Game Guides

I have one of those Inside Out core memories. I was probably thirteen or so and I’m sitting next to a friend watching him play the newly released Final Fantasy 10. He’d come to stay at my house and brought his PlayStation with him just to keep playing. As I’m watching he’s in a battle against a strange blue monster called a chocobo eater. I watched my friend restart that battle a dozen times.

I was confused, the enemy wasn’t that hard.

As it turned out, there were two ways to win the battle. The first was to kill the monster the normal way, run its HP to zero. The second was to hit the right combination of moves to push the monster off a ledge. If you managed to push it off the ledge there was a slightly better reward. Nothing game changing but I must have watched him restart that battle a dozen times before he was finally able to nail it.

I had no idea this was an option.

Meanwhile, my friend sat playing with the Prima Strategy Guide open on his lap. Every new area he visited came with a five minute pause and a read to determine the location of each and every chest and secret in the area. I’m not one to yuck somebody’s yums but to me, especially as an observer, this was a very boring way to play video games. He was having fun so I said nothing but the idea of reading each step like a recipe and following it to the letter was far from exciting.

Years later, games like Diablo, DOTA and Path of Exile became wildly popular amongst people I played games with. All these years later, it felt like these games now expected you to have a guide at hand. Sure, you could play Path of Exile and try figure out the gems and skills on your own but chances are you’d be severely under powered compared to someone with a guide.

Again, I tried to play these games. They were fun for a time but eventually, working through each little step in a guide started to feel like a chore. Do what the guide says, try not to veer off the recommendations. Click when you need to and you should be fine.

Sometimes there’s a random chance to overcome, drops in PoE are far from certain but overall your playthrough is set. What I found in a lot of these games is you’d find them littered with people playing the exact same build. The top ones became popular and the there was little room for anything else.

You spent hours farming the end game drop rates looking for the perfect item, the game had shifted from skill to slot machine.

All of this isn’t to say I don’t enjoy games full of grind. I’ve clocked my fair share of hours in Monster Hunter where some drop percentages are in the low single digits. The difference there for me is that all of the information lives within the game. Sure, you can look up the drop rates but the parts and pathways for every weapon and armor are right there in the game. If you’re happy with using ‘rarity’ as a vague proxy for drop rates you could play start-to-finish without ever looking up a guide.

To me, its the option of looking at a guide that makes the difference. Lots of games these days have packed in so many sets of collectables, obscure secrets and high difficulty pathways that you’re almost never going to get it all done alone. Sure, 100% completion isn’t everyone’s goal and I’ve left plenty of games after a satisfying 75% of achievements but there seems to be a push for more content that is being mistakenly equated to being a better game.

I want immersion not an endless collectathon and that coveted platinum trophy or final steam achievement.

I know that everyone enjoys games differently, but to me there’s something that's been lost. Some games, because of technology or budget end up smaller. They have secrets for sure but they were often games you’d play through a few times. I know where plenty of secrets are in Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 because I ran through them so many times as a kid.

Even looking at more recent games, I could point at games like Slay the Spire where the rounds are short enough that you can start to learn the combinations of relics and cards that work well together. There are build guides a plenty for Slay the Spire but I never felt I needed to look at one to have fun.

There’s a sense of discovery in working things out that feels like a much larger victory than hitting the 100% mark.