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How Strategy Guides Affected Gaming

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Mon, 08/28/2006 - 3:40pm — Snipehunter

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.

[Slashdot Updates]

Wow... I think...

I refute this, utterly...

I think that his premise is flawed. Strategy guide sales don't drive game sales, that's all on the retail side and the dev doesn't see a dime. As a game developer I've never been asked to give a flying fuck about the strategy guide. I've been asked to supply my docs, and even run a guy through the game, but that's it. The subject usually doesn't even come up until well into production because it takes that long for the asshats in publishing to ink a deal that makes them some decent cash. And, after seeing EVERY strat guide for every game I've ever made, I can tell you - they're a waste of cash 9 times out of 10. Most of them contain out of date information, bald faced lies or dumps of docs so poorly written the dev team that wrote them even refused to read them (I mean my god, "insecta spirit?!" Who writes this crap! Oh... wait..).

Most strategy guides suck, they suck because they're a "value add" - On the dev side, they are a way to make your game LOOK more complex than it really is. Huh, ok, so maybe they do drive sales, in a way...

You ever buy Warcraft II? You remember that kick ass notepad you used to get? All white with the kick ass Blizzard logo? Man I wish I still had some of those... Funny thing is, you know why that was there? TO MAKE THE BOX HEAVIER.

Back then it worked like this, you picked up RPG1 and you picked up RPG2 and you compared them... more times than not, the heavier box is the one you walked out of the store with. (that's why you got trinkets in your ultimas, I guarantee it)

What's the point of this aside, you ask? Simple: That's what a strategy guide is, now. You want a deep game (well you say you want a deep game), you want a game with a shitload of content (well, you say you want a game with a shitload of content), so what do you do? Everything ships on a DVD, so you can't just weigh the box to find the deepest or biggest game... But, when you look over one self space over and see a 200 page strategy guide, a 60 page atlas, and an art book... All of the sudden you think you know what's what and you pick up "GradioseDiaster 3 - This time it sucks even worse" thinking you're brilliant... That's the benefit strat guides give developers. We don't change our games or design them to be too complex so that we get a bigger strat guide.

So, Even though I guess I se where his logic comes from, I still contest this guy is totally wrong - strat guides make games SIMPLER because they give the industry a way to make a shitty, simple game look complex and big. Games have been getting simpler and simpler for years... Even Dead Rising, which is incredibly complex in terms of the number of interactions it supports, is a simple game. You don't need a strategy guide to play it... you don't even need one to max it out... But I bet this guy thinks you do.

*sigh*

- Snipehunter

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Tue, 08/29/2006 - 11:27pm — kaikai

i never use start guides

i never use start guides unless they are for games based entirly upon puzzle solving, like point and click adventures, because there is allways one thing that holds you up and has you pulling yor hair out for weeks trying to finish the game.

flight of the amazon queen, using the knife in my invintory with the coconut in my invintory is a perfect example.
i played for about a week in solid deadlock, and acutaly lost sleep over it trying to work out how to progress.

cheats and strat guides are addictive, i find myself wanting to take 'just a peek', and if i do, i can never put it down.

i think, like some of your observations of the game developer community, the gamer community is also becoming more lazy as a whole, and strat guides are a factor for that.
i certinaly remember seeing as many strat guides as i see today, when i was around 16, heck most gamestops have a strat guide shelf now! O.o

Wed, 08/30/2006 - 1:36pm — Snipehunter
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Strat guides are teh evil

I used to love the strat guides for Infocom games because of the whole "magic marker reveals the hint" thing. They made it easy not to over-indulge.

Modern strategy guides, however, are the opposite. It's hard not to over-indulge. On any given page you've got a walkthrough of your problem, a side bar listing Ai exploits, an enlarged quote highlight a cheat code and a diagram showing you the best line to take through the area... You have to wade through all of that to find what you're actually looking for, say the name of an NPC you need to speak to.

Once you've been exposed to all that, the game's world is never the same. For good or ill, simply reading the strat guide and seeing the "this is a game" information changes the way you interact with the world, even if you consciously try not to use the info you've gained.

I dunno about them making players lazy, though - I think that might be the industry's fault. For example, we make games easier and easier every year - in response to things like your complaint about adventure games, for example... Strat guides seem more like a symptom of that problem to me... I think it's us devs that are breeding lazy players; strat guide companies are just the dirty parasites come to feed off the result of that dark habit.

Maybe not, though. Maybe we make games easier because the players keep getting lazier. Damned strat guides! Eye-wink

- Snipehunter

Thu, 08/31/2006 - 6:30am — Humphrey

I am not a huge fan of strat

I am not a huge fan of strat guides, but i have used them to find hidden or hard to accieve objectives. Like openining up the hidden levels and worlds in a game after i beat it.

Generally i beat a game as normally as i can, then I cheat to all heck.

"Watch out for falling coconuts!"

Thu, 08/31/2006 - 8:23am — Snipehunter
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It's funny

When I buy strat guides, which is rare (in the exception of games I made), I tend to do the same thing.

First, I play the game through normally. Then I'll read the strat-guide to see what I've missed, if anything. I also prefer the strat guides that have more than just strategy in them. The Dig's strat guide, for example, I bought simply because it had 10-20 pages of dev supplied concept art and excerpts from design docs in it. I badly wanted to see their process and I wasn't disappointed (the excerpts mainly discussed the pitch they made to greenlight the project, very interesting stuff). Unfortunately, the strat guides I've seen recently haven't been all that great on that front.

The AA guide is a prime example. Not enough lore. Trust me, that world has tons of it; pages and pages of lore that players will likely never see. I had hoped that I'd find the strat guide packed full of lore. I mean all of that existed when they wrote it, so I figured they'd draw on it to sex up the strat guide. Not being involved in its creation, I didn't get to see the result of their work until the game shipped. I cried a little. Eye-wink

- Snipehunter