No I will not watch your fucking video.
No I will NOT watch your fucking video.
NO I WILL NOT WATCH YOUR FUCKING VIDEO.
Written instructions that I can search in and not have to fuck around with timestamps to find the part I need, then rewind it, then rewind it again, then… oh look it’s your stupid sponsorship read, because I give approximately negative-one fucks about Raid Shadow Legends or goddamn Squarespace (which you could’ve used to post written fucking walkthroughs, but here we are).
GameFAQs was the shit. Dozens of walkthroughs for every game, usually with some awesome ASCII art of the game’s title screen, a table of contents, and an easily searchable code for each section so that you could CTRL+F your way to the exact part you need. All in a deliciously lightweight .txt file that loads in seconds because it’s only a few KBs.
Yeah but newer games don’t have the same amount or quality of walkthroughs that existed in its heydey. Just looked up TOTK; there’s like 3 guides, none of which are in the old school txt style and none of which are actual full walkthroughs. Maybe I’m just having a rough time navigating the newer UI.
For old school games it’s still great, for newer stuff it doesn’t seem quite as good.
The lack of a full guide walkthrough on a game like totk is to be expected because it’s a fully open world game and there’s no definite path to follow.
I have a hypothesis that there are a lot of people out there who are legitimately bad at reading. You’d never know if you stuck to text based mediums like this, reddit, forums, and so on. People who can’t or don’t enjoy reading and writing aren’t going to be making a lot of content here.
For many of them, the rise of video is probably a godsend. What would take them 15 minutes to read and understand, frustrated the whole time, now they can just watch a five minute video on.
Meanwhile someone like me, and maybe you, is mad because what was a five minute read is now a fifteen minute video.
I absolutely agree! I hate video walk through with a passion. I miss the days of finding a text guide, printing the part I’m stuck on, and going back to my game instead of having to wade through a ton of junk.
I’d love to write written guides for games, but… how do I monetize it? YT is by far the most effective monetization. Written guides don’t earn any money, especially since everyone uses an adblocker now. Nobody would pay to read a written guide, unless it’s a book.
Because I also hate YT guides, I just started writing them. But nobody cared, nobody read them. I got more views on a 2-hour YT video without any commentary than I got on a written guide. There is no fun writing a guide if it doesn’t help anyone and doesn’t get me any feedback. Youtube gets me views and feedback, and it might actually earn me money. So I cave, and make a video (video is still pending). I’ve made a very basic YT guide and it got me way more views, “likes”, upvotes and comments than any written guide, and it took me much less time to create. There is even potential for monetization, I’m close to 1000 subs on YT. Written guides? There is no point putting ads on there, they will be blocked (also i hate ads and you should block them)
This is a nice example of capitalism shitting things up.
Youtube is in many ways the inferior product for this, but it can make money so that’s where people go.
If more people had more money (instead of most of it accumulating in the hands of a few assholes), some sort of “pay what you want” model might work. But with so many people with zero or negative savings, that doesn’t seem viable.
Also, side note, I’d be less likely to block ads if they were contextual rather than targeted. Targeted ads should be illegal. but if you want to put car ads on the need for speed wiki, fine. You don’t need to know who I am for that. That’s how tv, print, radio, billboards, and so on worked for generations.
gameFAQs and similar sites still exist. Wikis and steam guides are also really useful. I’m more of a patient gamer and rarely play big titles but so far I haven’t found a game where I couldn’t find written guides at all.
And the fact that when you want to see where something is located on a map in a game it is impossible to find it ANYWHERE. You have to go to those scummy sites that make you read paragraphs with ads sandwiched in between and a following video ad taking up half the page to finally tell you in the final sentence. When they can literally just show you a point on the map.
The sites that do both, especially with timestamps to the reference video are bae. Same for just about any instruction honestly. I 99% prefer a written thing, but every now and then just seeing how something is done is very helpful.
IGN guides are usually pretty good for this. It’s text based with pictures. For some games like Halo Infinite, it had videos, but only for the relevant section so you don’t even need to scan the video. It’s direct and to the point.
I was playing donkey kong country tropical freeze on my wii u while i was on vacation and my internet barely works there and i needed help finding a puzzle piece but i managed to load an ign guide and since then if i ever need a guide ive tried to find written guides its much more helpful
Yeah. Video makers are chasing a profit incentive. We can’t hace written guides because of neoliberalism. Or possibly they are out there but search engines have de-prioritized that content.
If we had a profit incentive to just… release the script of that youtube video - as a written guide… we could have what we need.
Transcripts do exist on YouTube to be fair, in the video description you can choose to load the transcript which has timestamps and is automatically generated for all (?) YouTube videos.
Though this doesn’t solve the issue as there will be times where you have to watch the footage, it certainly helps in skipping to the right time
Dude, I’ve seen so goddamn many AG1 ads from so many different streamers and podcasters I was finally like “ok, so many differnent types of people are shilling for this crap, maybe I’ll look into trying it”…
…
…
$80 DOLLARS A MONTH!!!
A text version is way more time consuming for the author. Some people do these videos for free with no ads or sponsorship, they do it only to help others, you cannot shit on them only because it’s not your preferred media.
And for walkthrough I honestly think it’s often the best format. It’s easier to understand what you should do when you see it and it’s also easier to find what you’re searching for when you see it. When you have to ctrl+f a bunch of synonyms because you don’t know which words the author of the walkthrough used to describe the scene it’s time consuming. Looking at 1 or 2 seconds of gameplay every half hours is less annoying, at least for me.
A text version is way more time consuming for the author.
And that’s why they’re better quality. And I don’t think any written oldschool FAQ were sponsored at all. They’re an art and I miss them. I also hate the videos for everything, thankfully steam forums or reddit usually have written answers for my gaming questions. Oh and wikis.
80% of web1.0 was amateur passion projects and that was what made it a wonderful and hugely varied experience. The other 20% is most of what survived the transition to web2.0. Was there anything particularly novel or exciting about the matrix scroll background or the Enterprise clip art centered over an eclipse clip art? Of course not. Was the page professionally edited and formated to provide the absolute best user experience? Nope, it was riddled with typos, the margins were inconsistent, and the labels on the frames were references too obscure for the average convention goer. Why was it better? Because the person who made that page absolutely loved the topic, knew everything about it, and was super excited to be able to share their knowledge with everybody who stumbled upon their page.
There used to be literal books sold at bookstores with game walkthroughs. I still have a couple of my old Prima guides! Then gamefaqs made those a bit obsolete because fans were willing to do the same thing for free, just out of love for the game (and maybe a bit of competitive spirit). No photos and you had to wait a while for people to write them, however!
Written instructions with ASCII maps that gives you the information you’re looking for in 10 seconds compared to a 12 minutes video filled with air? Are you insane?!
You know what I miss?
Written walkthroughs for games.
No I will not watch your fucking video.
No I will NOT watch your fucking video.
NO I WILL NOT WATCH YOUR FUCKING VIDEO.
Written instructions that I can search in and not have to fuck around with timestamps to find the part I need, then rewind it, then rewind it again, then… oh look it’s your stupid sponsorship read, because I give approximately negative-one fucks about Raid Shadow Legends or goddamn Squarespace (which you could’ve used to post written fucking walkthroughs, but here we are).
GameFAQs was the shit. Dozens of walkthroughs for every game, usually with some awesome ASCII art of the game’s title screen, a table of contents, and an easily searchable code for each section so that you could CTRL+F your way to the exact part you need. All in a deliciously lightweight .txt file that loads in seconds because it’s only a few KBs.
Gamefaqs and the walkthroughs on it still exists, its just not at the top of a Google search anymore
Yeah but newer games don’t have the same amount or quality of walkthroughs that existed in its heydey. Just looked up TOTK; there’s like 3 guides, none of which are in the old school txt style and none of which are actual full walkthroughs. Maybe I’m just having a rough time navigating the newer UI.
For old school games it’s still great, for newer stuff it doesn’t seem quite as good.
The lack of a full guide walkthrough on a game like totk is to be expected because it’s a fully open world game and there’s no definite path to follow.
Plenty of newer linear games have full walkthroughs. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/241004-sekiro-shadows-die-twice/faqs/76974
Maybe I just need to bookmark Gamefaqs and look there directly without search engines.
I have a hypothesis that there are a lot of people out there who are legitimately bad at reading. You’d never know if you stuck to text based mediums like this, reddit, forums, and so on. People who can’t or don’t enjoy reading and writing aren’t going to be making a lot of content here.
For many of them, the rise of video is probably a godsend. What would take them 15 minutes to read and understand, frustrated the whole time, now they can just watch a five minute video on.
Meanwhile someone like me, and maybe you, is mad because what was a five minute read is now a fifteen minute video.
A stomach-turningly large amount of americans remain illiterate to this day
No we am’t.
I absolutely agree! I hate video walk through with a passion. I miss the days of finding a text guide, printing the part I’m stuck on, and going back to my game instead of having to wade through a ton of junk.
How do I defeat this section… maybe there’s a text guide somewhere…
“Watch my let’s play episode 47! It’s only 2 hours!”
Ugh. I’ll check Steam guides, here’s one.
“Watch my let’s play episode 47! It’s only 2 hours!”
I’d love to write written guides for games, but… how do I monetize it? YT is by far the most effective monetization. Written guides don’t earn any money, especially since everyone uses an adblocker now. Nobody would pay to read a written guide, unless it’s a book.
Because I also hate YT guides, I just started writing them. But nobody cared, nobody read them. I got more views on a 2-hour YT video without any commentary than I got on a written guide. There is no fun writing a guide if it doesn’t help anyone and doesn’t get me any feedback. Youtube gets me views and feedback, and it might actually earn me money. So I cave, and make a video (video is still pending). I’ve made a very basic YT guide and it got me way more views, “likes”, upvotes and comments than any written guide, and it took me much less time to create. There is even potential for monetization, I’m close to 1000 subs on YT. Written guides? There is no point putting ads on there, they will be blocked (also i hate ads and you should block them)
PS: The written guide is here: https://tobyhinloopen.github.io/anno1800-guide/ - It’s even interactive.
This is a nice example of capitalism shitting things up.
Youtube is in many ways the inferior product for this, but it can make money so that’s where people go.
If more people had more money (instead of most of it accumulating in the hands of a few assholes), some sort of “pay what you want” model might work. But with so many people with zero or negative savings, that doesn’t seem viable.
Also, side note, I’d be less likely to block ads if they were contextual rather than targeted. Targeted ads should be illegal. but if you want to put car ads on the need for speed wiki, fine. You don’t need to know who I am for that. That’s how tv, print, radio, billboards, and so on worked for generations.
gameFAQs and similar sites still exist. Wikis and steam guides are also really useful. I’m more of a patient gamer and rarely play big titles but so far I haven’t found a game where I couldn’t find written guides at all.
And the fact that when you want to see where something is located on a map in a game it is impossible to find it ANYWHERE. You have to go to those scummy sites that make you read paragraphs with ads sandwiched in between and a following video ad taking up half the page to finally tell you in the final sentence. When they can literally just show you a point on the map.
The sites that do both, especially with timestamps to the reference video are bae. Same for just about any instruction honestly. I 99% prefer a written thing, but every now and then just seeing how something is done is very helpful.
I haven’t tried it for a walkthrough yet, but try: https://www.summarize.tech
This would be a great opportunity for someone to make a bit that does this for Lenny.
Who the heck is Lenny?
Lives next door to Alice
IGN guides are usually pretty good for this. It’s text based with pictures. For some games like Halo Infinite, it had videos, but only for the relevant section so you don’t even need to scan the video. It’s direct and to the point.
I was playing donkey kong country tropical freeze on my wii u while i was on vacation and my internet barely works there and i needed help finding a puzzle piece but i managed to load an ign guide and since then if i ever need a guide ive tried to find written guides its much more helpful
Yeah. Video makers are chasing a profit incentive. We can’t hace written guides because of neoliberalism. Or possibly they are out there but search engines have de-prioritized that content.
If we had a profit incentive to just… release the script of that youtube video - as a written guide… we could have what we need.
Transcripts do exist on YouTube to be fair, in the video description you can choose to load the transcript which has timestamps and is automatically generated for all (?) YouTube videos. Though this doesn’t solve the issue as there will be times where you have to watch the footage, it certainly helps in skipping to the right time
Maybe try some AG1?
Dude, I’ve seen so goddamn many AG1 ads from so many different streamers and podcasters I was finally like “ok, so many differnent types of people are shilling for this crap, maybe I’ll look into trying it”…
…
…
$80 DOLLARS A MONTH!!!
Are you okay with ads? Asking for a friend.
A youtube transcript could work in a jiffy.
A text version is way more time consuming for the author. Some people do these videos for free with no ads or sponsorship, they do it only to help others, you cannot shit on them only because it’s not your preferred media.
And for walkthrough I honestly think it’s often the best format. It’s easier to understand what you should do when you see it and it’s also easier to find what you’re searching for when you see it. When you have to ctrl+f a bunch of synonyms because you don’t know which words the author of the walkthrough used to describe the scene it’s time consuming. Looking at 1 or 2 seconds of gameplay every half hours is less annoying, at least for me.
And that’s why they’re better quality. And I don’t think any written oldschool FAQ were sponsored at all. They’re an art and I miss them. I also hate the videos for everything, thankfully steam forums or reddit usually have written answers for my gaming questions. Oh and wikis.
80% of web1.0 was amateur passion projects and that was what made it a wonderful and hugely varied experience. The other 20% is most of what survived the transition to web2.0. Was there anything particularly novel or exciting about the matrix scroll background or the Enterprise clip art centered over an eclipse clip art? Of course not. Was the page professionally edited and formated to provide the absolute best user experience? Nope, it was riddled with typos, the margins were inconsistent, and the labels on the frames were references too obscure for the average convention goer. Why was it better? Because the person who made that page absolutely loved the topic, knew everything about it, and was super excited to be able to share their knowledge with everybody who stumbled upon their page.
There used to be literal books sold at bookstores with game walkthroughs. I still have a couple of my old Prima guides! Then gamefaqs made those a bit obsolete because fans were willing to do the same thing for free, just out of love for the game (and maybe a bit of competitive spirit). No photos and you had to wait a while for people to write them, however!
Written instructions with ASCII maps that gives you the information you’re looking for in 10 seconds compared to a 12 minutes video filled with air? Are you insane?!
jeez try adblock