It occurred to me when I was looking at the original Age of Empires manual with its descriptions of the civilisations with timelines, images and text. That's exactly what I want in a printed manual. Something that makes me interested to play the game when I read it. Not so much for the listing of technology trees, but the inspiring background information on civilisations, military units and for AoM certainly a lot of the mythology.
What I don't need to see in print are unit stats, because they get old quickly after a few patches. If detailed stats are to be given out in any ordered fashion I think it would be best to have it in a document on the harddrive that is kept updated with every patch. That or do without it, so that fansites and others can collect the information as something extra. Personally as a gamer I prefer to try out units and see from experience what they can do, rather than having pitched spreadsheet battles in Microsoft Excel.
I see a trend in todays game making to put less effort into a printed manual. For some kinds of information it's the right thing to do, when it's described well right inside the game like tutorials on how to use the right mouse button, hotkeys, how to gather food etc, etc. ES also had a nice little encyclopedia inside AoK, wich is something that they seem to continue for AoM and that's of course good. But most games are still following the downwards trend. The popularity of the small DVD style case also presents a bit of a problem, because the physical space left for a really good manual gets very limited. Sometimes that's also used as an excuse to tell gamers to have to do with manuals that would maybe impress a console fan, but certainly not experienced PC gamers. It's still possible to fit a great manual in that confined space though, like they guys making Europa Universalis 2 did. They managed to get a hundred pages of pure enjoyment and a big colored map in there, somehow. Is AoM likely to use this new package?
At least for some types of games a well done printed manual is still a great way to add extra value to a game and make a customer feel that the price was right even if it wasn't low. That's how this gamer feels anyway.
[This message has been edited by Kaziglu Bey (edited 04-28-2002 @ 07:47 PM).]