ziggehunderslash wrote...
Man, game manuals, I remember them.
I know everything looks better through nostalgic eyes, but realistically they're a relic of a period in game design were the developers were essentially finding their feet when it came to relating to their audience. They got better at it, learning ways to teach us that information in game, as part of the game. Either through tutorials or more subtley.
And subtlety is good. If they can teach you what you need to know without it ever really feeling like a learning period, it's really strong design. Manuals are the antithesis of subtle learning. Admittedly, as 'shorts says, many of us will know they "language" many games are talking through previous experience, and so going back to the shallow end occasionally can prove frustrating, but just because something has been designed well, for all of it's audience, doesn't make it conceited.
I've been trying to avoid this topic, but here's where I fail.
I love manuals. Thick manuals, especially for cRPGs. With info about character builds and all the abilities you can choose...
and nowadays it means I have to buy a separate Strategy Guide, of which I won't use 70% of the guide but it's the only way to get what I want.
I take the manuals around the house with me - so when I have some down time, eating lunch or something, I read through character build options and such.
I hate in-game tutorials... especially when characters in the game speak in "press the X button" breaking the 4th wall crap. I dislike starter areas, unless you can just skip them. And I do - I'm not so impatient nor against reading that taking ten minutes to go through the game instructions. I'd rather do that and when I play I get to play from the get go rather than have hand-holder characters and a good half-hour of game time wasted on "too easy" stuff to bring me up to speed.
That's my preference, however. I'm annoyed at tutorial / starting areas, but I've learned to tolerate them.
Relic? Adjusting? It was a period of like thirty years of "adjusting"...
when what's closer to the TRUTH is that it was cheaper to put that info in a book instead in-game (like journal entries and such) as memory was very limited in early games. As computing power and memory increased, the need for journal books and such disappeared (and while I miss them, having in-game codexes and such works effectively just as well, so it's an ok evolution in my book)... but most attempts at putting manuals as digital text files resulted in many players not bothering to read them - once the computer starts up, who wants to read the rules then? And having a book next to you to flip through while playing is better, IMO, than tabbing between the game and a text file.
And then you get consol games where digital manuals isn't really an option.
Now printing big manuals is an expense that is easily cut to save on some developing costs, and digital manuals are largely ignored and often not a viable solution... in-game tutorials kind of became a necessity.
It's not game design adjusting to what's better... it's the technology changing, a wider audience including more impatient people, people who don't like reading, or who have other reasons to not want to have to read how to play a game and just want to be able to sit down and play it (I don't mean this as an insult, just a difference), combined with cutting costs for printing manuals and the inevitable shift to digital distribution... and it becomes clear (to me at least) that this isn't a eventual shift to something "better" but a gradual evolution that fits the times.
Retour en haut
have read all the 'flavour' text.
