No More Manuals: Desperate Struggle

[Forbin]

TF2 followed up with an unbelievable amount of post-release content online that trumps any manual Valve has ever released. I like a quality back-story manual as much as anybody, but I'd rather have the on-going updates on tf2.com's blog in it's staid.

[Rueler]

I can't even think of the last game it was that I specifically needed to read the manual for because the game itself did not have a good enough tutorial or wasn't self-explanatory enough. As games as a medium develops, there seems to be a certain "language" that is consistent among similar games. That is, if you know how to play Halo, you'll know how to play the newest Call of Duty. This obviously isn't the case for all games, though.

[Forbin]

Streamlining and contextual button presses have certainly trivialized the learning curve of a game. An episode of the Irrational Behaviour has a good segment on this, where Ken Levine talks about how Grand Theft Auto 3 opened his eyes to minimalistic key bindings. Basically saying that if he had been responsible for that game he'd have made car-jacking a multi-button operation, where the player isn't interested in something like that for such a common operation. They just want to hit 'A' to approach the car, open it's door, pull out it's driver, climb in and close the door while driving off.

A lot of the PC crowd seem to think this kind of thing is a purely a result of mapping input to a limited controller, but there's an element of good design as well. For example, old battlefield game's used to have control's like [9] to open a parachute, where Bad Company simply binds the parachute command to the jump command and judges whether it should deploy based on if the player is falling and if the distance will harm them if they don't deploy. They've also taken a complex communication rose UI and put the majority of it's functionality along with other commands into a contextual 'q' key.

Mass Effect 2 was one of my favourite PC games in a long time, and it was streamlined like crazy.

[jennoa]

I wonder also if Ubisoft does not include manuals with the epilepsy warnings and the generic "how to start the game" type stuff, will they face possibly legal trouble?

The reason Nintendo prints out that obnoxious warning booklet in everything they release and makes screens you have to press a button to skip was because of legal trouble from parents with epileptic kids looking to grab some money.

I would imagine they will have a small legal warnings pamphlet that gets put in every game.

As for in game documentation, I don't expect much.

[Jayel]

I always got a kick out of all the extra goodies that came with a PC game that seemed straight out of its universe! It's like the greatness of it couldn't be contained in mere digital form so part of it is creeping out into the real world. I dunno if it's because I got old and lost that child's ability to pretend shit, but I can never feel as immersed in games these days as with the old ones that let me hold an actual object from its world in my hands.

Manuals, I couldn't care less.

[SoulChicken]

Another evil conspiracy of big corporations out to get syntheticgerbil.

[syntheticgerbil]

Give me your soul.