Hey, we done did some dang good guides this year
Guides work is a very strange beast, and one that we don’t talk about as often as we maybe should. By its nature, we here in guidestown can feel a bit isolated from the rest of RPS. Our guides aren’t very visible to our regular readers. No one hops onto a website like this and says to themselves, “Well now! I wonder what guides have been written today that I can spend my time reading through!”. The vast majority of people who read our guides come straight from a Google search into something specific like “Can I romance Yennefer and Triss at the same time?” (spoiler alert: you can,but it may not end well for you).
Starting with the hulking demonic poleaxe-wielding elephant in the room:Elden Ringwas absolutely huge for guides this year. With all hands on deck and over 80 guides written to an exceptionally high standard by everyone involved, it’s hard to pick out just one that I’m particularly proud of. So I’ve picked out two instead.
Probably my greatest personal achievement this year was ourElden Ring boss locationsguide, over which I crooned like Gollum over the One Ring for much of the early part of the year. Containing 9 detailed maps and almost 20,000 words detailing the locations and natures of 238 bosses, this guide was absolutely my biggest personal undertaking in 4 years of RPS guides work. And it was worth it. Want a fun fact? That one boss locations guide accounted for over a quarter of RPS’s entire guides traffic in March.
Elden Ring’s monumental success at the start of the year was echoed at the end of the year with the daunting double-release ofCall of Duty: Modern Warfare 2andWarzone 2. 140 guides, folks. 140. That’s a whole lot of words, and a colossal achievement in itself. I’m quite pleased in particular with ourWarzone 2 weapon statstables, which involved probably a dozen or so hours of me repeatedly shooting someone in different parts of the body with different guns. It was worth it though, because we ended up being the first site on the internet that gave players a full stats breakdown of every primary weapon in both Warzone 2 and MW2.
But why stop with just one example? Just over a month later Rebecca wrote up a guide on thegender customisation options in The Sims 4, and I just have to give it a shout out here. It’s a complicated and sensitive topic, and her guide goes the extra mile in explaining the full consequences of each customisation choice in ways that only an ardent lifelong fan of the franchise could hope to write.
Predating all of this - at the very beginning of the year, Hayden published a cracking guide on thebest character builds in Project Zomboid, a spectacularly dense survival game which I certainly didn’t fancy the task of deciphering. Yet this is exactly what Hayden did, patiently explaining how occupations, skills, and traits all work inProject Zomboid, and then illustrating two in-depth character builds that will give new players that best chance of surviving and enjoying the game.
Build guides are something of a speciality of ours here in guidestown. I think we all relish the opportunity to dive very deeply into a game and use everything at our disposal to create the best possible build, whether it’s for a gun, a mech, or a hero. One of the most comprehensive guides we published this year was Rebecca’sGenshin Impact Traveler build guide. It’s one of the first examples of a multi-page guide on RPS, and Rebecca absolutely packed each page with essential information on how to make the most ofGenshin Impact’sflexible starting character.
I’d also like to give a big shoutout to Charlie, who spent over a year producing high quality guides for us on a freelance basis. He mostly worked on Warzone and ARPGs likePath Of Exile,Lost Ark, and Diablo Immortal, but in particular I’d like to point readers towards his two excellentEscape From Tarkovguides: the first onammo types, and the second on thebest helmets and armourto use. Both these guides make incredibly complex topics far more approachable for new EFT players, and could only have been written by someone with a huge amount of experience in one of the most abstruse shooters around.
Next year is already looking very exciting to us. We’ve gotStarfield, of course, as the big new game on the horizon. Next year’s Elden Ring, you might say. But there’s alsoForspoken,Redfall,Nightingale,Ark II, and other smaller but still intriguing opportunities for guides with games likeHades II,Planet Of Lana, andKerbal Space Program 2. It’ll be a lot of work, but the guides team has never been stronger. We’ll get it done, and we’ll more than likely have a lot of fun doing it.
