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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.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
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My friends, they are experiencing what we all know as the "Digg Effect".
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
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.
Editors: Get fresh stories!
"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.
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.
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.
What? There was the Chocobo Sage plus the girl/boy at the Chocobo ranch to give you hints and clues. As per the actual locations of WHERE to find the various Chocobos, that wasn't hard at all. Capturing chocobos was easy if your party was high enough level!
GPL Deconstructed
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.
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,
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.