Game Manuals

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It's my belief that game manuals have gone greatly downhill lately, and this thread is a lament for it.

When I was a youngster, I used to derive immense joy from reading my father's collection of old game manuals. They were mostly tiny, square little things, but they were absolutely fascinating - I read everything from background story to bestiary to spell descriptions to game instructions to classes. Not all were RPGs; some were strategical and some Simmish, but they were all interesting reads in their own right. It's here, incidentally, where I first met D&D - a nice manual of Dungeon Hack introduced me to dwarves, elves, and Magic Missiles. Other favourites included Ultima manuals and the manual for Daggerfall.

In my "gaming years", so to speak, my first real RPG experience was probably the original BG. That, as we all know, had a pretty brilliant manual - filled to the brim with lore, even though most of it was from Volo's Guide to the Sword Coast. I absolutely *loved* reading about the meals you can get at every inn, even though this stuff had absolutely no worth whatsoever in-game. The Might and Magic series continued delivering decent manuals; BG2's one was good, yet the binding was horrible. NWN had an okay one; whilst I absolutely love IWD2's. Morrowind and Oblivion's were also good reads. By far the best manual I have ever read, however, is the one for Wizardry 8 - it was *full* with irrelevent jokes and little comments by developers. The condition description for Insanity, for example, opens with "Similiar to a computer programmer during beta..."

But recently games don't come with manuals at all, or they're on inconvenient .pdf's. You can't realistically read them and play the game at the same time unless you print them out - I am still trying to learn how to play the Witcher. There's (generally) no lore in the manual, no longwinded spell descriptions, no bestiary, no profiles of the characters you will meet...

Of course the quality of the manual doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the game - PS:T's manual was notoriously horrible. But for me, having a good manual makes a huge amount of difference, and is an intricate part of the gaming experience - it's a *ritual* to read it while the game installs! It's a shame they seem to be disappearing from the gaming world.

What's everyone's opinion on the manual shortage?

 

Not just game manuals, game packaging as a whole. Back in the days of Ultima and especially the Infocom games, opening a game box was about much more than a bunch of discs and a manual. With Ultima and Might and Magic you got those amazing, lovingly detailed cloth maps. With the Infocom games you got a wealth of feelies, about half a dozen with each game, and all were somehow useful to advance. Who can forget the scratch-and-sniff cards that came with Leather Goddesses of Phobos and that Al Lowe much later "borrowed" for Leisure Suit Larry 7? And yeah, the manuals themselves were a glorious sight to behold. I think my brother still has the user manual of F19 Stealth Fighter, a Microprose flight simulator from the late 80s. It wasn't a game manual - it was an actual book of a couple hundred pages or more, trade paperback size. There's no way you'd get anything like it nowadays. Planescape I can forgive because the whole beauty of the game is to be thrown in the world and have no idea what to expect and how things work and slowly figure it out by yourself (I got a very similar experience when I first played Ultima Underworld. The only word of English I knew at the time was "hello" so I didn't read any of the detailed background in the manual, discovering everything by myself). However in most cases it's so much more fun to find out about the lore of the lands beforehand. Speaking of which, in Lands of Lore none of the background information was actually relevant until you played the sequel, which was a very nice touch (Diablo did this as well, though to a much lesser extent as the games are really not about story). Even Arcanum's manual was great, with all the magic vs technology "experiments" and dozens of pages of background on each race, their history and folklore, and so on.

 

I like game manuals that give you enough information to play, but don't give away the store. The Ultima manuals were perfect -- one placard explaining game mechanics; a booklet giving the basics of spells, armor, weapons, and bestiary; and a background booklet. Often there was some little trinket from Brittania and a nice map.

The manual for Planescape: Torment was brilliant. I know a lot of players who were used to having the Encyclopedia Baldurius whined a lot, but the manual was perfect for the game. I think the Baldur's Gate manuals and IWD are overboard. I'd rather see tables and detailed descriptions in-game.

 

A manual needs to educate me on the basic game mechanics and maybe add a little background flair, but that is it. A spell list is nice too. But any spoilers, like the BG2 manual's mention and description of Crom Faeyr and the Wave are unnecessary.

 

Oh I agree with this, as I don't always have the manual handy, but I also like to have all these tables in the manual as well. My biggest compain with Dark Sun (an RPG I otherwise think is one of the best) is that you have none of this information in the manual and therefore cannot plan your builds properly in advance - you've got to get in the game and start the character creation process to find out what the max attributes for each race are (and therefore which race is best for a particular class). Ideally having all the information both in-game and in the manual would be perfect. Right now I can't remember which one off the top of my head but there was a game that did this perfectly.

I love having lots of background lore in the manual (such as the ones I mentioned in my first post - Ultima, Might and Magic, Lands of Lore) but this has to be limited to things that most people in that world would know about. BG went overboard with the description of the NPCs and the items. Crom Faeyr is not common knowledge and it does spoil the sense of discovery when you know before even starting the game what items to expect (it does give you a strong hint about where to put your proficiency points though!)

Speaking of background lore I can't believe I forgot to mention the Redguard manual, considering I was reading it just over a week ago. This one was perfect in balancing lots of background lore with no spoilers at all. The manual is split into 2 sections, the user guide with detailed description of the UI, game mechanics, control schemes, configuration and option menus, and so on. Then you get the Pocket Guide to the Empire, an in-universe description of Tamriel. This one is particularly fun because it's written as a Cyrodiil propaganda piece by an Imperial, but it's annotated by a High Elf who points out all the propaganda pieces - and introduces his own, naturally (Cyrodiil and the Summerset Isle are not on good terms, at least not in Tiber Septim's reign). It even pokes fun at similar lore-type manuals at one point - the Guide goes on for some time about this Elvish place named after some Altmer hero in some battle somewhere, which prompts the annotator to ask "Does anyone have any idea what the human is talking about?" Touches like this one make the Guide very entertaining to read and you don't find anything like this in modern manuals. Compare with the new Pocket Guide that came with Oblivion (and only with the Collector's Edition at that) which is purely factual and lacks any humour or fun touches.

 

Manuals used to be awesome! I enjoyed reading about everything, from the creature lists in Heroes of Might & Magic II and Dungeon Keeper, to character bios in Strike Squad and Baldur's Gate 2. I've kept most of these manuals, and still read them every now and then for nostalgic reasons. They're also a great read when you're sitting on the toilet!

 

I still have the manual from "Warcraft II". I don't even have the game anymore! It's still a great read even if you can read it all in less than an hour. The backstory's really good and it's got little sketches in it. Also, it includes both the humans backstory AND the orcs; it's like a journal too. So both are written from each race's perspective! There's also units and buildings with their descriptions for both the orcs and humans.

 

Oh yeah, the Warcraft manuals are really good too! The one for Warcraft 3 had plenty of lore. Diablo's manual was pretty good too - in fact, Blizzard seems to produce good manuals generally.

And Tassadar has it right.

 

*Digs out his old Starcraft manual*

*Flips a few pages* It looks good, except...

... the entire thing is entirely unreadable because it is in Swedish. They couldn't have found any less poetic language for a scifi text (that goes for fantasy, too).

 

I guess something was lost in translation >.>

Anyway I remember reading through the manuals for the original Half-Life games, and they had everything from concept art to background info on the game. I open up Half-Life 2 and what do I get? A small sheet of orange paper with movement instructions on it

 

Ultima IV was my first RPG and the manuals were excellent. Still are actually. I get them out now and again to read through them...that's how good they are.

I also like the SSI Gold Box manuals for all the fake journal entries.

It's really unfortunate that companies have moved away from making manuals that are a part of the game, not just something tacked on.

-D

 

The manual that is shipped with Fallout 3 has some fun value with excerpts from the Vault Dweller's Survival Guide (with idiotic entries such as "don't learn the hard way") but I agree that older game manuals used to have more reading value (that comment applies for the Fallout series as well). As a side note I remember that Lionheart had a rather interesting manual that included a lot of information on the background and SPECIAL rules, unfortunately the game didn't live up to its potential.

 

Oh yes, journal entries! I remember these as well from the Gold Box games. They were very common in the late 80s. I really enjoyed going through the journal after finishing a game and checking all the entries I never read, having a good laugh at all the fake ones.

 

I bought SoZ yesterday afternoon, and was overjoyed to discover that it had a manual (a rather boring one, but that's not the point). The point is, I'm surprised that I'm surprised at finding a manual. They're a RARE item these days - even the mediocre ones! Bloody stupid pdfs...

 

An example of a perfect manual in my eyes is Vampire the Masquerade:Redemption, this had a great story about your character when he was younger and why he became a crusader, it then explained all the controls etc then went into detail on all the background about the world did a run down on each clan (even clans not in the game) and also gave information on all the disciplines as well. It also looked cool with just a dark book that look had an ankh on the front so you couldnt even tell it was a game manual!

 

The Journal Entries were a very important part of the game. I always enjoyed them and hope someone would bring that type of manual usage back into gaming. They were one of many exceptional parts of the Goldboxes that roped me into the rpg world. Long live the Goldbox games!

 

I loved (and still love) getting manuals along with games - They're like a little extension of the game itself, perfect if you need a good read while traveling, waiting in an office, or something to fiddle through before bed.

I always go to the store to pick up a hard copy of a game rather than downloading it simply to get the goodies stuffed inside. It's a shame that manuals are sometimes neglected in today's gaming world.