carpet from the Genie? Crap! I need to catch up to him!") I thought a Simpson's episode did a bit of fable (complete with moral) where Bart wanted some video game incredibly bad, then when he could just about get the game, some rude kid shows up in a shop and tells his mother the game is passe and he doesn't want it, he wants something else now. There's something about traveling in the herd which makes people need to succeed and buy these things.
I'm so happy to be out of most of these newer games and having lots of fun with old games (even infocom invisiclues can now be found in the internet :-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have no interest in trial & erroring for an hour when I'd rather kill monsters. But there really is somethign to this.
Well, it's clear that you're not spending the time working on your typing skills.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It's hard to take someone's comments seriously when they display such an obvious lack of spelling and grammar.
Or are we supposed to be doing this naked? That's an M-Rating for sure.
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Something must have lost balance over the years becasue I remember playing Monkey Island and getting stuck a few times, but not enough to have to go and read a guide.
Maybe it's a mix of information availability and the wrong balance of game developers toward this issue.
The readily available information out there, not just strategy guides but informal stuff on the Internet, has helped drive increased complexity in strategy games. However, the market has as well. People want more challenge, not rehashed games over and over. Unfortunately this has also led to many games becoming needlessly complex IMO and focused on complicated game mechanics at the expense of storyline and overall gameplay.
Games with relatively simple rulesets and execution like Chess can, after all, be extremely challenging. Just layering on complexity is in many ways a cop out.
Well, it's clear that you're not spending the time working on your typing skills.
Well, that's what editors are for and why their paid the big bucks, eh?
oooohh, the Official Slashdot Editor Guide Odd, doesn't look like they've sold any copies, EVER
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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This is why I would like to see more procedurally generated games.
Games where the actual story is completely different - with different characters generated for each instance.
Imagine a murder-mystery game, for instance. Which takes place in an actual-sized city. Your character waits around the precinct until the call comes in. You travel to the murder scene and it's completely random what happened and how it happened.
In this case, no strategy guide could say, "you should always look for a knife or a gun" because the murder weapon could have been any physical object - instead of a particular "murder_enabled" object. Maybe the murderer used a microwave oven to bludgeon the victim.
A procedural AI would do it's best to cover its tracks, and would learn your particular style of deduction so that the next murderer is even more thorough at cleaning-up.
With the advent of a good physics engine and procedural map-generating algorithm you would have a completely different murder scene every time, in a completely new location.
This could apply to all kinds of games. RPGs where the decision interaction between nobles and generals would dictate political climates and trickle down to direct the individual actions of the NPC AIs.
I certainly hope that Spore is going to be the "Wolfenstein 3D" of the procedurally algorithmic games of the future.
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Most strategy guides are misnamed. They should call them "Spoiler Books" or something.
You don't learn strategy from strategy guides, you learn how to follow a walk-through. Where's the satisfaction in that?
Maybe I'm old-school, but I've never used a strategy guide for any game. If I can't beat the game without one, either I'm not as skilled/smart as I'd like to be, or there is a design flaw in the game. Both have been true with different games, and it's only the second possibility that really bothers me... especially when I lay out cash for a game.
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Ok it goes like this:
1) Make a game people like to play.
2) Toss in some incredibly hard puzzles that no sane person can figure out.
3) Sell the answers in a "Strategy Guide"
4) PROFIT!
Nothing like making your own market.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
This makes me feel old... erm... or something.
Stroller.
up up down down left right left right B A select (I have a brother) start!
I really think this is complete and utter BS. I can't remember a single designer on any game I have ever worked on even considering a strategy guide when it came to design. This just screams of another gaming site grasping at straws and posting a contrversial topic just to get hits and it worked.
I always thought that games got more complex because the game designers were brilliant at what they did. The real reason is because of all these stupid gaming guides. What's next? John Carmack is not Santa Claus?
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I think not being able to die in Monkey Island (and other Lucas adventures) was a big part of this. It limits the problem domain. In some of the Sierra adventures, if you hadn't done just the right thing early, you could literally be trapped with no way to proceed and no way of even knowing this was the case.
Space Quest 2 was the worst offender that I can recall. In the first scene of the game, if you don't notice a particular item and grab it, then at the end of the game you're screwed, with no idea why. You have to start over. From the beginning.
The LucasArts adventures were just so well-written and well-executed. Solvable but challenging puzzles and not being able to die are both aspects of this.
Come on, LucasArts, give us more!
Hate to klikk on the last /. story only to find that the story broke on digg, and when /. comes after, the servier is dugg down.
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"Fix it"
* Business meeting *
Suit 1: Hmm, not enough people are buying our strategy guides for our games. How can we make more money?
Suit 2: We could invest more time and money in our games to make a higher-quality product.
Suit 3: Shut up Tom, that idea is horrible.
Suit 1: Let's up the games' difficulty so people will be FORCED to buy our strategy guides! Brilliant!
* Act Two *
Suit 1: OK apparently our customers are starting to use an "Internet" to download FREE, unauthorized guides made by other customers. What's worse, the legal department informed me that what they are doing is completely legal. Now, we need to either find a way to take down this "Internet" thing or figure out how to change the legality of these guides. Ideas?
Suit 2: I think...
Suit 1: ...from anyone EXCEPT Tom?
----
Etc. OK it's a bit of a Dilbert spin, especially near the end, but I bet the first act happened for real SOMEWHERE.
Strategy guides could also contribute to laziness among game developers. It's hard to make a puzzle that is challenging, yet not too difficult. This is evident in all kinds of puzzle/adventure games. The Zork trilogy had some puzzles that even some very smart people I knew just couldn't crack. And in Final Fantasy VII, the developers made no attempt to put enough clues in the game to perform chocobo breeding. So if a game developer knows that a strategy guide is going to come out in a month or two, why put in the extra effort to tune all the puzzles? Someone else will release the guide, and players who are having trouble will just use it. It's a shame, though.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
I don't necessarily have anything against strategy guides, (in fact I find most I've gone through to be very enjoyable reads with high production values), I do fear they've had a direct effect at cheapening the actual content in game manuals. It seems like most pack-in manuals with games are not much more than installation guides/or control layouts. I know there are exceptions to the rule, but the days of comprehensive pack-in manuals seem in the past.
They'd never be able to do that without a strategy guide/walkthrough, nosireebobski.
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I personally thought games were getting extremely easy nowadays. I, for one, welcome more challenging games.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
At this point, the technology doesn't exist to do it well enough to keep it from getting repetitive. You just can't link things together with the subtlety and detail that a human can. So in games that do it (Freelancer would be an example) the variation actually makes it more rote. Sure no two missions are precisely the same, but they are all the same general thing.
It's going to take a lot more advances before there's the ability to generate compelling random missions.
Y'now: pixar made a movie about how you had to buy the book to beat Zurg. Since when is something news that was mainsteam entertainment years ago?
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Developers didn't really catch on the fact that strategy guides help sell games while generating a tidy profit themselves, but once they do, it is obvious that you must make your game hard/obscure enough for people to be buying the strategy guides. I don't like this game design because it's introducing complexity/difficulty for the sake of just doing it (to the players, anyway). Though with the availability of sites such as gamefaqs.com, at least you have a free way out of this mess.
Dreamfall is a bad example, since its actually by far one of the easiest adventure games around, only difficult part is the cave in chapter 5, but thats more due to the invincible trolls then due to the nature of the puzzle, rest of the game is more like an audio-book, then a normal adventure game since there simply aren't really much puzzles worth to talk about.
However I doubt that strategie guides had anything to do with the death of adventure games, for one simple reason getting stuck *SUCKS*. Its simply no fun, plain and simple. If I get stuck there is a very good chance that I simply drop the game and go do something else, especially when its the "I don't even know what I am doing wrong" kind of being stuck, which in adventure games it often ends up being. Strategie guides on the other side resolve the stuckiness and allow me to actually enjoy the game, so if anything they should have increased the enjoyment of adventure games. There is of course a danger of getting more out of a strategie guide then you want to, spoilers ain't no fun, but compared to being frustrated for days or weeks, its really a small payoff. Beside I had a strategie guide for every adventure since ZakMcKracken, so those aren't really anything new either.
The truth why adventure games died almost out (still rather alive over here in europe) is plain and simple: LucasArts stopped making them and there was nobody to step into their shoes. There simply weren't much great games around after LucasArts, there where still plenty of good ones, but almost nothing great, nothing that would drive the non-adventure crowed into the genre. And there of course also was no innovation. While every genre moved forward, the adventure game had its last jump back when ManiacMansion was released, after that almost 20 years of nothing, little jump again with Myst, but that was more a sidestep then a leap forward. Only recently Fahrenheit tried something new again, something that wasn't the same old point&click which most people got already tired of 10 years ago. And a lot of the good aspects of adventure games of course also got absorbed into other genres, each FPS now has some kind of puzzles and most RPGs tell more interesting stories then the average adventure game.
...most games came with books the size, or at least information content, of most modern "strategy guides". They were called "manuals", and took up the space inside of the box instead of just having a disk and a cardboard insert.
For many games, the separation of what used to be expected in a robust manual into a separate "strategy guide" with the manual, if any, included with the game often little more than a basic introduction to the UI seems to be more of a way of restricting nominal price increases (as more of the work and cost is separated out into a different product) and narrowing the manufacturer's activities to their core competencies, than an excuse for making games more complex.
Sure, games are more complex, because newer computers can handle more complex games, and there is a market for them to fill. But its not strategy guides that have caused this,
Similarly, all those "Dummies" books have allowed applications to become not only more complex, but less obvious. On the original Macintosh, all functions were accessable from menus. Now it's considered acceptable to have functions you can only reach from some wierd key combo, one not necessarily easy to find out about.
Now every application seems to have an associated thousand-page book full of rituals and taboos. (Many such books are reviewed favorably on Slashdot. But I digress.) The "menu system" for many applications now consists of 1) look up how to do it in strategy guide, 2) follow button-pushing recipe blindly. Buy the book and learn how to add footnotes to your documents!
Even Web sites now have books. There's Google for Dummies. Then there's Building Your Business with Google for Dummies, which is apparently about search engine "optimization". There's MSN for Dummies, AOL for Dummies (of course), Yahoo for Dummies, eBay for Dummies, and Myspace for Dummies. Remember when web site navigation was supposed to be self-explanatory?
What went wrong?
My point was that whoever submitted this to Slashdot linked to a 5.8 megabyte PDF in order to talk about an article that was 3847 bytes long... A 1663-to-1 bloat factor has gotta be near the top of the charts for bandwidth wastage, even by our standards.
About the only thing more wasteful would have been linking to a 60-minute HDTV broadcast, in order to talk about the 30 seconds of talking-head "editorial video" starting at 22:17 and ending at 22:47. Seriously not cool.
Look at how it affects MMORPGs. WoW is a no-brainer, sure; but making puzzle solutions so spelled-out for the user takes a lot of the fun out of solving difficult them.
One of the things that I kind of liked about EQ, was the fact that there were really tough puzzles where you could accidentally sacrifice some hard-won quest item if you didn't know what you were doing. Unfortuntately, after the first generation solves a puzzle, they post it on the Internet then it's easy for people after them. To compensate, EQ cranks down the drop rate for key quest items or they make the quests so unbelievably complicated. Imagine instead if information were much more limited.
Imagine if you and maybe just your guild had to figure out how to solve certain problems that were different from what everyone else was solving. Then, game makers could feel comfortable in making puzzles that teased your brain a bit, but weren't so ridiculously hard to make up for the Internet effect.
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But certainly not all games. For a counter example, well just look at what is either on it's way to, or already the most profitable game of all time: World of Warcraft (pulling over $1 billion/year and rising). The game is anything but simple. It's easy in the sense that it doesn't ever really punish you for failure, you don't die for good or anything, but it's not at all simple and can be very challenging to achieve many things.
Perhaps it's just more of a PC gamer thing, but I can think of plenty of hit PC games (say The Sims) which are quite complex and certainly aren't interactive movies.
If you lack a force power to deal with the Jedi in the tubes (I'm guessing that's what you mean) it just takes a lot longer. Just keep beating Malak's ass until he runs out of Jedi. There's a reason the game throws an almost never ending supply of life support packs at you in the final level. Besides, if you didn't buy ANY of the powers that would work (Force Breach, Lightsaber Throw, Shock, Drain Life, and Force Push all work) you should have sufficient points spent in other powers like Heal, Force Immunity, Master Speed, etc that you can do a good hold and engage kind of battle and wear him down while you keep yourself up.