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The walkthrough: Insider stories of a life in strategy guides
by Doug Walsh
Players had trouble playing before the internet. If you're stuck on a particular part of a game, no YouTube tutorial or step-by-step IGN solution will help you. No, you had to go to your local mall's electronics store to see if you could badign a strategy guide.
But as author of long-standing strategy guide Doug Walsh and author of The step by step procedure can attest, produce and maintain badog instruction manuals for digital games is not easy. In the excerpt below, Walsh discusses the challenges he faced when he Diablo III makes the leap from PCs to consoles.
Diablo III was a record success, with 3.5 million copies sold in twenty-four hours, a feat for a PC exclusivity. To date, it remains the best-selling computer game of all time, with 10 million copies sold in the first three months. And more than 14 million unique players took up arms to defend Tristram a year after its release. Our guide sold relatively well, anchoring in the Top 25 of the Amazon throughout the launch period.
But the work was far from finished.
With network errors on launch day, fan dissatisfaction with the final phase (or lack thereof), and the real-money sales force polarization, Blizzard's staff did not no time to rejoice. The fixes arrived quickly and often, responding to complaints from the PC fan base, while larger changes were incorporated into the console version. Further modifications were made, eventually leading to a complete overhaul of the loot system, published alongside the Reaper of Souls expansion in 2014. In addition to the main campaign, the Diablo III Gamers know today that look like little one covered by the 496-page hardcover that I co-wrote in 2012.
To fill this gap, BradyGames sent me Thom Denick, a real Diablo expert to help you upgrade the initial guide for the 2013 version of the console. While I was busy updating the text and replacing the screenshots of the campaign, Thom reworked many device chapters, particularly the equipment section, to ensure its usefulness for advanced players.
Then, in January 2014, we joined again for the Reaper of Souls expansion. We have simplified each page and rewritten the guide to focus on the newly added Crusader clbad, Act V, the content of the final phase and the famous Loot 2.0 system.
And yes, we finally even managed to cover the so-called cow level, Whimsyshire.
After so many months of writing – and rewriting – the original book, it was necessary to tear everything to rework and rework was bittersweet. Writing the guide for Diablo III was a job of love. It was also a sinister reminder of Sisyphus' challenge of producing printed documentation for a modern game. No matter how many nights I spent outside the house, no matter how many times I updated my text, the final book could only reflect a instant of the life of a game. And the more successful the game, the faster it will evolve beyond the scope of our book. Could we ever follow?
The back cover of our Diablo III: Reaper of souls The guide exclaims: "So begins the end of all things …" in reference to the extension of Malthael, the Angel of Death. This was only one of the many purposes mentioned. For BradyGames, it was a recognition of the merger between Penguin and Random House, the parent companies ready to oversee the inevitable forced marriage between us and our rival, Prima Games.
On a personal level, the symbolism has become deeper. Reaper of souls This is the first strategic guide I have written outside of an annual contract in a dozen years. And at the time, I was almost certain it would be the last to bear my name.
Extract of The walkthrough: Insider stories of a life in strategy guides by Doug Walsh. Copyright © 2019 by Doug Walsh. Reprinted with permission from Snoke Valley Books. All rights reserved.
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