This here is the original game box for Wasteland, an RPG you may have heard of considering it recently got a sequel, currently in Early Access, and both its director (Brian Fargo) and its spiritual successor (Fallout) are pretty well known. Now, look a lil' closer, and you will see... Holy shit, that's a big ol' honkin' book, isn't it? And there's more than one of 'em! Gaaaaahd, how could you be expected to read that shit?
Well, firstly, you were expected to read dat shit because RPGs are often quite complex, and limitations of the systems they were on meant that you couldn't fit everything into the game. In Wasteland's case, there are two books: The actual manual, which describes the stats, how they interact, some skills (manuals of the time sometimes had misleading information for reasons of plot or designer dickishness. Not quite cricket, I know), and how to control what, at the time, was a fairly complex game (and, to be fair, still is). The manual served a second purpose, which is part of why manuals largely fell out of vogue: It allowed the designers to take shortcuts. Why work harder to make your UI more intuitive, when you can have a manual to describe it?
(Sometimes, though, folks are just bad at UI design...)
The other book, however, was the real doozy. It was a combination of copy protection, and a way to get around size limitations. See those floppy squares? Those are 5.25" Floppy Disks, and they had a maximum filesize of... 360 Kilobytes. Go look at your "My Computer" screen, or equivalent, and let's go downward. I have a 500 Gigabyte and a 3 Terabyte Hard Drive. My DVD-RWs for Let's Play backups have a 4.75 GB limit. Tera... Giga... Mega... Wow. Them's some tiny files, right?
The Wasteland Paragraph Book contains any long talky bits for the game, along with fake talky bits so anyone who wanted to try and skip ahead in the story could very easily fuck up, and it had something like 500 paragraphs. Let's assume the paragraphs had an average of 50 words, with an average of 5 characters. That's 125,000 characters. Each one of those characters takes, effectively, 1 Byte, so encoded in the game files, that would be 125 KB, or slightly less than half the allowed filesize on a disk of the time. In practice, it would end up a fair bit smaller (Probably around 40-60 KB), but like I said, it doubled as an anti-piracy measure.
It also ended up getting around another limitation. Here's a Wasteland screenshot.
Hrm. That's something like 20 words. They could have displayed the paragraphs, but it would make the game a lot more tedious to play. Since it's not really real-time, it takes very little effort to flick through the book, and everyone's happy.
But anti-piracy measures moved on from something as easily circumvented as "Read The Fucking Book/Take numbers off a card", and I'm actually sort of glad about that, because while they sometimes got inventive in a good way, they also started doing such boneheaded things as black text on carbon paper (which is red), and really small fonts, in order to discourage copying. If anything, this had the opposite effect, and I remember Dad and I tearing our hair out at trying to decipher the codes on the TMNT anti-piracy sheet, and eventually writing what codes we could on a TXT file and printing it off. Since not many folks I knew even had a PC at the time, this wasn't a ticket to easy pocket money either, more's the pity... Because the TMNT game in question was shit.
Another hotly contested thing manuals did was set up the lore for the world, or provide a miniature encyclopedia. "But Jamie!" I hear you cry "You can have an in-game encyclopedia now!"
This is a bad in-game encyclopedia. Partly because it's badly written, but mostly because it's a FUCKING RACING GAME.
Yes. Yes you can. But it has exactly the same potential flaws as a lore-book, and it has one flaw that printed versions don't have: You can't read it outside of the game. Why would you want to read it outside of the game? Well, if your in-game encyclopedia is actually good, it would be because you wanted to learn more about this strange world you'd found your character in, to know things the designers didn't put in.
And here's where it gets complicated. Because modern game design quite rightly states that the hierarchy of tutorial methods (and, to a lesser extent, world building) is Do > Show > Tell. Whenever you can, it is better to either outright show an aspect of a culture in a game, or at least imply it. However, to show that it's not all that simple (Give respect to game designers, yo, they have a hard job), we have to consider flow.
Whoops. Somebody fucked up their flow!
Flow is not, as some believe, a nebulous, arty farty game design concept, but something any good game designer has to worry about. Ever had that "Ugggh, this cutscene came in the middle of a fucking boss fight, and he attacks right after!" or "God-fucking dammit, now I have to look at my journal while I'm being attacked!" ? That's bad flow. It's not always on the game itself, as well: I've complained, in the past, of "Ugh, fighting breaks the flow of this game too hard" in Mirror's Edge, and in fact, that was a common complaint when it came out. But on examination? A lot of that was me, not the game. There are rarely places where you have to fight, and those places, it's pretty clear that, well, that's the only way out. The rest of the time, you have lots of options for just plain avoiding the cops that try and bar your way, and the game's simple visual language means you have very little excuse for not using the environment well.
In a turn based game, you don't have to worry about flow so much, so you can leave lavish descriptions and lovingly crafted stat pages right there in the game (although most double down and have a PDF you can alt-tab to or print sections of.) But in a more action oriented game, you just don't want to know right now, thanks! So doing this well helps a lot. I'm Let's Playing the series now, and have a soft spot for it, so let's talk briefly about lore done right in the Wipeout series.
It helped that the game was fairly pretty for the time, too.
Wipeout's manual was pretty simple. It had to be, because PS1 manuals were generally quite small. But they wanted us to care about the world and teams. So they had team profiles they felt they couldn't fit in the game. Okay, we get a favourite team (Qirex for the win, as an aside!) But they also had little press releases that told us about the world... And it wasn't as nice a place as you'd think, considering Anti-Gravity had pretty much decimated Big Oil, and helped the environment a little bit. They had track blurb, that also added to this, and later games in the series also had tidbits of lore tucked into press releases on the official site, a timeline we could build up of the world... It was a technical racing game, but we had added reason to want to play it because the world was interesting!
That, and PS1 parties at raves, were both pretty useful marketing tactics, and the series sold pretty well, for the most part. So manuals can serve a useful purpose that isn't just "haha, you need this manual, noob!"
But the biggest concern, the one that really nails the lid shut, is that it's a) not cost effective to print manuals much anymore, especially when you have the PDF, cutting printing costs entirely, and b) It's more environmentally friendly. But there's a good reason Official Guidebooks, especially ones that hint at the larger world, or give info that just couldn't be put into the game, still exist, and sell like hotcakes.
So how do we resolve this? Well, different companies resolve it in different ways. Portal and Dark Souls both do the "Implied world" and "Teaching through play", and that mostly works. I say mostly, because sometimes, not even excellent design can help some folks. Yes, you've tried to put a portal on not-white surfaces for the last half hour, dude, maybe it's time to try something different?
There is nowhere here to put a portal. Stop fucking trying.
Thief (the original one, not the bastard child of 2014) had optional lore, a tutorial mission, and again, implying details about its grim world, often through the hilarity of some seriously obnoxious guards (In a good way... You'd have to have played to understand why "Y'wanna go to the bear-pits tomorrow?" can send me into peals of laughter)
Paradox strategy games, and many others, do indeed have big honkin' manuals, and lengthy tutorials, and ohgodihavetoomanyindustrialistswhygodwhy... Maybe Paradox, as much as I love them, aren't the best example... And many RPGs have... the same WALLS OF TEXT AND LORE, but in dialogues with other characters. That's... a double edged sword, because when the writing and the voice acting is good, just like a manual, it's engaging, but when it isn't, you get "And LO, Did The Archimandrite Of Thessalinicamanica Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Why Haven't You Hit Skip Already [important info] Blah Blah Blah."
So, when you're designing a game, spare a thought for the manual. It's good design not to rely on it, but it, and your in-game encyclopedia and whatnot, are important tools, even in something as simple as, say... A twin-stick shooter series. It can give players a reason to care about your game, it can clue players in to advanced strategies. You have to account for the fact that folks might not read it, but if you're going to do it, do it well. In game or out, it may well help deflect that old saw of "UGH, THIS GAME SUCKS BECAUSE [Long rant translated to: I didn't pay any attention whatsoever to the game] !"
It's still a valid option, even today.
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