I’ve started playing Dragon Age: Origins for the first time, and because I always want to get the best possible outcome, I’ve been frantically Googling what decisions I should make and trying to piece together how my choices will affect the storyline going forward. Yes, I know that the unforeseen circumstances are the point, but here’s my counterpoint: shut up. I don’t have time to go back and replay it so I can get my desired outcome. I'm trying to finish all these games before Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases.
As I was scrolling through various guides, searching for the information I needed, I found myself wishing there was a centralised place for me to find everything I was searching for. Ideally, one that wouldn’t require me to pick up my phone and type in a new search query every ten minutes. Perhaps it’s because Origins makes me feel nostalgic for when I was a kid first discovering BioWare games, but strategy guide books came to mind.
I didn’t play a ton of RPGs as a kid, nor did I own any strategy guides, but my cousin did. He was a hardcore Pokemon fan, trading cards and all, and he used to have all the Pokemon guides sitting on a bookshelf in his living room, just waiting for perusal. Back then, the only time I ever had access to a Game Boy was when I went to his house to hang out. I’d sit on the sofa with Game Boy in hand and a guide open in my lap, trying to finish as much of the game as I could before my mum came to pick me up.
Hard Copy Guides Offer Things Online Guides Don’t
I always loved those guides because of the way they looked and felt – they were chock full of information I would never need or even care to read, but it was comforting to know the option was there. They were often beautifully illustrated and designed, with information flowing organically across the page. With RPGs, you could read full walkthroughs with detailed explanations of how your actions would change the game, which was something I sorely needed while playing Origins.
While guides have largely moved online, you can still technically find physical game guides. I’ve seen quite a few displayed in my city’s largest Kinokuniya bookstore, though I can’t say I’ve ever seen them in other stores, and you can order them online as well. But nobody is really making them anymore and they’ve been relegated largely to novelties, more geared toward collectors (like TheGamer columnist Mike Drucker) than players.
But We’ll Never Go Back To Physical Guides
The obvious reason is that the internet has made physical guides obsolete, the same way most modern technology has turned artefacts from the ‘90s and ‘00s into antiques that Gen Alpha don’t recognise. That’s not a moral judgement – guides just moved online, like music, television, and nearly the entire media industry.
Games have changed as well. In today’s gaming culture, they can be updated with fixes and content for years and years after release. Consider Stardew Valley: a guide written and published in 2016, when the game was first released on Steam, would be out of date now because of the eight years of updates ConcernedApe has painstakingly created. Or think about any game that’s ever had DLC released – considering that DLC takes even longer to create nowadays because of expanding game development cycles, it just wouldn’t be feasible to wait for DLC to release before publishing a physical game guide. That means that a guide would have to have multiple editions, possibly over several years, for it to be totally complete – for most publishers, that kind of work just isn’t possible.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing that online guides are the default now. They’re easy to find, free to read, and it’s easier to create guides for smaller games. Quite frankly, they also keep most modern game media websites afloat. Guides are virtually essential for attracting consistent web traffic, which is an unfortunate requirement for websites to keep existing. Without online guides, I probably wouldn’t have a job. I salute all guide writers, you are the backbone of games media. They’re good for websites, and they’re good for players. Everybody wins, technically.
But at the same time, I miss hardcopy guides. I miss having a centralised, informative, beautifully designed and thoughtfully laid out book that I could peruse at my leisure, that I could know would have the information I needed without me having to scroll through the slop that Google results feeds me. Guide books were an art form in themselves, and it’s a shame that they’re barely ever made anymore. There is one for Dragon Age: Origins, though… Maybe I should become a collector too.
