Champions delivers manual labor

by Tateru Nino on Sep 13th 2009 8:00PM

When it comes to the manual that we've seen so far for Champions Online, probably the last word that comes to mind is 'super' – neither super-long, nor super-informative, especially since launch day has come and gone. Clearly not a heroic effort.

However, Cryptic's furnished us with an actual manual at long-last! While not what you would call cosmically complete, it does have the honor of being the largest collection of Champions Online information published in a single document, and sheds a bit more light on some of the more obscure mechanics that are frequently debated on zone-chat.

There's a whole lot more it could cover – it is perhaps only half as long as we think it should be, but if you're curious and sifting through forums doesn't appeal, the new PDF manual may just have the answers that you're looking for.

Tags: champions, champions-online, cryptic, cryptic-studios, guides, manual, pdf

Reader Comments (23)

Fact is, if we had got a nice manual at launch 50% would be wrong now, due to the changes make early in release. Personally I'd prefer they spent their time improving the game and adding information to their website.

I'll agree with the "manuals are not valued by most companies producing products" to a degree. More an more companies are seeing the value in a good manual but are hindered by the expense. when I say "expense" I mean the space it occupies in packaging (increasing the cost of package design and shipping), the need to keep a technical writing staff (either in house or contracted), the cost of printing (how many production companies have in-house printing facilities?), usability testing and so forth. any production company is going to keep the overhead of producing a product as low as possible. The first thing to go is solid technical documentation. The after thought of "just skip it, or slap something together in a day" is indicative of not wanting to shell out even a penny for a solid integrated guide for usage.

I'll further put forth the fact that is is probably more on the publishers end where we see cuts like this. I know, from prior products they have produced, Cryptic values documentation. I have both the CoH and CoV manuals at hand as perfect examples of good manual design and use them as such examples in my tech writing classes.

So, yeah, sure, they don't value manuals but how that manifests is debatable. in the case of Cryptic i think it may have been on the distribution side, not the studio side ..and we all know how Atari does not value instructional or guide material.

That's the saddest looking manual I've ever seen, ever, and I've been playing games for well over 25 years. The manual is one of the first things I look at when I get a game, to me a good manual means the developer actually cares about the game. For comparison's sake CoH was released with a nice thick color manual with plenty of nice art in it.

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