One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.
It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.
> One thing I find interesting about playing video games in modern day is that with the proliferation of Wikis, there is assumed to be some kind of third party guide for every game. Especially in smaller/newer games it seems like developers sometimes don't bother putting necessary information in the game at all because they don't have the person-hours for it.
While this may have become more of a norm in recent years, online communities with community-supported guides have definitely been around since before wikis were common in the gaming community: most notably at gamefaqs.com. To this day you can still find plaintext walkthroughs for thousands of games, written 25 years ago by pseudonymous authors.
Which isn't exactly to dispute your point, just waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. The RPG Maker 2000 forum was basically my introduction to programming, waaay back in the day.
Video game magazines would regularly publish short walkthroughs and maps, as well as tips on common places to be stuck in popular games, and cheat codes.
Guidebooks were found in stores next to the games, they were typically slim, full-color affairs full of screenshots and production art, with complete lists of all the stuff you could do in the game. Full walkthroughs, item statistic charts, locations of the 52 Secret Gears you need to collect to build the Wind-Up Sword to achieve the secret ending, etc, etc. Here's a photo of someone's collection of a bunch of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/comments/12rsvll/seems...
I don't really know how exploratory most games are compared to old Minecraft. Some games like Stardew Valley have certain things that are much easier to do because of third party wikis but I don't think the same is true of a lot of games in the same way it was for Minecraft.
I picked up Stardew Valley a few months ago for the first time, and consciously chose not to use the wiki. I'm obviously way behind where I would be had I used the wiki, but it's been fun figuring out what works by myself.
One game I recently got which has great exploratory potential is Shapez 2. The in-game help is amazing.
For instance, back when I first played Minecraft in Alpha the only ways to find the crafting recipes was through a wiki, or trial and error.
It's nice that it makes development easier, but I wonder if this trend is making it harder for new people to get into video games, since it's hardly obvious if you're not used to it.