Valve introduced the new game guides feature on Steam a few days ago, with the release of strategy guides for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, Just Cause 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. This was done in partnership with Prima, which had already written and published strategy guides for all of these games and provides these new digital versions as well.
There would seem to be a lot of potential here for better navigable strategy guides (than the print versions) accompanied by video content and proper Steam integration. So I tried to purchase a game guide, only to discover that I had to own the game in question on Steam in order to use the guide. Not exactly a smart move, but surely that’s just because of the excellent Steam integration?
Well, no… not exactly.
In the end I settled for a Left 4 Dead 2 game guide, because I don’t own any of the other games on Steam. As a co-op game it’s not exactly the most logical choice for a strategy guide, but because it’s a Valve product one would expect it to be of superior quality to the others, or at least accompanied by extra content.
I’ll ruin that illusion right now, because the Steam strategy guide is simply a digital copy of the print version published by Prima. The only changes are a section with a few gameplay videos, as well as the promise of updates, which could conceivably make these guides more valuable than their printed counterparts. That could be useful for Left 4 Dead 2, because as it is the strategy guide doesn’t even include the “The Passing” DLC!
These strategy guides on Steam are as far off from professional print guides as a toddler is from becoming an astronaut
More problems start to surface when trying to actually open the strategy guide. There is no separate guides section or any fancy Steam integration, but just an easily overlooked link in the respective game’s detail screen on Steam. This link refers to an external website where the actual game guide is hosted, which is also accessible in-game in the community pop-up screen with a small browser window.
It gets even better when actually trying to navigate the ill-designed strategy guide. The design seems like a clumsy rush job, with it managing to simultaneously look ugly and navigate like a ten ton truck on a half lane gravel road. The backgrounds clash and the sidebar menu that was obviously intended for easy navigating requires a great deal of squinting to be legible: the text is practically the same color as the background!
The actual pages contain a great deal of useful content, as is to be expected from Prima guides. There are detailed maps that are accompanied by a lot of useful tips and strategies. But again the design ruins the experience, with enormous pictures messing up the layout, making for a decidedly uncomfortable read. A fair few pages are also ridiculously long, with great walls of text that aren’t properly formatted. Add in the inconsistent image placement, varying between centered and left-aligned from page to page or even paragraph to paragraph, and the result is an amateuristic mess of a digital guide.
Accessible in-game, but not nearly as useful as a print guide next to your monitor
These strategy guides on Steam are as far off from professional print guides as a toddler is from becoming an astronaut: it’s possible to get there eventually, but not without a lot of hard work. If you’re really in need of a strategy guide, then Prima’s print versions are superior in every way other than being future-proof for DLC, which in most cases is hardly an issue.
I do have to note that the Left 4 Dead 2 guide appears to be the most poorly designed one of the lot, but I haven’t been able to try any of the other ones so I can’t actually confirm that. I sincerely doubt that they actually add anything over the print versions, so again my advice is to just get the print version instead.
Loading ...