Well to be honest, the 'instruction' is in the game now. The only thing that has disappeared completely is the 'in character' description of the game that used to frequent instruction books. One I remember in particular was Arcanum, which had a fun little explanation of magick vs. technology that spanned 4 pages and used a fun little experiment description to show it, sets the mood for playing the game perfectly.
The Ultima VIII instruction manual on the other hand... Hell, that whole game in fact, is rather devoid of actual 'instruction'. The book is wonderful in its descriptions of the actual world, and provides a great backstory as to what the hell everyone is babbling about in the game, but doesn't tell you an ounce of controls.
Deus Ex seemed kind of like that too, but that could be just because I didn't have the manual for it. It gives you the little tutorial at the beginning, but in the short amount of time I played it, I never got any feel for what any of the skills you could choose actually did. In spite of that, they still forced you to pick some of them without a real knowledge of what each did.
I should probably say something about the topic... Morrowind and Oblivion have a fun amount of lore. From what I hear, that's a pretty big draw of the games. Being able to talk to people and discover histories, cultures, etc. Ultima VIII was kind of skimpy on the NPC interaction thing, but it had a lot of books scattered about that were pretty informative, and I miss that. Again. There is a lot of crap that needs to stop disappearing from games.
The Ultima VIII instruction manual on the other hand... Hell, that whole game in fact, is rather devoid of actual 'instruction'. The book is wonderful in its descriptions of the actual world, and provides a great backstory as to what the hell everyone is babbling about in the game, but doesn't tell you an ounce of controls.
Deus Ex seemed kind of like that too, but that could be just because I didn't have the manual for it. It gives you the little tutorial at the beginning, but in the short amount of time I played it, I never got any feel for what any of the skills you could choose actually did. In spite of that, they still forced you to pick some of them without a real knowledge of what each did.
I should probably say something about the topic... Morrowind and Oblivion have a fun amount of lore. From what I hear, that's a pretty big draw of the games. Being able to talk to people and discover histories, cultures, etc. Ultima VIII was kind of skimpy on the NPC interaction thing, but it had a lot of books scattered about that were pretty informative, and I miss that. Again. There is a lot of crap that needs to stop disappearing from games.
