Ubisoft Says No More Game Manuals 400
thsoundman writes with this excerpt from The Gamers Blog: "No more manuals? Ubisoft announced last week that they will be ditching the trend of printing instruction manuals for new games under the 'green' initiative. While no other publishers have jumped on that 'green' train just yet, it is likely that others will follow suit. Printed manuals have been part of gaming since you bought PC games in plastic bags. There have been many standout eras for manuals, such as the NES-era booklets to the manuals that accompanied Electronic Arts vinyl-sized game sleeves. Some may argue that the advancement in on-screen contextual commands and first-level tutorials have made the manual pointless, but is this really the case?"
Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Funny)
When no one can play your game due to drm servers being down?
(come on, you know it's going to be said many times in this thread.. Might as well get it going early :))
Re:Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Green" initiative... Money is green
Re:Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Funny)
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Netbook.
I always take my netbook with me to the crapper.
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I don't know about you, but I usually read the instruction manual on the crapper.
Did you hear that everyone!? Poster admits he is full of shit!
Re:Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you can answer that question, you have to realize that game manuals fall into two, maybe three, categories:
1) Traditional Instruction Manual with story overview, controls reference, and other useful information. No matter what, such manuals are always essential for quick multiplayer games (ie:Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Smash Bros., etc.) for looking up some extra moves while you wait your turn ;-) For some games their useless, but for others their a great reference.
2) "Collectible" Instruction manuals. These are one-step below the dedicated art books that come with recent games, but still include extensive story, background information, artwork, and more. These won't be going away, though I predict we'll increasingly be seeing them only on "collector's" edition copies.
3) The Boilerplate Manuals. These are the ones that Ubisoft and others use the most and should go the way of the dinosaur. These manuals are always virtually identical, contain a picture of the controller, copyright notice, and maybe a copy of the description printed on the box. On occasion, these come in thick booklets that trick you into thinking it's type (1) or (2) before you realize that it's just boilerplate * n languages.
So in summation - if all the publisher's are writing are boilerplate manuals, let's go save some trees. But for those few developers that still invest the time in creating real manuals, those are an important piece of gaming tradition that we don't want to lose.
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Kudos to Ubisoft. Better for waste, better for their bottom line and practicall
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Re:Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why bother with manuals? (Score:5, Insightful)
$60 (or $40 for an older game) for 20 hours of gameplay is pretty good $/hour of entertainment.
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Because they add to the overall experience of the game.
That's great. In a couple of months they will announce that you can buy the manual for a "small additional fee" to go along with the small fee they are charging for demos of the game.
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Ahh those were the days.
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Thankfully not a problem any more [rlslog.net]...
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Settlers 7 is still.. an issue, for now.
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Why bother with manuals when no one can play your game due to drm servers being down?
As long as you can't play the game, you may as well entertain yourself by leafing through the manual.
Well at least they dropped (Score:5, Interesting)
the brown paper written in black with anti-piracy codes (remember Sim City?!)
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Why brown paper? So one guy had to go through the 5 minute trouble of scanning it and cleaning it up in Photoshop before distributing it?
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I don't know about brown, but a number of games back in the 80's came with black-on-purple code sheets which (it was said) would confuse photocopiers. Personal scanners didn't really exist at the time, these were 8-bit games distributed on tape.
Re:Well at least they dropped (Score:5, Funny)
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This was a long time ago when throwing the manual on the (black and white) office photocopier before lending the disks to your coworkers was a major piracy channel... Scanners were quite rare, and running photoshop on an EGA card would have been a joke.
Anyway, have to say your sig goes well with the topic of your post.
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been all but useless for ~20 years anyway. Contextual help and tutorials within the game are usually more useful and intuitive. If I need more help, it's usually easy enough to find what I'm looking for online anyway.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I dunno, for some games, I've found manuals to be pretty useful: Neverwinter Nights, Civilization, i.e. games with lots of miscellaneous icons and skill trees that require a decent amount of planning. Sure you can put the content in game, but sometimes it's nice to have a reference guide. Plus the art and flavor text is nice sometimes too.
But did you absolutely require that information printed on paper, or would a PDF or HTML file do the job?
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It's been almost 20 years since I've ridden a bus (unless you count public transport).
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Sim City 2000 was first released in 1993. Infocom text adventures is even older. Homeworld is the most recent one you list--it was released in 1999. Manuals used to be useful. They haven't been for a long time. You can find better information on the internet for the more complex games. For what it's worth, the only FPS I've actually played through is Call of Duty 4. I don't really get into those games. I much prefer strategy or simulation games.
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've spent many loading times in Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, reading manuals. Guess its just me.
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I've spent many loading times in Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, reading manuals. Guess its just me.
I never did that for those games. Downloaded them all from steam. But back in the day some games came with fold-out maps, an actual story in the manual, and something that made the experience just that bit more than sitting in front of a keyboard mashing buttons.
Somehow, not having all those little extras makes it feel like when I buy a physical copy I'm somehow just getting a cardboard box with a CD in it. It's like the companies that produce games no longer like their customers except for their money. Oh,
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in other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
they plan on developing only simplistic titles for the brain-dead masses; instead of huge, complex, detailed games that demand printed reference materials.
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When was the last time you needed a manual for even a complicated game? Neverwinter Nights?
Oh, wait, no, you didn't. We've pretty much all seen that interface before, and had a good idea of what to do with it and the ruleset.
In fact, when's the last time you saw a game with totally unique mechanics that weren't remotely intuitive to anyone who has played a game within the genre before?
Re:in other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dwarf Fortress.
Aurora.
Nethack.
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So games will be cheaper then? (Score:5, Funny)
Since games now ship without a manual I am sure all of those savings will be passed on to the end consumer, right?
Re:So games will be cheaper then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like the "Boss wants a new ferrari" department, and the always popular "How to DRM your way into making games unplayable".
Awesome!
Re:So games will be cheaper then? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So games will be cheaper then? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sustainable forestry doesn't hurt the ecosystem. We can harvest trees until kingdom come and still have trees left, as long as we do it properly.
It's the fossil fuels, inks, and man hours that go into harvesting, producing and shipping the materials and final products that's the problem.
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Wrong. It means less trees will be planted. Paper comes from trees planted specifically for that purpose in large farms. The higher the demand for paper, the more higher the need for tree farms to be planted.
Wood pulp is best from younger trees, which soak up more CO2 and pump out more O2 than mature trees.
The only green thing about Ubisoft's decision is the color of the money they'll be pocketing from this.
Game Manuals? (Score:3, Insightful)
I honestly can't remember the last time I used a game manual.
The only real reason I know of is to find out the control layout, but that's usually included/changeable in-game now.
Has anybody read a modern game manual? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Has anybody read a modern game manual? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny, modern instruction manuals are....worthless. There's about 10 pages of front matter, including boilerplate information from the console manufacturer (controller configuration, seizure warnings, etc), ToC, etc. Then there's about 5-10 pages on the actual game. Then once you start the game you go through 30minutes to an hour of non-skippable tutorial. It's obnoxious. How many different ways can you explain to someone to hit the button to jump and the other one to shoot?
I remember, back when games were much simpler, even stupidly simple games would have much larger instruction books. Dare I say they were even fun to read? They were full of story, jokes, cool art, etc. To this day, I have all the instruction books for my old NES and SNES games. I wouldn't buy a game without them. Now I couldn't care less about them. Which is sad to say because I write technical manuals for a living. I'd be lying if I said that videogame instruction books weren't influential in me going down this career path.
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I have not seen a decent printed manual for a game in about 10 years now.
Technically, you only need a sheet of paper that contains a list of controls, and other stuff as needed. It may need to span multiple pages depending on how complex the controls become, and any smart designer would place a copy in-game as well.
However, the manual should at least describe basic game mechanics (e.g. should allow players to successfully min-max something on the first try.)
Having the instructions only printed in the manual is an anachronism in this day and age.
I've seen an RTS that listed a whole ton of units in the game manual. For each unit, it only described the actions it coul
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Side note, and more than slightly off topic, but I would so very much like to see the original 2 X-COM games recreated to run on modern systems. No changes to some real-time-turn-based hybrid bullshit, just pure I take my turn then the computer (or online opponent) takes it's turn with destructible environment features. This would even be a good fit as a console game at this point in tech. With everything else getting remade or rereleased for the sake of nostalgia, why not X-COM?
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[...]When you download games from Steam you don't get the manual either.[...]
That's one of the (several) reasons I don't download games from Steam. I buy games, with packaging, and expect a physical manual, even if it is rather worthless. To me, they're a part of the whole package that I buy (not pay for a license). I still have my first PC game CD, with the box and manual. It was Age of Empires. Yeah, I'm a latecomer, I know. Those are the sort of things you don't throw away. They're a bit of nostalgia that remind you of the fun times in life; like photographs from your favo
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The switch to DVD movie-style boxes was the real death of the Manual as anything more than a list of key mappings and install instructions. I still have my SimCity 2000 Special Edition, UFO:Enemy Unknown (X-COM:UFO Defense for the 'merkins) & Warcraft 2 manuals and they were works of art - especially the WC2 one with all the drawings by Chris Metzen; they were mini-encyclopaedias back in the day when vast amounts of information about a game wasn't available at the touch of a Google.
They will be sadly mi
What manuals were good game manuals? (Score:2)
Since so many of them stunk, can anybody list which box manuals were actually worth reading?
Two that come to my mind:
1) Final Fantasy VII. We had a computer, but we didn't have a Playstation. When FFVII was released to PC, I was so excited. The manual that came w/ the game had a step-by-step game guide of the first "chapter" of the game. It wasn't a complete walkthrough, but for someone who had not played that-intricate a Final Fantasy game before, it was incredibly helpful and informative. It was com
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Pfft, yeah, "GREEN!" (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not "GREEN", more like "It's a helluva lot less expensive to just not print the manuals!"
On-line help in HTML or PDF form would suffice for a "manual" and often does in many games nowadays.
Besides, I have seen manuals get smaller and smaller and smaller to the point where they are really just a few pages of basic "How to install game" paragraphs and "How to contact support" *plus* two pages of advertisements for the company's other games, subscriptions, merchandise, etc.
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No, not "GREEN", more like "It's a helluva lot less expensive to just not print the manuals!"
Exactly. One of the concepts I learned in psych was that you need to properly frame things to be a benefit to the customer; even if teh goal is simply to save costs. Hence, hotels "Use less water if you reuse a tool" and "Unless you ask we won't change sheets / vacuum during your stay"ather then "we only service the room every other day to save cash."
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Don't forget the two or three blank pages where you're supposed to write who knows what.
Home Improvement (Score:5, Insightful)
Real men don't read instructions
I like them (Score:5, Insightful)
If the end result was the inclusion of manuals... (Score:5, Insightful)
...either in software form (nothing more fussy than html or pdf, please) or within in-game help, that would merely be a disappointment.
But what really going on here is that they're turning their manuals from a cost to a profit by outsourcing their manuals to BradyGames, Prima, and other publishers. I'm sick to death of paying for games which need manuals (rts/tbs yes, fps, no), but I'm only provided with a razor thin command reference sheet, if that.
UbiSoft wins. The game strategy guide industry wins. The customer loses. More of the usual.
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When is the last time that a major RTS hasn't had a campaign mode nearly entirely devoted to showing you all of your units and explaining the mechanics and trees? Starcraft and Warcraft 2 had campaigns where the beginning explained these things; the difference in newer games is the general shrinking of the portion afterwords that you have full access to all units.
I know that TBS games can be a bit more detailed and usually only give an overview, but since when is learning their mechanics impossible to do fr
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How is that a loss? There was a time when the game manual had to fire the imagination a little, make up for the chunky graphics, supply a back story, or document some complicated controls, stuff that was difficult/impossible from within the game. Now games have all the technology to explain themselves from the moment they start, and if they can't or don't, they're in trouble. What's wrong with giving some game mapping companies an inside track, folk who do a far more honest job documenting the game than
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... seriously? http://gamefaqs.org/ [gamefaqs.org]
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For which YOU need manuals. Only games I've needed a manual for in the past decade have been the Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron series, both available with my purchase in PDF form for free.
It's a small but important point: after all, there could be somebody else who also needs detailed manuals for FPSs and even if your policy were put in place, he'd complain about paying for only a thin reference sheet.
Pretty much useless (Score:2, Insightful)
I kinda miss them... (Score:2)
Nostalgia (Score:2)
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However, I will always fondly remember those hefty manuals that you used to get with a huge role-playing game like Baldur's Gate. I loved flipping through those and reading up on the lore or finding out about an aspect of the game I didn't know about from reading just the basic instructions.
It was the Ultima series for me: the manuals, the lore, not to mention the cloth maps and little trinkets. Going forth to do battle with yet another incompatible DOS memory manager. Happy times!
Green? (Score:5, Insightful)
So to be green they're removing the most environmentally friendly part of the product?
It'd be a much more green initiative to replace the plastic case with a paper and card case that could include basic controls printed on it's various surfaces. They could even go all out and switch to all digital distribution.
Re:Green? (Score:4, Insightful)
They could even go all out and switch to all digital distribution.
All-digital distribution isn't fun if you can't get cable or DSL where you live, or if you're trying to squeeze 20 GB of a Blu-ray or multi-DVD game over low-end DSL.
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What, you think game disks are analog?
(And yes I know what you meant ;-) )
Fixed (Score:2)
Ubisoft announced last week that they will be ditching the trend of printing instruction manuals for new games under the 'cost savings' initiative.
Odds on them passing along the savings to the customer? Zero. But it doesn't matter. Ever since the internet connection required fiasco I won't be buying any of their crap anyway
'Green'? (Score:2, Interesting)
RTFM? (Score:4, Funny)
So now I am going to look stupid telling people to RTFM. I don't know, but RTFCH (read the F. contextual help) just doesn't feel as catchy.
My two cents (Score:2)
Personally, I like having a manual, but I also apparently like losing them. Sure, ditch the print version, but provide for an online manual. It has been important, time and again, to have some form of manual for games. Whether it's understanding an item, having a quick controller reference, or just the nifty character and enemy profiles. Go green, just don't go without.
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They could not make a manual at all, and you would still be able t find what you need about the game online.
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Sure, as long as it is all in one convenient place - having it in a "manual" format would allow for easy finding, users would have a downloadable copy they could print off if they felt so inclined, and you wouldn't have to rely on webs of forum posts or comments from the community if the developer put on loose bits of info about the game but nothing to the caliber of a well-done manual (not always the case as some manuals are pretty terrible).
Think of the children (Score:2)
Now how are we going to advise epileptics that they shouldn't play video games?
readme? (Score:2)
They'll still have a readme file that I can print out on my dot matrix printer and store in a three ring binder for future reference though right?
My grandfather actually used to make me do this when I was little, being an old school engineer. God help me if he saw me uncheck that "view readme first" check-box after the installation.
Fine by me (Score:2)
With their crappy DRM, I wasn't planning on buying any of their games anyway.
Good for them. (Score:2)
Good for them. Not that I really care seeing as I'll never purchase an Ubisoft game again.
green? (Score:2)
I thought the global warming folks were freaking out about CO2? Paper is made from trees grown for exactly that purpose. Those trees are young, which means they absorb more CO2 than older trees. Shouldn't we support using paper? New paper also takes less chemicals and such to process than recycling the stuff again as paper.
what (Score:2)
"While no other publishers have jumped on that 'green' train just yet it is likely that others will follow suit. "
Publishers have been going more green for years. Most games I have bought over the last couple of years haven't had a hard manual.
Manuals used to be the only way to learn a game (Score:2)
I remember when reading the manuals were the ONLY way to figure out how to play a game. On Atari 2600 games and the likes you would often need them to figure out what those little pixelated blobs were supposed to be on the screen and what to do with them, and the manual certainly wouldn't fit in 4k bytes of rom. On text based Infocom interactive fiction games you would always need to read through an example session in the manual to figure out the basic vocabulary understood by the particular game.
Utilities
Why bother with manuals at all (Score:2)
But is this really the case? (Score:2)
Yes. Glad we had this discussion.
If they want to be green, stop using DRM over... (Score:2)
...servers as the electricity costs/footprint alone is much more hurtful than a dead tree manual. Green initiative my ass, lying sack of cheap bastards.
$$$Think GREEN$$$ (Score:2)
global warming global cooling global dimming global skimming
A few reasons (Score:2)
And next month... (Score:2)
Green as in greenback (Score:2)
>> Ubisoft will be ditching the trend of printing instruction manuals for new games under the 'green' initiative ...and of course its just coincidence that it also happens to save them a lot of money.
So I guess they will be passing thew savings onto us then? No I thought not...
Get rid of them. (Score:2)
I've always been a fan of nicely designed manuals. But the last time I've seen a good one was back in the 80s. Everything since then has been halfhearted, poorly designed junk. Few people seem to read them. I'll flip through them once myself and never refer to them again. Might as well get rid of them and include instructions in the game. I don't mean annoying tutorials that get in the way of me just playing the game. I mean a separate set of instructions I can read through at my leisure.
If you need a manual to play a game... (Score:2)
The kind of stuff you DO need to read for certain games will never be published in a manual anyway like drop percentages or cookie cutter strategies, the internets are much
Tired of the 'green' fad. (Score:2)
Memories... (Score:2)
My friends and I used to buy games based in part on the manuals. One of the best manuals ever came from Dynamix when they released Red Baron. It was a very well illustrated history of aviation and aerial warfare during World War One. Another great manual was the Falcon 3.0 bible. Back in the day you could practically judge the depth and quality of a simulator based on the size of the manual. Who can forget all of the old Sierra Online games and the manuals that contained clues about how to play the gam
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Good manuals, like good liner notes will be missed. The vast majority of game manuals, like the vast majority of liner notes are, and have always been completely superfluous crap.
Actually, I think it's a bit worse than that. It used to be that games were completely both incapable of conveying a story line and had extremely poor graphics, so the best manuals filled in the gaps. Now a days games are so much better at the narrative and have such vastly superior graphics that game manuals only exist to tell
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I prefer the PDF AND the paper version. The PDF to read it and search it when I don't play the game. The paper version next to my keyboard when I play the game and I have no way of reading the PDF at the same time. The kind of game a play tend to have lot of keys to use and need some background information (RPG).
The thing for me between continue to play with my 'evaluation' version (ie: TPB version) and the 'real' thing is:
1) If I like it and play it more than 15min
2) Or there is a nice shin
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Unless there is no buyers. By reducing the need for resources in all possible places there simply will not be a market and land that is unused today will continue to be unused. Supply and demand applies as much to land as it does to money.
They're doing this to save money, nothing more.
The paper i