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How Strategy Guides Affected Gaming

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the please-turn-to-page-124-to-win dept.

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.

7 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Follow the money? by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    strategy guides have created more difficult games.

    Strategy guides have been with us for a very long time indeed, almost as long as we've had games. I did a little research, and the earliest reference I can find to what I think qualifies as an 'official' strategy guide, are the 'hintbooks' published by Infocom in support of their adventure 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
    1. Re:Follow the money? by legoburner · · Score: 5, Insightful

      At least nowadays we have gamefaqs to save money on overpriced gaming guides. Although most games are more fun without gaming guides, every now and then there is one puzzle in a game where something has been missed along the way and a little help is needed. I find gaming guides most useful if I play a game for a little while, then dont play it for a few months and cannot remember some of the smaller details needed to get past puzzles once I pick the game up again.

      --
      Warhammer forums
    2. Re:Follow the money? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The thing is that lots of games are fun as they are, and can be completed without finding everything, but if you want to experience certain parts of the game you'd have to be fucking insane to actually get there without help. I mean think about Vincent's ultimate weapon in FFVII... In order to even get to that quest, you have to race your chocobos enough to level them up, then feed your chocobos weird food, then get them to breed. You need to go through two generations of breeding (minimum) in order to even get the kind of chocobo you need to get to where his quest is. Or how about that place on the railroad tracks you have to just sort of spontaneously turn and go up a rock wall to get? There's no visual clue whatsoever that there is a place to climb up there. NONE. And if you go past it and don't get it the first time you're there, it's not there the next time you go by, either.

      Basically, games are designed to sell strategy guides. What more proof do you need?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:Follow the money? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      [This post has been deleted by a GameFAQS moderator]

  2. Can't write a procedure guide by w33t · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
  3. Ye olde standby... by Dread_ed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Strategy Guides have killed the Manual by joinder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.