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Where is the manual?

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I would like to add my encouragement to the idea of a manual (or a completed, easy to navigate wiki) that is available shortly before release. I do understand the reluctance of creating a printed manual that will be obsolete at release because of late balance adjustments, but the general 'how to play' should be available to purchasers, IMO.

Pragmatically, it could accomplish the following:
  • Increase hype
  • Give undecided purchasers additional info about the game to encourage purchase
  • Reduce frustration and abandonment by customers
Much of the content can be programmatically created from the game files so the concept that there is no time between finish and release does not hold water.

Paradox, you have made a name for yourselves for deep, intricate games. Please realize that not all of us want to solve a puzzle about how to play the game. We want to solve the puzzle of how to play the game well.
 
Nukenin said:
Where is the manual?

If there is no manual, why not?

I don't want a wiki, I don't want videos, I don't want community guides, I don't want rummaging through some in-game encyclopedia trying to piece information together—I want a manual, like the gods intended. :mad:
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The manual. simple...learn all the control commands, mouse, keyboard , Xbox / PS4 controller, whatever... then , and ONLY then , like an architect, carpenter/engineer , et al . once you know to a . say 90% or so of all the commands to memory , you merely design a base to your vision ,if you have one...Took me about 24 hrs for Xbox1 , certainly no worse than GTAV
PS , as a guiding principle, consider the emminet architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a maxim of his , work with what mother nature gives you as a pallett, and blend in accordance,forget boxes , think curves ! ,
, something to that effect..
 
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A manual goes beyond a controls reference, or should. Not that the game has even that for the non-console version (rummaging through 11 pages of mostly undefined key bindings isn't the same as a printed or printable reference).

The presence of a manual by no means would or should discourage those who want to just jump in and learn by doing.

Right now, that's all you can do if you want to try and enjoy the game. I do not like trial and error or guesswork, myself. I have to deal with that in my day job. o_O

(It looks like this same lament was made of Stellaris.)
 
No manual.
No tutorial.


Think about it.... Sending people on a mission to Mars with no training, no manuals etc.
I hope Elon Musk will do a little bit better job.
 
Nukenin said:
Where is the manual?
Click to expand...

What? A "manual"? What else do you want with that, affordable housing, union rights, clean air and water or any other things that may have been a norm at some point in the past?

Well, too bad, all of those things are passé. Off to eating ramen while watching a Youtuber pretending to be screaming to keep a persona (and not because they can't afford a decent microphone, and/or now can, but their voice is now stuck at that level) with you. Have a nice 2018.

Edit: obligatory "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" joke.
 
While I don't feel a full on digital manual is needed (Nice but not needed) The in game info needs to be much more detailed. Info like Food per person per Sol on avg, and how often a building needs maintenance on avg. That way we can guesstimate what we need.
 
macphal said:
While I don't feel a full on digital manual is needed (Nice but not needed) The in game info needs to be much more detailed. Info like Food per person per Sol on avg, and how often a building needs maintenance on avg. That way we can guesstimate what we need.
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Agree with this!

Not sure if that info exists and I haven't found it yet.
 
Exemplar Voss said:
I don't think I've seen a computer game manual in almost two decades. Two and a half?

As for why, production costs.
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Some do have pdf manuals which nobody reads or in some cases knows about. Printed manuals are pretty much dead with digital distribution and they're mostly useless for often updating modern games.

A good tutorial + a wiki for reference is far better. Which makes it all the more impressive that this game passed QA without a smidgen of a tutorial. I wonder how many testers got ignored there.
 
Bankipriel said:
Yeah. No in-game tutorial? No manual? No money from me. I refunded this game after 1.4 hours of annoyance. Hairbrained Schemes & PDX are releaseing mech tactical combat next month. A gamer only has so much time.
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Oh if i could only give this 1000 Upvotes. My positive attitude towards the game got smashed by how poorly done the tutorial is. Like they actually dont really give a fuck if you understand it or not. Right now the game is "learn it the hard way and start over...again and again and again"...thx but no thx
 
A well-maintained, well-structured official wiki would be a valued resource, but nothing beats a real manual. (An honest-to-the-gods well-structured wiki would actually be able to generate a printable, searchable, fully navigable PDF manual and kill this second avian with the same micrometeoroid.)

And this is 2018. PDF manuals, even carefully manually curated ones, can be updated same as any other digital file. (Of course, this was true back in 1993, except the bit where I says "this is 2018".)

Even for manual-phobes, though, a good comprehensive tutorial or series of tutorials would have been welcome.

As I implied earlier, if testing was limited throughout to folks who had "grown" with the game's development, it's easy to see how there was oversight with this regard. If some had come into the QA process with zero experience with the game and told to figure it out with zero input outside what the game itself makes available, I suspect there might be better appreciation of what is missing.

I do like this game's potential. I think making it more approachable (via tutorials and documentation) would help build a broader spectrum of players that enjoy (and purchase!) the game and DLC down the road.
 
I can understand if we're moving past the age of a proper "manual" per se, but I am absolutely not a fan of the Paradox model of choosing not to document anything and instead putting it on a community-run wiki. For one thing, it's never up to date. I realize with some of the PDS grand strategy games that it's a tough order given the frequent patching, DLCs, etc. But this leads to my second point: even to the extent the community is doing the upkeep, we are literally forced to experiment to figure out how the systems work, hope it's accurate, and then keep the thing up to date each time there is a new patch---all of this when the developers are the ones who programmed the game and have access to/knowledge of the actual mechanics & code!!!

It seems more egregious in this game, given that it doesn't appear to be as complex in terms of system interactions as in-house PDS games, yet the developers (or someone at PDI) can't manage to document their own game?

To be fair, the encyclopedia isn't terrible, so thank you for that, but there is plenty left unexplained. How in the world do the developers (here, and more generally for PDS games) do internal project management, or have any idea what anyone else on the team has been doing? Does literally no one have documentation on how their own game works? I doubt it. I understand that internal documentation requires extra work to put into a form of usable documentation for external users, but good lord, are they really that strapped for time/resources that they can't adapt documentation that surely must already exist? Maybe they are in this particular case, but in the larger scheme of PDS/PDI games I find it troubling (or unbelieveable) that they have the resources to pay stream producers and marketing, but not enough to pay a person to write something.

Thank goodness the games are good, but... jeez, talk about disrespecting your own fans. Sorry for the rant, I don't like to get too negative about the majority of people doing their jobs (this strikes me as a management decision), but this one topic really, really bothers me so I couldn't help it.

Thanks for the fun game so far; please see if you can improve the encyclopedia.

EDIT: and in the case of this game, a robust tutorial could suffice. That's harder for many of the PDS games, which I think necessitate documentation.
 
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