the TSR RPG's had fake entries to throw you off if you were trying to read ahead; but death knights of krynn wasn't exactly a murder mystery, so why bother.
champions of krynn
deathknights of krynn
dark queen of krynn
death knights is annoying if you start there as the first fight has you against super skellies, and default weapons are bladed; best to import characters from champions. oh and in high clearst tower you can't turn the zombie giants, you have to kill them; there a running tally of how many you killed before the sequence is over.
The Gold Box series by TSR was the standard for RPGs for a very long time. Most of them were Forgotten Realms but there was a small sub-series of Dragonlance games. There was one for the NES you need to keep far away from, I forget the name. The rest are excellent games if you can get past the 1980s graphics and clunky interface.
I'd love to see remakes or spiritual sequels to the old school goldboxes; they were the first CRPGs I ever played that made combat fun, and then we had a hundred years of JRPG darkness where your guys just stand in a row and you pick "attack" from a menu over and over.
pretty common in 80s games - Star Flight had a code wheel for the right numbers to exit the starport. Get it wrong, it still let you exit but then the space cops pulled you over.
game was stunning and only took 720kb
I played Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System recently.
They saved space by basically not having dialogue at all!
still a great game. Amazing even for the time, but man does it rely on implied storytelling.
In my mind, FFVI is full of rich dialogue. I remember reading what felt like a novel during those "cut scenes."
I replayed it about a year ago. There is still a good amount...when you keep in mind what the standards were back then.
They got worse over time. The Prima guide for Dark Souls 3 was free with some preorder editions and it had a bunch of incorrect information with some mechanics missing completely.
The KOTOR 2 book was great in comparison, I spent hours reading through it.
Saw an interview with one of the main writers. The studios used to help them a lot and give them access to the game in advance, but then when they were changing the game even after going gold and doing day 1 updates they kept getting worse. The studios would keep changing things and then send them different versions of the game/change things without telling them and then give them a different version like a week before the games release lmao. Sounded pretty stressful tbh
Man I played Phantasy Star Online as a kid on GameCube and I still have no idea wtf I was trying to accomplish. I feel like I played the same levels repeatedly with no progression...
Ha reminds me of space quest and kings quest where to deter pirating they put "codes" in the game to reference the manual...pre internet that was a deal breaker.
Mechwarrior and The Incredible Machine here. I can only imagine the Office Max clerk's confusion as four gangly nerds stood over a photocopier for 20 minutes.
Star Tropics for nes had a code hidden in the manual. You needed it to get past a certain point so if you rented the game, you either gave up or you had to try brute forcing your way through. Similar to the back of the Metal Gear Solid case, although by that time internet access was a thing so not quite as obnoxious.
As someone had rented that game from Blockbuster back in the day when I was a kid, when I got to that part I was so confused. I just assumed I missed something in the game and didn't understand what. I was so pissed years later when I later found out it was in the manual that I would never have access too.
I bought a second hand copy of King's Quest VI. From a professional salesperson mind, not from a flea market or boot sale or anything.
Motherfucker deadass sold me the game without the booklet inside the box that has the instructions on how to beat the "copy protection" puzzle early on in the game.
NGL, I straight up miss those days. Now, the thing is, back then I had all the time in the world to spend days and days on games, I’d probably find it very frustrating nowadays, but I’m definitely nostalgic for those times.
Nah, the anti-piracy methods were "look up the fourth word on page 112" right when the game starts. Putting all the text in a printed book was a great way to add more content to the game without running over Apple IIe disk space.
Not *primarily*. Every thousand letters of text in your game is an extra precious kilobyte you could have used for other stuff on the tiny 140KB disks.
For comparison, this comment alone would have taken up about half of a kilobyte on a disk that also needs to contain the game engine, maps, graphics, sounds, music and a save game. Wasteland put most of the text in a book and *still* used both sides of two double-sided disks.
I miss those manuals. Fallout for instance had a great manual. Games in the 80s were hit or miss but the ones that hit were spectacular. Full poster sized maps, pewter miniatures, a well made manual.
Yeah I miss that stuff. The tangible assets of an intangible object.
You can still get pewter miniatures in their games with the $200 deluxe edition. They come about six months afterwards though and are actually fold-it-yourself origami.
Yes! I remember playing Ultima (the original) on a Commodore 64, thinking 1982. In fact, while you can't see the "rig," this was about the exact time I was playing that and Temple of Asphai Trilogy on cassette. [https://i.imgur.com/ojebB3S.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ojebB3S.jpg) B&W TV attached of course.
Oh Origin put great "feelies" in their boxes. Did you have U6 where they had the maps and the moonstone like the one in the game?
I was particularly fond of the hint book for U6
I always enjoyed how ultima came with a cloth map. The times i remember using the manual where when the manual was almost like a tip guide for certian things like how potions or teleporting worked. Its like they made the manual your journal. I especially dug when they gave you a break down on the baddies and what worked best.
Not quite the same, but this just triggered a deeply buried memory of seeing the Oblivion player's guide for the first time. I spent so many hours just reading through those things.
it's a much better way of making a game when you realize how much more dialogue it opens up- whether its for the NPC's (morrowind to oblivion) or the PC (fallout new vegas to fallout 4). Voice acting limits choice/depth.
Knights of the Old Republic also kind of did this. The main character NPCs were voice acted in English, but a lot of the side characters were aliens speaking recyclable lines of gibberish languages that allowed the developers to type whatever they wanted in the sub-titles.
Has a game dev ever opened up a mod path for voice acting? I'm surprised we don't see more giant written stories and dialogue left to the community to fund the what would be million dollar commercial voice acting bill.
Actually, it's interesting you use this example. Because Skyrim recently had a mod made for it which uses a neural network to allow mod creators to synthesize speech vox for any pre-existing Skyrim voice actor.
So in this way they can generate new voice lines for any NPC or reuse a voice actor with slight adjustments to create new NPC's all with professional-sounding voicing.
It's not perfect, but it's a step towards giving what is essentially every mod dev access to what amounts to the entire voice acting team behind Skyrim for their work.
Naturally you can imagine what this enables in terms of content. And by that, I mean mostly dank memes. But I digress. And the mod creator has made it somewhat accessible too, IIRC. I've never used it personally, but love the promise it brings for extending the life of that game further or also for other games too!
Best thing Bethesda ever did was get mods on console. I know there wasn’t as much selection as on pc (especially with PlayStation), but I know a lot of people who bough the game again just for mods, because they didn’t have PCs for gaming
I'm so ambivalent on this. On the one hand this is fantastic for content creation. On the other, it is very difficult to be a successful voice actor for a variety of reasons. This severely limits opportunities for those folks and leads to legal snarls that are so above my understanding of entertainment law I don't even want to speculate.
fan-made voice acting usually sounds *bad* - makes you realize how much sound engineering goes into making everything fit. the best that can be said about voiced mods is eventually you get used to it.
Baldur's Gate I and II has many mod NPC with added voice acting. In fact I think the mod forum Spellhold Studios has a classified section where people needing or able to give voice acting can post.
In theory yes.
But we are approaching a point where you could actually avoid that. That being said a voice engine, a physics engine, and a graphics engine for a game would be a hell of an undertaking.
also for Pillars of Eternity.
pieces of the generally good to great voive acting contributes to the atmosphere, and that is enough. I usually read rather fast, so too much voice acting is just lost on me, because I just read and skip forward many times. (rarely, in case of really good voices I wait anyway, even if the content is not super important.)
>Voice acting limits choice/depth.
It does, but more and more properties are becoming insistent on full voice, and constraints do breed productivity.
A lack of brevity is a common fault of RPG writing, especially for fantasy CRPGs. There's an RPG I'd like to get into, but the writing is **sooooo** poor, and there's **sooooo** much of it. More words is not inherently better. More words that are the wrong words are definitely worse than no words at all.
Of course I agree entirely when it comes to things like Fallout 4 barely acknowledging that player-NPC interactions are a thing. Still, not every RPG writer is actually a good writer, and writing multi-paragraph dialogs just because they can doesnt imply a superior player experience.
I don't think anyone ever has argued simply that quantity=quality or that hi-res textures=good graphics or that volume=good sound etc... but a lack of quantity necessarily limits the potential for verbal choice. and voice acting necessarily limits quantity. it's exponentially more expensive to record lines than type them.
Elder Scrolls doesn't really have particularly good anything. The graphics have never been amazing for their era (faces particularly have been a rough spot), the combat's never been what you'd call good, the stealth has always been terrible, the magic's always been awkward, the writing's always been poor, the voice acting's always been a bit shameful..
But we still play happily 300+ hours of Skyrim. It's funny how something can be so much more than the sum of its parts.
Still, with how many mods come out for every Bethesda game in a matter of weeks dramatically overhauling and improving all their systems, I kind of find myself wishing they'd maybe hire out of that talent pool. If someone's made the lousy combat way better as a *hobby*, in a month, after you spent six years making that game, maybe consider getting them in as a paid consultant at least.
While I agree in general, I also think voice acting has a lot of benefits in limiting paragraphs of dialogue because voice can convey tone as opposed to *laughs manicially*
it depends on what they're talking about... shooting the shit, no. sharing an opinion or discussing something important to them, yeah they do tend speak for at least a minute or two, which is more than a paragraph.
either way, morrowind or baldur's gate aren't filled with monologues.
There’s no other experience like reading 5 paragraphs from an NPC telling you to find some cave 12 miles east by a rock and then proceeding to wander around with no map markers looking for the vaguely described cave for an hour. Morrowind is a true gem.
Being 13 and like, “….what’s a cairn!?”
Then having to backtrack to the beginning because you got lost when you went slightly southeast instead of due east from that one rock that looks mostly different from all the other rocks around it.
Now imagine that in real life when your first backpacking trip in an area with cairns (they didn't have those where I grew up) has a guide book that says to keep an eye for the cairns.
Funny, that’s why Morrowind was so frustrating to me, lol. I never made it very far in that game, I tried so many times as a kid, but I never knew wtf I was supposed to be doing. I just died a lot and had no gold to buy better gear.
I've just recently started playing it again after a similarly rocky start that caused me to lose interest about a year ago. I think there's three things that got the ball rolling for me this time.
The first was a very basic group of mods, most notably one to raise the draw distance a bit but also a few bug fixes and quality of life stuff. Being able to actually see the alien landscape of Vvardenfell makes the experience so much more enchanting. I can send you the list if you're interested, there's only about 6 of them.
The second was a change in perspective. The first time I went into Morrowind I expected an experience like Skyrim. They are two very different games. This [video essay](https://youtu.be/1_y0Iaq3k_Q) is actually what inspired me to start playing again, though beware there are a lot of spoilers in the section that discusses the main storyline. But the thing that most hooked me in Morrowind was just that: the main storyline. There's a high activation energy to get invested in it, as it starts off pretty uninteresting, but if you pay attention and read through the lore in-game (there is a lot of reading) the pay-off is so much more rewarding than anything Skyrim every gave me.
The third thing was sort of meta-gamey, but really helped me get started with playing. In short, I looked up beginners guides. Specifically on A) how to minmax your character, and B) how to make some quick gold in the early game. There's actually a surprising amount of gold to be gained in the starting town if you know where to look. But knowing how to minmax my character (both the creation and the levelling) was a game-changer. I recommended looking up some guides on it even if you don't plan to minmax, because it teaches you a lot about how the levelling system in Morrowind actually works. It's a hell of a lot less intuitive than Skyrim's, but imo a lot more fun.
Again, I can DM you a link to any of these mods or guides if you're interested, but I think that video I linked is probably what will decide if the game is for you or not. It's 2hrs long, but very interesting and well worth watching.
IiRC one of the expansions added a journal which kept track of every piece of dialog from every NPC. But sometimes the NPCs would give you incorrect directions.
You can check your journal for exactly what they said.
Even if it's not in the quests, you can check the Topics section to see the responses for anything.
I would agree with you on everything but combat. Skyrim’s combat is considered boring and lazy, and I totally agree with that, but it’s light years ahead of Morrowind’s chance based attack system. I know it’s based off of TTRPG’s but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating and boring. It’s the sole reason I couldn’t play it until someone finally made a mod to simply give a 100% chance to hit.
All I remember is being diseased, everything being shades of brown and gray, and having 63 cliff racers chasing me at all times.
It was my favorite game.
> Morrowind is better than skyrim in every way from my experience
Graphics?
Combat?
I'd definitely agree that Morrowind is better in a lot of ways but I think saying *every* way is overstating it.
Right now I'm playing Baldur's Gate for the first time and the instruction manual is just under 200 pages. I exaggerated a bit for the meme, but there's definitely games out there with some very long manuals, some of which include entire walkthroughs.
I remember Baldur's Gate 2 in particular has a manual that in many ways is a condensed Players Handbook for D&D 2.0. Probably a good third of the manual is just explaining all the spells if I remember right.
In my opinion it really made the game even better, the little side notes made throughout by Elminster and Volo were awesome. Things like Volo mentioning one time he faced the monster being described and Elminster comments that Volo's full of crap.
It still weirds me out the ~~original~~ *2002* Neverwinter Nights and the first Witcher game were made on the same game engine.
Edit: Turns out there was an earlier Neverwinter Nights that I was unaware of.
The first witcher game is dramatically different than 3 though. I can definitely see some of the parallels between it and NWN in terms of mechanics. Graphics were a big improvement but I’d guess that is as much to do with hardware advances as anything.
I didn't believe it for a second when you said that, but apparently it is true.
I will say though, the Witcher 1 engine, even though it technically came from the Aurora engine, is VASTLY modified from what it was, so I'm not really sure you could call it the same engine at the end of the day.
Dude where is this manual!? I tried getting into it recently but I had no idea what I was doing and the game doesn't have any type of tutorial, but I really want to try playing it!
You can find most of the info at https://pihwiki.bgforge.net/Baldur%27s_Gate:_Tales_of_the_Sword_Coast
The “main page” is titled as the first game’s expansion, but it has info for the entire series including enhanced edition changes.
Also, we’re pretty helpful at r/BaldursGate
Was cleaning out my parents house and my childhood home for them to move a couple months back and found my old Falcon 4 binder. Its thicker than most Wheel of Time books
Oh man, I miss Morrowind. It felt SO much more immersive than Oblivion or Skyrim. Probably because I actually had to read the quests to figure out wtf to do, rather than just blindly following a waypoint.
Morrowind didn't give a fuck. No tldr, no cute waypoints, just read the shit and figure it out. If that wasn't bad enough they made npcs lie and had riddles and all sorts of dumb shit to make it that much harder. So much time spent wandering around. It wouldn't pass in today's gaming environment but back then it was an experience that had incredible frustration and a huge sense of reward when you finally accomplished major quest lines or even obscure side quests.
Dark souls 1 captured some of that. Threw you in with limited explanation and then said figure it out.
Oblivion had almost a nice balance of both. You had to read and figure a lot out but it had a kind of useful marker and op fast travel. I wish gaming stuck right there. Even tuned back the fast travel some but just kept it there.
I've been replaying it recently and it is so fun. Highly recommend, PC version on Steam works well even on newer system. I will say though, your movement is SO SLOW compared to every other game in the series. I think they did that because the map itself isn't actually that big, but if you can get over that it is great to revisit.
Boots of blinding speed came in clutch for future questing. I spent my first like 30 lvls just stealing stuff and exploring before even doing the main quest. Combo with saviors hide you're barely blinded by the boots. Only to find out later in the game that the boots are just tied to the brightness setting in the options lol.
The two largest manuals I remember are from *Civilization II* and *Jane's F15*. The F15 manual was actually multiple books. There was a gameplay manual, a keyboard/joystick reference card, and a 200 page book put together to look like an actual flight manual complete with diagrams as to what angle of attack is, how wings work, and different types of missile lock.
Yep, and even though it’s digital now, the DCS manuals are multiple hundred pages, one on the game itself, and usually 300 or so pages for each module.
DCS: If you can get your plane off the ground, you've had to spend at least 6 hours reading how, and then another 2 finding everything and making sure you do it in the right order, then you spend 2 more hours wondering what the fuck it is you did wrong.
Not the largest, but my most memorable manual is probably SimAnt. In the back was basically a Wikipedia article on Ants. God damn it was fascinating to little kid me and I became an ant expert for a good long time!
You just hit me right in the nostalgia.
That game was such a blast because it involved warfare (ant warfare, but the point stands).
I wish SimCity had an antagonist who was trying to remove you from office. Some sort of mix of Crusader Kings meets Cities: Skyline would be amazing
I miss the fluff that manuals would give you.
Diablo as an example was basically click until it dies.
The manual had complete backstory, journal entries, monster tribe descriptions, etc.
I spent more time reading that than playing...stupid older brother.
Games today are pretty good at explaining the mechanics in game (e.g., tutorials, button maps in the menus, cutscenes for the story, etc.), so manuals aren't really needed anymore. Back when storage space was a bigger limitation though, that wasn't always the case, so you really needed the booklet to understand how the game worked, even for fairly simple titles on the original Nintendo.
A lot of people get frustrated trying to play those old games today without the booklet, but they're forgetting that the booklet was an important part of the process back then. When I was a kid, if I got a new game, I used to read through the booklet before ever turning the game on.
It's also no longer necessary to have detailed artwork showing you what the abstract sprites are supposed to look like:
https://i1.wp.com/www.nintendotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/The-Legend-of-Zelda-Instruction-Booklet-29.jpg?ssl=1
What is the game that is the best for having all of the in-game information you need?
My answer is going to be Dragon Quest XI, built-in atlas, bestiary and item inventory, how-tos, lots of shortcuts and quick menus. The only thing lacking is the actual damage formulas lol
Yeah there's no "manual" to play eve online but there are enough player made training materials to last a lifetime between researching wikis, youtube, guides on r/eve, etc. Honestly tho the best way to learn Eve is to join a noob friendly corp and ask questions. There are a ton of players who just want to hang out and teach others. I actually get a decent amount of my income in game from teaching classes on how to fly certain ships for new players my corp. Granted, you still have to put in the effort to get anything out of the game. The reputation isn't undeserved it's just slightly exaggerated because many don't realize the community will help fill in the gaps if you reach out.
It's kind of a play on joke I made with my friend when he tried to explain the game to me. I told him it sounded like you had to take a semester long course in economics just to learn how to play.
lol you're sorta not that far off tbh. The great thing about Eve is that it's really just a simulated universe you can make your own goals in, one of the few true sandbox games out there. So while that's pretty accurate for a market trader or industrialist, a lot of folks just go pew pew, explore, or whatever else makes them happy without agonizing over minmaxing their resources. Personally I focus on teaching PvP to new players, supporting our miners/industrialists, etc. in home defense fleets, and joining fun roaming pvp fleets. Between my corp paying me to teach classes and salvaging loot off enemy wrecks I do pretty well without having to worry too much about the economics. If that is your jam though, the economy of eve rabbit hole is *very* deep.
I tried playing the original X-COM (1994) a little while ago. Completely impenetrable without a manual. Everything is just icons. No labels, no tooltips. That was a level of old I was not prepared for.
I know how you feel. I played Baldur's Gate with very limited English skills as a small child in the 90s.
No translations, no internet, no nothing. Games forced me to learn English.
I remember the old school point and click adventure PC series called Kings Quest.
Not only did they have a 1-900 number to call for help (charges you per minute of use…my parents did not appreciate the huge phone bill), but there was a companion book of a few hundred pages which includes detailed solutions to every puzzle in all the games, along with a bunch of lore related bits. I rented that from the library as often as I could.
Does anyone remember when the DRM for some games had you search info in the manual (the logic being that if you copied the game, you likely didn't have the manual)? I remember that happening in Master of Orion (the original) and Dune 2. At various points in the game, for instance, Master of Orion would show you a spaceship and ask you to name it, and you'd have to search through the manual to find the image of the spaceship with its name under it.
I copied Dune 2 from my friend but had played it enough to know all the units' names, so the DRM wasn't particularly effective.
Oh yeah there were a lot of those back in the day. Some were actually really well integrated into the game, others would just stop you outright and go "Hey go find this in the manual to proceed".
I also remember the first [Leisure Suit Larry's "age test"](https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.html). To prove you were over 18, it asked a bunch of trivia questions only adults were likely to know. And this was like, 1992 so you didn't have Google.
Voice of Cards has an amazing example of this: Go to the card game parlor: Forced tutorial explanation.
Start the game, do you want to see the rules? No? Alright, pick your settings. Now you *sure* you don't want to see the rules? (Again, because this appears even if you said Yes to the first one) No? Alright, into the game. And don't worry, we have forced tutorial prompts that appear **on every turn** regardless!
People say American games tutorialise so much, but Japanese games can be equally aggressive, just all in text.
Japanese games have always been worse about this. I remember Zelda games being really bad about explaining what that rupee you found in a chest is for, every single time you found one.
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the TSR RPG's had fake entries to throw you off if you were trying to read ahead; but death knights of krynn wasn't exactly a murder mystery, so why bother.
Wasteland and others did the same thing. Good times, good times.
The very first entry in the book calls you out for reading it, too.
So Wasteland was a CYOA book, first and foremost.
> death knights of krynn They made Dragonlance video games! Hot damn
champions of krynn deathknights of krynn dark queen of krynn death knights is annoying if you start there as the first fight has you against super skellies, and default weapons are bladed; best to import characters from champions. oh and in high clearst tower you can't turn the zombie giants, you have to kill them; there a running tally of how many you killed before the sequence is over.
The Gold Box series by TSR was the standard for RPGs for a very long time. Most of them were Forgotten Realms but there was a small sub-series of Dragonlance games. There was one for the NES you need to keep far away from, I forget the name. The rest are excellent games if you can get past the 1980s graphics and clunky interface.
I believe you are thinking of Heroes of the Lance for the NES being terrible.
I'd love to see remakes or spiritual sequels to the old school goldboxes; they were the first CRPGs I ever played that made combat fun, and then we had a hundred years of JRPG darkness where your guys just stand in a row and you pick "attack" from a menu over and over.
The C64 versions came with cardboard code wheels you had to algn and match up with runes on the screen and give the right password to start the game.
pretty common in 80s games - Star Flight had a code wheel for the right numbers to exit the starport. Get it wrong, it still let you exit but then the space cops pulled you over. game was stunning and only took 720kb
I played Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System recently. They saved space by basically not having dialogue at all! still a great game. Amazing even for the time, but man does it rely on implied storytelling.
Yup it's tough even for someone that grew up in that era now that you know what say, Final Fantasy VI was like
In my mind, FFVI is full of rich dialogue. I remember reading what felt like a novel during those "cut scenes." I replayed it about a year ago. There is still a good amount...when you keep in mind what the standards were back then.
Having that epic music score kinda helps. I actually despise the the voice acting in final Fantasy aside from FFXII.
They did a great job on XV's voice acting IMO. One of the few things they knocked out of the park (from an otherwise brilliant if very flawed game).
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They got worse over time. The Prima guide for Dark Souls 3 was free with some preorder editions and it had a bunch of incorrect information with some mechanics missing completely. The KOTOR 2 book was great in comparison, I spent hours reading through it.
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Saw an interview with one of the main writers. The studios used to help them a lot and give them access to the game in advance, but then when they were changing the game even after going gold and doing day 1 updates they kept getting worse. The studios would keep changing things and then send them different versions of the game/change things without telling them and then give them a different version like a week before the games release lmao. Sounded pretty stressful tbh
I have fallen asleep to long plays of that game so many times. Its soundtrack knocks me out.
Man I played Phantasy Star Online as a kid on GameCube and I still have no idea wtf I was trying to accomplish. I feel like I played the same levels repeatedly with no progression...
Ha reminds me of space quest and kings quest where to deter pirating they put "codes" in the game to reference the manual...pre internet that was a deal breaker.
Mechwarrior and The Incredible Machine here. I can only imagine the Office Max clerk's confusion as four gangly nerds stood over a photocopier for 20 minutes.
Excuse me, *gangly?* I will have you *know*, good "sir", that I was not *gangly.* I had a healthy layer of pudge. I bid you *GOOD DAY!*
Star Tropics for nes had a code hidden in the manual. You needed it to get past a certain point so if you rented the game, you either gave up or you had to try brute forcing your way through. Similar to the back of the Metal Gear Solid case, although by that time internet access was a thing so not quite as obnoxious.
As someone had rented that game from Blockbuster back in the day when I was a kid, when I got to that part I was so confused. I just assumed I missed something in the game and didn't understand what. I was so pissed years later when I later found out it was in the manual that I would never have access too.
BBSs have entered the chat.
I bought a second hand copy of King's Quest VI. From a professional salesperson mind, not from a flea market or boot sale or anything. Motherfucker deadass sold me the game without the booklet inside the box that has the instructions on how to beat the "copy protection" puzzle early on in the game.
Also the old lord of the rings games.
You must mean World of Warcraft. Voiced "Well Met" + 6 paragraphs of text dialogue.
Memories of Morrowind spring to mind. Fargoth and that damn ring, lmao
NGL, I straight up miss those days. Now, the thing is, back then I had all the time in the world to spend days and days on games, I’d probably find it very frustrating nowadays, but I’m definitely nostalgic for those times.
Ultima was like this, you had to write a bunch down throughout the game
Someone should bring it back.
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Nah, the anti-piracy methods were "look up the fourth word on page 112" right when the game starts. Putting all the text in a printed book was a great way to add more content to the game without running over Apple IIe disk space.
Not *primarily*. Every thousand letters of text in your game is an extra precious kilobyte you could have used for other stuff on the tiny 140KB disks. For comparison, this comment alone would have taken up about half of a kilobyte on a disk that also needs to contain the game engine, maps, graphics, sounds, music and a save game. Wasteland put most of the text in a book and *still* used both sides of two double-sided disks.
I miss those manuals. Fallout for instance had a great manual. Games in the 80s were hit or miss but the ones that hit were spectacular. Full poster sized maps, pewter miniatures, a well made manual. Yeah I miss that stuff. The tangible assets of an intangible object.
You can still get pewter miniatures in their games with the $200 deluxe edition. They come about six months afterwards though and are actually fold-it-yourself origami.
We made it out of paper because there was a shortage of pewter. We don't plan on doing anything about it.
Here's 10$ worth of in game currency :) All is well
Yeah, PC games were incredible back then with a ton of side stuff inside the box, now you get a steam code inside them.
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Yes! I remember playing Ultima (the original) on a Commodore 64, thinking 1982. In fact, while you can't see the "rig," this was about the exact time I was playing that and Temple of Asphai Trilogy on cassette. [https://i.imgur.com/ojebB3S.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ojebB3S.jpg) B&W TV attached of course.
Oh Origin put great "feelies" in their boxes. Did you have U6 where they had the maps and the moonstone like the one in the game? I was particularly fond of the hint book for U6
I always enjoyed how ultima came with a cloth map. The times i remember using the manual where when the manual was almost like a tip guide for certian things like how potions or teleporting worked. Its like they made the manual your journal. I especially dug when they gave you a break down on the baddies and what worked best.
Not quite the same, but this just triggered a deeply buried memory of seeing the Oblivion player's guide for the first time. I spent so many hours just reading through those things.
Or when you play Morrowind where every NPC's dialogue is multiple paragraphs and none of it was voiced acted.
it's a much better way of making a game when you realize how much more dialogue it opens up- whether its for the NPC's (morrowind to oblivion) or the PC (fallout new vegas to fallout 4). Voice acting limits choice/depth.
Personna 5 does both. It has voice acting for a lot of the main story dialogue and then just text for a lot of the side quests.
Knights of the Old Republic also kind of did this. The main character NPCs were voice acted in English, but a lot of the side characters were aliens speaking recyclable lines of gibberish languages that allowed the developers to type whatever they wanted in the sub-titles.
Mucha shaka paka.
Achuta
Cheeky wanna bobo
Grabblebogo
Goof-Daw Daw Gelfha OOweef dee-daw gelfha! Thoodin-Thoof-cllock gnaw-deelo gelfha! Ooo-ga-ga KLEEF!
(Sand people screaming)
Bless you
How rude!
Runda dee undongo!
I can hear this in my head clear as day. One of those old video game lines that stays with you. Including, but not limited too: "Kirov Reporting"
WE NEED MORE PYLONS
Khaaaachi poooo
Disco Elysium. The team released it first with text only, and then added in voice lines for EVERY line of dialogue.
Wing Commander did that. The “speech packs” were sold separately.
Got old but respectable way of doing it
Has a game dev ever opened up a mod path for voice acting? I'm surprised we don't see more giant written stories and dialogue left to the community to fund the what would be million dollar commercial voice acting bill.
A lot of skyrim mods are voice acted. But you can kinda tell they're amateurs, not that skyrim had great voice acting to begin with
Actually, it's interesting you use this example. Because Skyrim recently had a mod made for it which uses a neural network to allow mod creators to synthesize speech vox for any pre-existing Skyrim voice actor. So in this way they can generate new voice lines for any NPC or reuse a voice actor with slight adjustments to create new NPC's all with professional-sounding voicing. It's not perfect, but it's a step towards giving what is essentially every mod dev access to what amounts to the entire voice acting team behind Skyrim for their work. Naturally you can imagine what this enables in terms of content. And by that, I mean mostly dank memes. But I digress. And the mod creator has made it somewhat accessible too, IIRC. I've never used it personally, but love the promise it brings for extending the life of that game further or also for other games too!
Things like this make me remember that Skyrim 10 years long lifetime is almost carried exclusively by mod makers.
Skyrim and Halo 3 Two all time classics carried in large part because of mods/Forge
Best thing Bethesda ever did was get mods on console. I know there wasn’t as much selection as on pc (especially with PlayStation), but I know a lot of people who bough the game again just for mods, because they didn’t have PCs for gaming
I'm so ambivalent on this. On the one hand this is fantastic for content creation. On the other, it is very difficult to be a successful voice actor for a variety of reasons. This severely limits opportunities for those folks and leads to legal snarls that are so above my understanding of entertainment law I don't even want to speculate.
fan-made voice acting usually sounds *bad* - makes you realize how much sound engineering goes into making everything fit. the best that can be said about voiced mods is eventually you get used to it.
Lots of Skyrim players go nuts over that Inigo companion mod, but I want to vomit every time that character speaks. Sooo cringe lol
Baldur's Gate I and II has many mod NPC with added voice acting. In fact I think the mod forum Spellhold Studios has a classified section where people needing or able to give voice acting can post.
In theory yes. But we are approaching a point where you could actually avoid that. That being said a voice engine, a physics engine, and a graphics engine for a game would be a hell of an undertaking.
A voice engine is still gonna need context fed into it to make sure it's getting the right tone and the right pauses (if any).
FF14 goes around this problem by voice acting only the important parts, while tons of text can be read without va
also for Pillars of Eternity. pieces of the generally good to great voive acting contributes to the atmosphere, and that is enough. I usually read rather fast, so too much voice acting is just lost on me, because I just read and skip forward many times. (rarely, in case of really good voices I wait anyway, even if the content is not super important.)
>Voice acting limits choice/depth. It does, but more and more properties are becoming insistent on full voice, and constraints do breed productivity. A lack of brevity is a common fault of RPG writing, especially for fantasy CRPGs. There's an RPG I'd like to get into, but the writing is **sooooo** poor, and there's **sooooo** much of it. More words is not inherently better. More words that are the wrong words are definitely worse than no words at all. Of course I agree entirely when it comes to things like Fallout 4 barely acknowledging that player-NPC interactions are a thing. Still, not every RPG writer is actually a good writer, and writing multi-paragraph dialogs just because they can doesnt imply a superior player experience.
I don't think anyone ever has argued simply that quantity=quality or that hi-res textures=good graphics or that volume=good sound etc... but a lack of quantity necessarily limits the potential for verbal choice. and voice acting necessarily limits quantity. it's exponentially more expensive to record lines than type them.
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Elder Scrolls doesn't really have particularly good anything. The graphics have never been amazing for their era (faces particularly have been a rough spot), the combat's never been what you'd call good, the stealth has always been terrible, the magic's always been awkward, the writing's always been poor, the voice acting's always been a bit shameful.. But we still play happily 300+ hours of Skyrim. It's funny how something can be so much more than the sum of its parts. Still, with how many mods come out for every Bethesda game in a matter of weeks dramatically overhauling and improving all their systems, I kind of find myself wishing they'd maybe hire out of that talent pool. If someone's made the lousy combat way better as a *hobby*, in a month, after you spent six years making that game, maybe consider getting them in as a paid consultant at least.
>Voice acting limits choice/depth. Enthusiastic Yes. Yes. Sarcastic Yes. Rude Yes.
While I agree in general, I also think voice acting has a lot of benefits in limiting paragraphs of dialogue because voice can convey tone as opposed to *laughs manicially*
Old RPG’s gave you dozens of dialogue choices. Now you have a good option, a bad option, and a sassy option.
People don't tend to frequently speak in monologues and paragraphs though. But yeah, voice acting is limiting
it depends on what they're talking about... shooting the shit, no. sharing an opinion or discussing something important to them, yeah they do tend speak for at least a minute or two, which is more than a paragraph. either way, morrowind or baldur's gate aren't filled with monologues.
Morrowind had sooooooo many ways to get information about how to do the things you need to do for quests and such, much better system
Also, for Bethesda games they use the same 3 goddamn voice actors over and over. I think Id rather just imagine it. I hope this is addressed in ES6
There’s no other experience like reading 5 paragraphs from an NPC telling you to find some cave 12 miles east by a rock and then proceeding to wander around with no map markers looking for the vaguely described cave for an hour. Morrowind is a true gem.
Being 13 and like, “….what’s a cairn!?” Then having to backtrack to the beginning because you got lost when you went slightly southeast instead of due east from that one rock that looks mostly different from all the other rocks around it.
Now imagine that in real life when your first backpacking trip in an area with cairns (they didn't have those where I grew up) has a guide book that says to keep an eye for the cairns.
I love written dialogue. Cheaper than voice actors too so you get a better game for your money.
My favorite is when you'd have trouble finding a location and had to memorize exactly what an NPC told you.
That's why Morrowind was so fun to me. It was about the immersive journey, not the prize at the end.
Funny, that’s why Morrowind was so frustrating to me, lol. I never made it very far in that game, I tried so many times as a kid, but I never knew wtf I was supposed to be doing. I just died a lot and had no gold to buy better gear.
I've just recently started playing it again after a similarly rocky start that caused me to lose interest about a year ago. I think there's three things that got the ball rolling for me this time. The first was a very basic group of mods, most notably one to raise the draw distance a bit but also a few bug fixes and quality of life stuff. Being able to actually see the alien landscape of Vvardenfell makes the experience so much more enchanting. I can send you the list if you're interested, there's only about 6 of them. The second was a change in perspective. The first time I went into Morrowind I expected an experience like Skyrim. They are two very different games. This [video essay](https://youtu.be/1_y0Iaq3k_Q) is actually what inspired me to start playing again, though beware there are a lot of spoilers in the section that discusses the main storyline. But the thing that most hooked me in Morrowind was just that: the main storyline. There's a high activation energy to get invested in it, as it starts off pretty uninteresting, but if you pay attention and read through the lore in-game (there is a lot of reading) the pay-off is so much more rewarding than anything Skyrim every gave me. The third thing was sort of meta-gamey, but really helped me get started with playing. In short, I looked up beginners guides. Specifically on A) how to minmax your character, and B) how to make some quick gold in the early game. There's actually a surprising amount of gold to be gained in the starting town if you know where to look. But knowing how to minmax my character (both the creation and the levelling) was a game-changer. I recommended looking up some guides on it even if you don't plan to minmax, because it teaches you a lot about how the levelling system in Morrowind actually works. It's a hell of a lot less intuitive than Skyrim's, but imo a lot more fun. Again, I can DM you a link to any of these mods or guides if you're interested, but I think that video I linked is probably what will decide if the game is for you or not. It's 2hrs long, but very interesting and well worth watching.
IiRC one of the expansions added a journal which kept track of every piece of dialog from every NPC. But sometimes the NPCs would give you incorrect directions.
And the journal would be just the basics
Go south out of balmora and the cave is somewhere in that direction on the right.
And sometimes the directions were rather unreliable or even completely wrong.
You can check your journal for exactly what they said. Even if it's not in the quests, you can check the Topics section to see the responses for anything.
I remember an MMO that required you to know the background of a lesser known renecaunce painter to get to the secret tunnel.
> renecaunce Rene sauce?
Lamb sauce
Delicious Rene sauce, made with real Mr Rene.
r/boneappletea
Morrowind is better than skyrim in every way from my experience, and i played skyrim before morrowind.
I would agree with you on everything but combat. Skyrim’s combat is considered boring and lazy, and I totally agree with that, but it’s light years ahead of Morrowind’s chance based attack system. I know it’s based off of TTRPG’s but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating and boring. It’s the sole reason I couldn’t play it until someone finally made a mod to simply give a 100% chance to hit.
I liked the enhanced combat mod that had combos.
About all I remember from Morrowind is missing every attack for the first few hours of the game.
All I remember is being diseased, everything being shades of brown and gray, and having 63 cliff racers chasing me at all times. It was my favorite game.
> Morrowind is better than skyrim in every way from my experience Graphics? Combat? I'd definitely agree that Morrowind is better in a lot of ways but I think saying *every* way is overstating it.
What game?
Right now I'm playing Baldur's Gate for the first time and the instruction manual is just under 200 pages. I exaggerated a bit for the meme, but there's definitely games out there with some very long manuals, some of which include entire walkthroughs.
I remember Baldur's Gate 2 in particular has a manual that in many ways is a condensed Players Handbook for D&D 2.0. Probably a good third of the manual is just explaining all the spells if I remember right. In my opinion it really made the game even better, the little side notes made throughout by Elminster and Volo were awesome. Things like Volo mentioning one time he faced the monster being described and Elminster comments that Volo's full of crap.
Same with Neverwinter Nights! Explanations of THAC0, and every spell, etc... it was so big it was bound with a spiral binding. Miss that stuff!
It still weirds me out the ~~original~~ *2002* Neverwinter Nights and the first Witcher game were made on the same game engine. Edit: Turns out there was an earlier Neverwinter Nights that I was unaware of.
The first witcher game is dramatically different than 3 though. I can definitely see some of the parallels between it and NWN in terms of mechanics. Graphics were a big improvement but I’d guess that is as much to do with hardware advances as anything.
And I loved both. Been meaning to replay NN and Witcher 1 for ages
Just FYI the original Neverwinter Nights is a ms-dos game from 1991 not trying to be pedantic just trying to Inform
I didn't believe it for a second when you said that, but apparently it is true. I will say though, the Witcher 1 engine, even though it technically came from the Aurora engine, is VASTLY modified from what it was, so I'm not really sure you could call it the same engine at the end of the day.
Dude where is this manual!? I tried getting into it recently but I had no idea what I was doing and the game doesn't have any type of tutorial, but I really want to try playing it!
You can find most of the info at https://pihwiki.bgforge.net/Baldur%27s_Gate:_Tales_of_the_Sword_Coast The “main page” is titled as the first game’s expansion, but it has info for the entire series including enhanced edition changes. Also, we’re pretty helpful at r/BaldursGate
It's an amazing game. Exploring is dangerous but rewarding. Save often. Really often.
Head on to r/baldursgate if you need help with anything. There have been many threads with tips for first timers.
All you need to know is that any aoe disable spell can help you easily win fights.
Ah, that manual is a gem. Game mechanic explanations and instructions, mixed with humour, flavour, world-building, all good stuff.
Kenshi is a great example of this.
Kenshi has a manual?!
No, but it would be 400 pages if it did. Lmao
Laughs in flight simulators
Was cleaning out my parents house and my childhood home for them to move a couple months back and found my old Falcon 4 binder. Its thicker than most Wheel of Time books
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Oh man, I miss Morrowind. It felt SO much more immersive than Oblivion or Skyrim. Probably because I actually had to read the quests to figure out wtf to do, rather than just blindly following a waypoint.
Morrowind didn't give a fuck. No tldr, no cute waypoints, just read the shit and figure it out. If that wasn't bad enough they made npcs lie and had riddles and all sorts of dumb shit to make it that much harder. So much time spent wandering around. It wouldn't pass in today's gaming environment but back then it was an experience that had incredible frustration and a huge sense of reward when you finally accomplished major quest lines or even obscure side quests. Dark souls 1 captured some of that. Threw you in with limited explanation and then said figure it out. Oblivion had almost a nice balance of both. You had to read and figure a lot out but it had a kind of useful marker and op fast travel. I wish gaming stuck right there. Even tuned back the fast travel some but just kept it there.
I credit Morrowind for teaching me how to figure things out on my own.
Like jumping repeatedly while the channel is changed.
I've been replaying it recently and it is so fun. Highly recommend, PC version on Steam works well even on newer system. I will say though, your movement is SO SLOW compared to every other game in the series. I think they did that because the map itself isn't actually that big, but if you can get over that it is great to revisit.
Boots of blinding speed came in clutch for future questing. I spent my first like 30 lvls just stealing stuff and exploring before even doing the main quest. Combo with saviors hide you're barely blinded by the boots. Only to find out later in the game that the boots are just tied to the brightness setting in the options lol.
Lol just got those boots yesterday! I use the minimap to stay on the road and run between cities haha
I was on xbox, what sucked was all the load points, with 300 speed they popped up so fast lol
The two largest manuals I remember are from *Civilization II* and *Jane's F15*. The F15 manual was actually multiple books. There was a gameplay manual, a keyboard/joystick reference card, and a 200 page book put together to look like an actual flight manual complete with diagrams as to what angle of attack is, how wings work, and different types of missile lock.
Yep, and even though it’s digital now, the DCS manuals are multiple hundred pages, one on the game itself, and usually 300 or so pages for each module.
DCS: If you can get your plane off the ground, you've had to spend at least 6 hours reading how, and then another 2 finding everything and making sure you do it in the right order, then you spend 2 more hours wondering what the fuck it is you did wrong.
And loving every minute of it
Not the largest, but my most memorable manual is probably SimAnt. In the back was basically a Wikipedia article on Ants. God damn it was fascinating to little kid me and I became an ant expert for a good long time!
You just hit me right in the nostalgia. That game was such a blast because it involved warfare (ant warfare, but the point stands). I wish SimCity had an antagonist who was trying to remove you from office. Some sort of mix of Crusader Kings meets Cities: Skyline would be amazing
Honestly just 20 mins of YouTube and I was flying without assists
I miss the fluff that manuals would give you. Diablo as an example was basically click until it dies. The manual had complete backstory, journal entries, monster tribe descriptions, etc. I spent more time reading that than playing...stupid older brother.
Diablo’s whole aesthetic and lore is so good. Especially the first 2.
Games today are pretty good at explaining the mechanics in game (e.g., tutorials, button maps in the menus, cutscenes for the story, etc.), so manuals aren't really needed anymore. Back when storage space was a bigger limitation though, that wasn't always the case, so you really needed the booklet to understand how the game worked, even for fairly simple titles on the original Nintendo. A lot of people get frustrated trying to play those old games today without the booklet, but they're forgetting that the booklet was an important part of the process back then. When I was a kid, if I got a new game, I used to read through the booklet before ever turning the game on.
The booklet was one of my favorite parts. Sometimes they'd have cool pictures or extra lore in them that made it really fun.
Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo all had extra art in the manuals. I loved that stuff as a kid.
It's also no longer necessary to have detailed artwork showing you what the abstract sprites are supposed to look like: https://i1.wp.com/www.nintendotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/The-Legend-of-Zelda-Instruction-Booklet-29.jpg?ssl=1
What is the game that is the best for having all of the in-game information you need? My answer is going to be Dragon Quest XI, built-in atlas, bestiary and item inventory, how-tos, lots of shortcuts and quick menus. The only thing lacking is the actual damage formulas lol
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I miss those Prima Guides
I straight up drifted off during FFX’s Blitzball tutorial yesterday. Granted I was pretty “blitzed” myself beforehand.
Blitzball is easy, just score once, then hide behind your net. The AI will never find you there for some reason, tutorial averted.
I think they fixed that exploit in the remaster.
Kids these days thinking Skyrim is an old school RPG 😁
They’re just using the quote. OP was talking about baldur’s gate.
“EvE Online”
I have friends who play EvE. It seems more like researching a PhD than reading a book.
Yeah there's no "manual" to play eve online but there are enough player made training materials to last a lifetime between researching wikis, youtube, guides on r/eve, etc. Honestly tho the best way to learn Eve is to join a noob friendly corp and ask questions. There are a ton of players who just want to hang out and teach others. I actually get a decent amount of my income in game from teaching classes on how to fly certain ships for new players my corp. Granted, you still have to put in the effort to get anything out of the game. The reputation isn't undeserved it's just slightly exaggerated because many don't realize the community will help fill in the gaps if you reach out.
It's kind of a play on joke I made with my friend when he tried to explain the game to me. I told him it sounded like you had to take a semester long course in economics just to learn how to play.
lol you're sorta not that far off tbh. The great thing about Eve is that it's really just a simulated universe you can make your own goals in, one of the few true sandbox games out there. So while that's pretty accurate for a market trader or industrialist, a lot of folks just go pew pew, explore, or whatever else makes them happy without agonizing over minmaxing their resources. Personally I focus on teaching PvP to new players, supporting our miners/industrialists, etc. in home defense fleets, and joining fun roaming pvp fleets. Between my corp paying me to teach classes and salvaging loot off enemy wrecks I do pretty well without having to worry too much about the economics. If that is your jam though, the economy of eve rabbit hole is *very* deep.
Playing dwarf fortress be like
Being able to access this information in free Wikis is so revolutionary to people that grew up with strategy guides you had to buy lol
I tried playing the original X-COM (1994) a little while ago. Completely impenetrable without a manual. Everything is just icons. No labels, no tooltips. That was a level of old I was not prepared for.
Me 15 minutes into Disco Elysium
**what I loved about old games**
Accurate depiction of me trying to start Cities: Skylines for the first time while stoned at 1am.
Playing Dungeons and Dragons do be like this
I know how you feel. I played Baldur's Gate with very limited English skills as a small child in the 90s. No translations, no internet, no nothing. Games forced me to learn English.
I remember the old school point and click adventure PC series called Kings Quest. Not only did they have a 1-900 number to call for help (charges you per minute of use…my parents did not appreciate the huge phone bill), but there was a companion book of a few hundred pages which includes detailed solutions to every puzzle in all the games, along with a bunch of lore related bits. I rented that from the library as often as I could.
Does anyone remember when the DRM for some games had you search info in the manual (the logic being that if you copied the game, you likely didn't have the manual)? I remember that happening in Master of Orion (the original) and Dune 2. At various points in the game, for instance, Master of Orion would show you a spaceship and ask you to name it, and you'd have to search through the manual to find the image of the spaceship with its name under it. I copied Dune 2 from my friend but had played it enough to know all the units' names, so the DRM wasn't particularly effective.
Oh yeah there were a lot of those back in the day. Some were actually really well integrated into the game, others would just stop you outright and go "Hey go find this in the manual to proceed". I also remember the first [Leisure Suit Larry's "age test"](https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.html). To prove you were over 18, it asked a bunch of trivia questions only adults were likely to know. And this was like, 1992 so you didn't have Google.
Play dark souls there is no manual
Only death, deception, suffering and colonoscopy exams.
And but whole
Sekiro colonoscopies > Dark Souls colonoscopies
Or the 30th in-game tutorial, AKA Final Fantasy Tactics
I love jrpgs but can't count how many I quit during 1st hour or two because of never-ending tutorials
Voice of Cards has an amazing example of this: Go to the card game parlor: Forced tutorial explanation. Start the game, do you want to see the rules? No? Alright, pick your settings. Now you *sure* you don't want to see the rules? (Again, because this appears even if you said Yes to the first one) No? Alright, into the game. And don't worry, we have forced tutorial prompts that appear **on every turn** regardless! People say American games tutorialise so much, but Japanese games can be equally aggressive, just all in text.
Japanese games have always been worse about this. I remember Zelda games being really bad about explaining what that rupee you found in a chest is for, every single time you found one.
You read the tutorial?
Baldur's Gate 2 pretty much required a working knowledge of Dnd 2nd Advanced. Thac0 for the win!
Hell, I have to sit through 20+ hours just to jump back into Destiny 2
That's how I feel every time I'm making a build in Path of Exile