The Walkthrough by Doug Walsh

Author:Doug Walsh [Walsh, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07P6P9SG2
Publisher: Snoke Valley Books
Published: 2019-05-16T07:00:00+00:00

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Learning that Epic Games had sold the Gears of War license to Microsoft in 2014 was nearly as depressing as seeing Dom go up in a ball of flames. I wasn’t particularly worried about the games’ quality declining since Microsoft smartly put Rod Ferguson in charge of the studio taking over development. No, I was concerned about something more personal. Namely, that the level of support we received at Epic wouldn’t continue.38 And two years later, when I was given the name of my contact at The Coalition, the studio developing Gears of War 4, those fears were realized.

The project nearly made me swear off writing guides forever.

Epic Games, more than any other developer I worked with, ensured our guides were complete. It’s as simple as that. Too many companies acted less a partner in the guidebook’s creation and more of an obstacle needing to be smashed through or avoided entirely. Every author had his or her share of horror stories, but it almost always came down to withholding content.

The only time Epic Games dissuaded us from including information concerned the Easter eggs in Gears of War 3, specifically the sequence for unlocking the giant golden chicken aboard the ship. Fine. Secrets of that sort didn’t affect gameplay or have any connection to achievements, so it was a simple compromise.

The same can’t be said for the Data Pads in Halo: Reach, which were among the best-hidden collectibles I’d encountered in any game I had covered. Bungie wanted no mention of them in our book, despite their being an achievement linked to finding them all. The gamer in me knew this was bullshit. How could we sell a book that didn’t cover one of the trickiest aspects of the game?

Fortunately, our contact at 343 Industries, the ever-helpful Corrinne Robinson, persuaded Bungie to meet me halfway. They reluctantly allowed me to include a list of cryptic clues to the 19 Data Pad locations.39 It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best we were allowed to do. I can only hope that the “community effort” Bungie hoped to foster lasted longer than it took someone to upload a video to YouTube.

Then again, at least YouTube existed in 2010.

That certainly wasn’t the case a decade earlier when the guide to Final Fantasy IX was published, a book industry journalist Jason Schreier calls “the worst guide ever made.” Nearly every page of the guidebook employed blue note boxes directing players to Square’s burgeoning online portal, PlayOnline.40 Tips for playing the game, unlocking side quests, and discovering secret items were stripped from the guide and replaced with passwords. In order to access the missing information, readers had to log into an account on PlayOnline. It was the equivalent of going out to see a movie in which every major plot point and action sequence was replaced with instructions to watch it on your phone.

Theaters would be lucky if popcorn was the only thing burning by the end of the film.

BradyGames was already wrapping up

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