How Strategy Guides Affected Gaming 352
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.
Follow the money? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 :-)
Didn't need em for Monkey Island (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's a mix of information availability and the wrong balance of game developers toward this issue.
That is part of it.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
In summary... (Score:2, Insightful)
Does that about cover it?
Re:Follow the money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't write a procedure guide (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
strategy guide? hardly (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Ye olde standby... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not true (Score:4, Insightful)
This is weird... (Score:3, Insightful)
They remove responsibility from developers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Follow the money? (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?
Strategy Guides have killed the Manual (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Follow the money? (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest money makers in video games are sports games, second to that are the titles based on movies. I realized this one time when I was testing Ninja Gaiden. I realized that there was a single attack button that you just hit over and over during combat. The game made you do all kinds of cool looking moves including decapitations and wicked slashing combos. You as the player did nothinhg but hit 1 button and watch.
Another game that was just an interactive movie was the xbox King Kong game. The game was extremely linear and the combat was based of learning a gimmick that once you knew you would not die. There was no difficulty in finding your way around becuase the game resembled a tunnel and all the fights were so easy that as i said before, you were simply watch a movie and your controlle rwas along for the ride.
Re:Follow the money? (Score:3, Insightful)
And "Dummies" books have created harder apps (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [amazon.com]. Then there's Building Your Business with Google for Dummies [amazon.com], 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?
Re:A 5.8 megabyte PDF. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Follow the money? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Follow the money? (Score:3, Insightful)
When I played FFVII (back in 97, so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think it took me about 35 hours) I never even got the character Vincent, and this was not a problem to finishing the game. Sure, I might not have seen every single screen or heard every single scripted line of "conversation" or gotten every item in existance, but you don't have to. The final fantasy games are enjoyable without getting all the ultimate weapons, doing all the side quests, etc, etc.
I think it is rather a good sign of games to be so designed that there are elements to be found for those that enjoy racing and breeding chocobos, dodging lightning bolts, or whatever, but still be playable and enjoyable for those of us that don't want to do all that crap. I didn't read a strategy guide, I just played the game, making somewhat intelligent decisions of where to go based on the information given in the game and some exploring.
Re:They remove responsibility from developers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps that's how consoles are going (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps that's how consoles are going (Score:3, Insightful)