Now without exception every game must include a tutorial, lest the player be unable to figure out how to crouch. Mechanical complexity is gimped because everything has to be easily construed through a short tutorial.
This is ignoring the loss of all that world building and art that is now never even made/even if it is it's never seen.
Worst of all is that YouTube videos are a very poor replacement for manuals when taking a shit.
>game has a digital manual
>it sucks
>game has no manual
>tutorial is glitched at launch and won't run
>game has digital manual
>doesn't use this to give some backstory information beyond the fricking nothing the game gives you
there's 5 major fractions and I know nothing about them unless I read through those backlog of news posts you get at the start of the game
Complex mechanics can be explained in-game without needing a separate document for it and the same goes for world-buidling. Even if a separate document is the best way to get the information across, you can just put it in the game. You're mad at the wrong thing.
Stop it. Telling you how to dash isn't a complex mechanic.
The point is that any information you could put on printed paper you can include in the game itself. Good job intentionally missing it.
Except it often isn't.
Wish in one hand, shit in the other. Which one filled up first?
Manuals contained more than just tutorials printed on the page. They often contained some insight of the game's world, like lore or character introductions, or, famously in Arcanum, a recipe for banana bread.
I still have my pokemon blue manual. It has a short guide to the first few areas, info on several pokemon, a list of gym leaders, an introduction to stores and how they function. All sorts of shit. There was cool stuff in manuals that really delighted me as a kid and it's all lost now
All of which you can just put in the video game itself. Shit, Helltaker had that pancake recipe.
Correct. Which means the problem isn't the lack of manuals, is it?
Simply digitizing it loses the overall feel and makes the experience worse overall.
Yes, it is the problem. Because if we still had manuals they'd have to fill them with something. Give a dev the option to be extra lazy and they're going to usually take that option.
I remember King's Quest 6 had the answer to a puzzle in the manual. Pretty creative antipiracy in a way
>or, famously in Arcanum, a recipe for banana bread.
You don't need a printed manual for that. Deus Ex had two recipes in the game.
https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Coq_au_Vin
https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Chinese_Silver_Loaves_recipe
Manuals had to be printed independently of the game, and sometimes are written by people quite disconnected from the actual developers. What ends up happening in quite a few cases is that the manual just contains total fricking lies. It's worse than useless.
The manuals are still there. They’re just in the game rather than in a booklet.
I'm hellbent on releasing my magnum opus with a manual specifically designed to be printed as a physical booklet and a tutorial on the main menu because god damn it video games gave up on that style of presentation much earlier than they should have
Zachtronics? Is that you? You already released Opus Magnum.
No, I'm not zachtronics you big dork
You wouldn't need either one if the average gamer wasn't completely moronic. If you've ever seen streamers playtest a game in development, or qa testers, you know what I mean. Instead of bringing back instruction booklets, we have to make gamers more intelligent.
If you weren't a zoomer you'd know that not having a page telling you how to jump isn't the pain of losing manuals.
No, I understand. Gazing upon physical portraits of your characters to run your thumb over, letting the lore pass through your lips as you thumb through each page. It's an intoxicating, sensual experience. That's what gamers truly wanted all along. Sensuality.
have a nice day
You say this as if we don't come to that realization ourselves just playing with people online.
You don't seem to really understand the appeal of manuals. The majority of space in old manuals was ironically not devoted to cut and dry keybindings and tutorials but had a lot of nice artwork and stuff related to the game that was worth reading. A lot of games specifically included both a manual and a quick reference card for this reason.
Xenoblade 2 has a tutorial for the final boss fight.
>Demons
I don't even know if these things can deal damage
100% agree. There was just a thread about yellow paint in RE4R and a lot of apologists saying that due to graphics getting more realistic, players need some kind of guidelines to determine what's interactible vs. part of the environment. If there was a manual that just said "you can break barrels and boxes" it wouldn't matter. But there are no manuals anymore, so their solution is neon yellow paint everywhere killing the immersion.
God, you're so right. A simple manual with a screenshot of what a breakable object looks like would have erased the need for the yellow paint.
Manuals are so dead that when I participated in one of those threads I didn't even consider that you could just literally spell it out for a player in a resource that's outside the game.
Hell, it doesn't even have to be outside the game. You could put a nicely formatted digital manual inside the game in the options menu or something. 3DS games all had digital manuals accessed via the home menu that were pretty well done. Not sure why it was all abandoned in favor of popups and shit. The worst is when the gameplay constantly gets interrupted with a little pop up window with a paragraph explaining some mechanic. All that info should be available in a menu to read at your leisure, not constantly breaking the flow of gameplay.
The worst is when it's in an easily missable popup in the corner that you don't have to click away from or anything, I restarted necromunda underhive wars like 3 times realizing I had missed some information
SOUL
Nah it's so publishers could shit out more games and make more money BC the masses have no time to process server miniscule detail of an imaginary world supposedly.
>manuals disappearing caused design changes
The design changes happened before the manuals went away though. As soon as storage space got big enough that you could include the story and the tutorial inside the game itself of course devs did that because it's what they wanted to do from the beginning. They only ever printed it on paper because filesize constraints were so goddamn tight early on. And manuals stuck around for more than a decade after they became completely vestigial.