As old as video games themselves. As a manifestation of solidarity between players or brotherhood of the joystick, video game tutorials quickly flourished. Simple scribbled sheets, hand-drawn plans on school papers to begin with, sometimes photocopied or exchanged on playgrounds. And then the first codes, the top-tier cards from gaming magazines, Tilt, Generation 4 and all the rest.
Codes to access the next level when you’re stuck, or simply to pick up where you left off when games rewarded the completion of a stage with a series of letters and numbers that allowed you to resume your progress, more or less, without having to start over… This was before saves.
A natural evolution, a convention of players that makes the solution, or the famous “walkthrough”, as our English-speaking cousins say, has become part of the video game landscape. With different approaches, a gradient, a kind of “fifty shades of players”. The purists and diehards who criticize the solution don’t want to hear about it for even a second. Those who do not consider a game without this definitive guide, to play it the right way. And, between these extremes, players who don’t mind a little help. And then the completists, born long before the successes, those who do not plan to leave a game until it is “plated”, “sanded”, until it has given everything it had hidden…
Some people wonder if we really need to make a full game with a tutorial, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Everyone will find in the solution the step-by-step guide or the right little help…
The main thing is the work that is hidden behind this help, whether in the form of authentic official guides and sometimes even collections, or a website, a YouTube channel, which we consult feverishly or annoyingly on our smartphone, controller in hand. Over the years, the solutions have evolved, the players, to the point that sometimes we forget about those who write them, the fans of the video game who give everything so that we can proudly say that we have finished such a particularly complicated game.
A question of organization
Years later, paper was replaced by the Internet and many sites have turned it into a specialty. Among the most important, Super Soluce (published by Reworld Media), but also Jeuxvideo.com (published by Webedia), which was born from the ETAJV (for Encyclopedia of Video Game Tips and Tricks), a floppy disk full of tips and codes whose data is updated once a month.
It is the ETAJV that allowed Jeuxvideo.com to be born: its economic model is then based on Minitel (3615 ETAJV), and allows you to receive advice on games launched in the 90s, financing the site that will become one of the European references.
But since the floppy disk, the race for the solution has become more intense, more professional and with the increasing complexity of the games, the initial passion has had to give way to a vital rigor.
“Making a tour is a very precise and methodical organization that follows the structure of the game,” explains Alvin Haddadène-Xu, former head of the tours section at Jeuxvideo.com. “You have to know how to index the appendices of the main game as accurately as possible, so that a player who is just looking to find the collectibles has a dedicated section instead of locating them throughout the text.”
An operation that is the same for Super Soluce, as Alexandre Stervinou, editor-in-chief, reveals: “What we are going to do is explore completely once and then go back to understand the progression. Once the editor has managed to find his way, he will be able to write, although there may be adjustments along the way with the discovery of new secret passages.”
“A work of goldsmithing”
Recently released Silk Song of the Hollow Knightwhich requires colossal work, taking into account the content and the secrets found there: “It is really a work of art, it is a very serious work, you have to look at the game with a new perspective to see a blocked passage,” assures Alexandre Stervinou.
Supersoluce has chosen to internalize its solutions with a team made up of four permanent editors to better manage the published content: “For a while we used freelancers, but an operational problem may arise. Because a freelancer is free to act and we cannot afford to stop a solution until it is available again. For me it was very important to have at my side people capable of doing an enormous job in a limited time.”
At Jeuxvideo.com, while freelancers were massively used for most of the content, today it is partially internalized, in particular by the editors behind the tests.
A latitude offered by the economic model of this type of sites, linked to advertising. The era of payment guides is over, unless you go through physical formats, which are more restrictive in the case of mobile games.
One of the consequences of writing a tutorial is the pleasure that disappears: “I remember the game Still life 2 which I had received a code for two weeks before launch, and at one point in the game, there were around twenty key items to collect to progress through around fifteen different screens. “I remember spending three whole days walking around the place, clicking absolutely everywhere and obviously restarting the game thinking I had been the victim of a bug, without finding all the objects necessary to advance,” explains Alvin Haddadène-Xu.
The former head of the solutions section admits that he has never tinkered The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild after hundreds of pages of advice written about it.
“When thinking about a game like we do at Super Soluce, we end up more annoyed by the flaws than pleasantly surprised. for the qualities. We don’t dislike it, but we realize that it is work. It happens that we get stuck in something, and since we do it before others, there is no help to move forward. We cannot say to ourselves ‘I will continue tomorrow’, we cannot allow ourselves to do so,” said Alexandre Stervinou.
Some publishers remain cautious
Writing a solution also means having to talk to video game publishers to receive codes in advance so that the content is available at launch. An important element in the life of a specialized site, but one that is not understood by all players in the sector: “Some followed us immediately,” explains Alexandre Stervinou, “but others do not want to give us the game in advance because they say it destroys the interest of the game.”
“There are those who ask to delay the publication until the day after launch to avoid the images of the end of the game circulating immediately, but they are not the majority. Some have a closed approach and completely reject the test versions being used for tutorials, but it is a bit ridiculous because communities systematically publish the full game on the day of launch, or even before,” says Alvin Haddadène-Xu.
Among the editors who have trusted the different tutorial sites are Playstation and Capcom, who see in these contents a way to engage players over time: “Pleasure is above any judgment. What pleasure do we find in being trapped for hours in front of a puzzle or a boss without being able to overcome it or wandering around a level looking for an element that we cannot find?” he asks.
The important thing, in the end, is to move the players forward without revealing important elements of the story: “For example, instead of saying that the character is going to die, we will simply say that there is a scene that is beginning. We are not there to say absolutely everything, but to guide the player towards a logical progression,” adds Alexandre Stervinou.
Supported by screenshots, the process of an online solution is not that different from what one might have with the Internet. There was a time when we were running to the newsstand to buy the “complete guide” for a game that had just been released, while along the way we picked up the “Action Replay” guide, its specific cartridges and its CDs that unlocked infinite life, for example.
Over the years, the activity began to become a collector’s item with the publication, by publishers such as Piggyback or Future Press, of “collectors'” guides on certain important licenses.
“I bought the collector’s guides of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild AND Tears of the Kingdom“Not to follow them from beginning to end, but for the collection, because they are beautiful books,” explains Thomas, a journalist for several video game magazines.
AI is still far from up to par
At a time when many paths can also be found on YouTube, written solutions are still in fashion: “Even if we have games that continue to be watched frequently over the years, such as the witcher EITHER zeldaSuper Soluce’s success is also based on new products and word of mouth. Compared to a video, writing is still imperative because as a player you don’t want to spend too much time searching for the location you are in, especially since you may not have taken the same route as the person who captured the video.”
These sites, like Super Soluce or Jeuxvideo.com, still have a long future ahead of them, despite the arrival of artificial intelligence. When you ask ChatGPT a simple question, the quality of the response varies greatly and is far from satisfactory.
Furthermore, you often have to deal with English terms and some answers do not correspond to reality: “There is nothing better than the source material,” explains Alexandre Stervinou, “an AI will rely too much on an aggregation of ideas and, if there is no solution, it will not be able to respond adequately, so we are quite confident in our future.”
Given that this is the core of the interest of these sites and their sustainability on the Internet: a generative artificial intelligence that needs content to absorb, these publications still have a long future ahead of them. It remains to be seen whether that logic will continue to exist as AI increasingly learns to play on its own, as well as being able to analyze video better and better.
Beyond professional sites that have to deal with specific limitations, many players also rely on community sites to answer very specific questions. Reddit is one of the best social networks for these requests, mainly because it is so well referenced, but there are also community wikis, not to mention fan sites dedicated to a license, with much more detailed walkthroughs, like Power of Zelda in particular, which has made it a specialty.
Never alone, the player can count on this community of weird things, amateur or professional, old-fashioned or AI-oriented, with one certainty: for every problem, there is a solution. Behind each solution, a player. And on the web, as in the past in our school notebooks, the same shared passion: playing.
Source: BFM TV
