Strategy Guides

Strategy guides are a set of instructions that contain hints or complete solutions to a specific video or computer game. These guides are not limited to strategy games, but are also common with role playing games, adventure games and action games.

Although strategy guides may be published on the Internet (often termed walkthroughs), more comprehensive guides are usually printed and sold through game retailers or other publication channels, such as bookstores or newsstands. One such producer is the speciality publishing house Prima Games, a division of Random House, well-known for their hundreds of Prima Official Game Guides, for games such as Doom 3 (first person shooter), Myst (adventure-puzzle game) and Dark Age of Camelot (massively multiplayer online role playing game). There are also other publishers who make third-party, unlicensed, unofficial strategy guides.

The actual contents of a strategy guide often varies from game genre to another. However, most guides typically contain:

• detailed character information (particularly for role-playing games where the player must create their own character)
• detailed gameplay information, such as manoeuvres that are not detailed in the manual
• complete maps of the game, which may show the placement of all items, including hard-to-find or hidden items
• walkthroughs to help the player complete levels
• detailed instructions on how to reach specific locations
• explanations of puzzles
• details of enemies, including where they may be found, and techniques for defeating them (especially boss monsters)
• checklist of collectible items
• cheats and game editing (this is less common in official guides)

Although the availability of walkthrough guides on the Internet may have made strategy guide books less popular, there is still a large market for them. Not only do gamers enjoy taking the time to read about aspects of the game in more detail than is normally provided by online guides, but the guides often feature extensive picture-by-picture walkthroughs, maps, game art and other features that cannot be provided by a bare text online walkthrough.

Whilst the information about most games remains stable once it has been released, strategy guides for online games that receive regular software updates and expansions can soon become outdated. Some companies have looked for a way of solving this by offering free updates to their official strategy guides via their website. Prima also came up with an idea for their City of Heroes and City of Villains guide, a loose-leaf binder that could be updated with new packs when new (or amended) content was released. However, after the binders were released, it was announced that due to the high cost, Prima would not print these updates, but would instead allow users download them for free from the website. However, the detailed graphics and densely coloured backgrounds of the updates made this an impractically high-cost option for most users.