Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   Anonymous
   Unregistered

   Now users of Valve's Steam game client have one less reason to Alt-tab away: integrated game guides.

   The company just launched what it's calling Steam Guides, which allows community members to create "guides, walkthroughs and tips" for games on the Steam service.

   Users can access these guides without exiting their games through the Steam Overlay, eliminating the need for a player to exit a game and move away from Steam: an important step toward the platform agnosticism that Valve seems to be working toward.

   More on the Steam Guides home page.

   tidbit

   Steam Guides on Steam

   Posted 12 years ago #
2. 

   Anonymous
   Unregistered

   Valve launches player-written Steam Guides
   by Alice O'Connor, Jan 18, 2013 7:30am PST
   Related Topics – Dota 2, Steam, Valve, PC, Mac, Linux

   One day, you'll be able to download groceries through Steam, ingesting the nutrients through a Steam Port at the base of your spine. While Valve is forever expanding the platform in pleasing ways, it's not quite there yet. Still, you can now read and write game guides on Steam, hosted on the Steam Community. This'll likely tie into the hints we've seen of in-game Dota 2 guides, then.

   Everyone Steam accounts can write Steam Guides for any software on Steam, jamming in images, videos or tables to make it all shiny like. The Steam Overlay now has a section for guides so you can quickly check things in-game, or you can casually browse from any game's Community Hub.

   It seems Valve will tie guides in deeper to some games, though. Dota data digger Cyborgmatt's latest patch rummage shows hooks for pop-up guides with tabs for skill builds and suggested items. Given how complex the game is, it's a fine idea to help players learn 'new' heroes. It's not hard to imagine this being rolled into the Steamworks API for all developers to use if they fancy.

   In this rapidly-changing guide environment, I just don't know what to do with my million-dollar idea of having Shakira write a video game tips column named My Tips Don't Lie. Gutted.

   article

   Steam’s New Built-In Game FAQs Are Pretty Good!
   Luke Plunkett

   First announced last month, Valve today announced the formal release of its Game Guides Feature, adding the ability for users to compile their own guides to games (or parts of games), then have other users enjoy and rate them.

   While there's not exactly a tome of reference material there now, what is there shows the service certainly has potential. The guides can be easily broken up into hotlinked chapters, and the use of images also makes illustrating points pretty easy.

   This Team Fortress 2 guide is a good example of what the service is capable of, with images and even video dropped in where needed to really help get a point across.

   Take a look at it, then go look at an ASCII-filled guide on GameFAQs, and tell me which one you'd prefer to be using for the next ten years.

   via Kotaku

   article

   Posted 12 years ago #
3. 

   Anonymous
   Unregistered

   Unlock Your Inner Lansbury: Steam Guides Are Out

   By Craig Pearson on January 19th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.
   Tweet this

   Typewriter ready?

   The gaming guide is something of a lost art form. Back in the day, they were the only way to find out how to get past that bloody goat in Broken Sword, aside from phoning Uncle Charles and asking him on his goat hotline. Now it’s all Google, Youtube, wikis, or skywriters. You can’t look at a sunset without the best StarCraft 2 build orders getting in the way. Valve are as angry as I am at those damn pilots, and have just un-betafied their newest Steam Community creation: Steam Guides.

   Now everyone can give their opinion on how to best tackle a [thing] in [a game], with the built in Steam tools. They’re generally a bit more media packed than the plain-text GameFaqs, and you can’t CTRL-F a Youtube walkthrough, can you? They’re also community rated, so you can’t troll anyone without the gaggle of gamers tramping over your unfunny lulz. How useful are they thus far? This guide has all the publicly released Borderlands 2 Shift keys. They generate Golden Keys that let you open the Special Weapon Locker at sanctuary, delivering untold wealth in epic weapons. I have quite a few, now.

   There are more involved guides, obviously. This is a highly-rated Red Orchestra 2 guide, which is handy as I’m just about to get into it. I’ll bet the writer felt a bit like this when he was done.

   Guides will live within Steam’s community discussions, as a tab. You just head to whatever game you want to learn about, and click the tab.

   What else do you thing Steam needs? A download manager is high on my list.

   article

   Posted 12 years ago #
4. 

   Whiterabbit-uk
   Games Guru

   I think this is a great idea. I never used to bother with the strategy and user guides that you could purchase from the likes of Brady and Prima. The first guide I ever bought was Tom Clancy's End War and only because they were selling it off for £1 at my local GAME store, then I got the Jade Empire Prima guide from a charity shop for £0.20p. Although I'd always been of the mind that guides were sort of cheating, I did find both of them useful as they pointed out things I'd missed the first time i'd played the games.

   After that I started purchasing Prima and Brady guides via Steam shortly after I first registered in January 2009 and have amassed quite a few since, but I only ever purchase them when they are between 50 to 75% off. That said I did decide to buy hard copies for my favorite RPG's Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Two Worlds 2 from Amazon. A couple were second hand such as the deluxe hard covered Fallout New Vegas and I got the Skyrim copy free when I purchased a hard copy of the game for my son.

   I hope the Steam user generated guides are a success. With loads of fans writing for each game, I'm sure there's going to be loads of useful information for those who get stuck or want some advice.

   What I'd like to see is a dedicated cloud for each Steam account. the more games you purchase, the bigger the cloud so that I can store backups of all my games and when I need to re download them, they aren't limited by the usual traffic from the main servers. With my fiber optic broadband connection I can get decent download speeds when traffic is light. If i had my own dedicated cloud it may be practical to keep most of my games stored there instead of having to have over 4 TB of disc space used by my Steam games. Most of the indie games can be downloaded in a matter of seconds or minutes and apart from maybe the last few total war games (all of which are over 20GB in size with all of the DLC's most AAA games will download in around 20 minutes or less if I get the maximum speed out of my connection (60MB broadband)

   Posted 12 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.