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GameFAQs has already been dying for the last 10-15 years. Its amazing how most of their user reviews are from 2000-2005 or so and how frequently they don't even

GameFAQs has already been dying for the last 10-15 years. Its amazing how most of their user reviews are from 2000-2005 or so and how frequently they don't even have guides for games anymore. Their message boards went from being notoriously overmoderated with tons of silly rules like a ban on profanity to notoriously undermoderated with very few rules (but what few they have are still enforced bureaucratically) and lots of trolls. CBS did not do a good job of running it especially after the site's founder left so its good that they're selling it. Its just probably not good that Fandom is buying it.

the_lonely_road 4y ago
I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most of their userbase as well.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search. Best result is a Steam forums link, second best is YouTube, third is Wikia and all that crap (why would you auto-play an unrelated video and make that take up a third of the screen in a sticky div if I scroll down?!?!). Fourth are seemingly machine-generated garbage results that don't contain anything useful but try to look like they do. Gamefaqs would still be the best on desktop but it doesn't show up in searches so I kinda forgot they existed and also text FAQs suck to navigate on mobile, and 99% of the time if I'm looking up how to find the Yellow Key or whatever it's on my phone, because I'm either not at my computer, or am gaming on it. Some other comments here make it seem like they don't have content for a lot of modern games, anyway.
- 1980phipsi 4y ago
  YouTube is great for those situations where a written explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.
- moomin 4y ago
  Some of the content was beyond excellent, though. Like, a text file with a guide to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 with location co-ordinates to every single item and interactable object.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    For real. The dedication and detail involved in some of those guides was just unreal.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I still re-read the Doom FAQ every decade or so. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text
  - klibertp 4y ago
    I would have never soloed BG2 with a Sorcerer if not for a very detailed and funny guide on GameFAQs. I didn't quite believe it's possible, but decided to check it out. Oh boy, one-shotting (almost, ie. in a single turn) dragons and eventual Wish-spamming, that was really nice. Another guide allowed me to finish "Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader" with pure-mage, again, I wouldn't have believed it's possible but the author did all the math, compared almost all possible builds, and arrived at the most min-maxed one: fire-based mage. It was really nice to wade through hordes of enemies without caring about sneaking, aggroing just a few at once, and escaping all the time. However, one advice there was priceless, it said: "grab a book. No really, grab a book." I've read I think two before finishing the game. (If you're curious: the carnage cost mana, and the game was not designed for pure-anyone, so the supply of mana potions was insufficient (to say the least). Given that the build had like 5-6 times as much mana as normal character, the natural mana regen took like 40 minutes (IIRC) by the end of the game...)
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      With apologies to... I think it was Groucho Marx? Lionheart is a very educational game, I finished all of Moby Dick while playing it.
sylens 4y ago
GameFAQs was necessary in a time of dial-up modems. The guides were just plain text documents that were tiny and downloaded quickly. The site design was basic and not overly flashy. The forums were a "go-to" spot for any game that got announced. I spent a lot of hours in my summers in the late 90s and even early 2000s writing FAQs for N64, Gamecube and Game Boy Advance games and patrolling the message boards. In the mid 2000s, a lot of that traffic got diverted to IGN (who started siphoning off prominent FAQ writers to write guides for their own site) but also Digg and then Reddit. Having a game-specific forum on GameFAQs didn't matter as much when you could moderate your own subreddit community for it.
ASalazarMX 4y ago
It started when you googled cheats for a game, this was one of the top results, and it spit things like these: - In super Mario you can gather 100 coins for an extra life! - There are no currently known cheats for Civilization VI. If you know one, tell us!
AdamH12113 4y ago
I loved GameFAQs and even wrote a couple guides for it back in the day. As limited as it was, I think the plaintext format had a lot going for it in terms of simplicity, searchability, and avoiding spoilers. The alternatives today seem to be either 100-page web guides laden with ads, YouTube videos with spoilers in the title, or incomplete wikis. GameFAQs did add the ability to make HTML guides with pictures (although as far as I know they're all multi-page), but by then it was too late.

the_lonely_road 4y ago

I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most of their userbase as well.

yamtaddle 4y ago
YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search. Best result is a Steam forums link, second best is YouTube, third is Wikia and all that crap (why would you auto-play an unrelated video and make that take up a third of the screen in a sticky div if I scroll down?!?!). Fourth are seemingly machine-generated garbage results that don't contain anything useful but try to look like they do. Gamefaqs would still be the best on desktop but it doesn't show up in searches so I kinda forgot they existed and also text FAQs suck to navigate on mobile, and 99% of the time if I'm looking up how to find the Yellow Key or whatever it's on my phone, because I'm either not at my computer, or am gaming on it. Some other comments here make it seem like they don't have content for a lot of modern games, anyway.
1980phipsi 4y ago
YouTube is great for those situations where a written explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.
moomin 4y ago
Some of the content was beyond excellent, though. Like, a text file with a guide to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 with location co-ordinates to every single item and interactable object.
- Arrath 4y ago
  For real. The dedication and detail involved in some of those guides was just unreal.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I still re-read the Doom FAQ every decade or so. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text
- klibertp 4y ago
  I would have never soloed BG2 with a Sorcerer if not for a very detailed and funny guide on GameFAQs. I didn't quite believe it's possible, but decided to check it out. Oh boy, one-shotting (almost, ie. in a single turn) dragons and eventual Wish-spamming, that was really nice. Another guide allowed me to finish "Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader" with pure-mage, again, I wouldn't have believed it's possible but the author did all the math, compared almost all possible builds, and arrived at the most min-maxed one: fire-based mage. It was really nice to wade through hordes of enemies without caring about sneaking, aggroing just a few at once, and escaping all the time. However, one advice there was priceless, it said: "grab a book. No really, grab a book." I've read I think two before finishing the game. (If you're curious: the carnage cost mana, and the game was not designed for pure-anyone, so the supply of mana potions was insufficient (to say the least). Given that the build had like 5-6 times as much mana as normal character, the natural mana regen took like 40 minutes (IIRC) by the end of the game...)
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    With apologies to... I think it was Groucho Marx? Lionheart is a very educational game, I finished all of Moby Dick while playing it.

sylens 4y ago

GameFAQs was necessary in a time of dial-up modems. The guides were just plain text documents that were tiny and downloaded quickly. The site design was basic and not overly flashy. The forums were a "go-to" spot for any game that got announced. I spent a lot of hours in my summers in the late 90s and even early 2000s writing FAQs for N64, Gamecube and Game Boy Advance games and patrolling the message boards. In the mid 2000s, a lot of that traffic got diverted to IGN (who started siphoning off prominent FAQ writers to write guides for their own site) but also Digg and then Reddit. Having a game-specific forum on GameFAQs didn't matter as much when you could moderate your own subreddit community for it.

ASalazarMX 4y ago

It started when you googled cheats for a game, this was one of the top results, and it spit things like these: - In super Mario you can gather 100 coins for an extra life! - There are no currently known cheats for Civilization VI. If you know one, tell us!

AdamH12113 4y ago

I loved GameFAQs and even wrote a couple guides for it back in the day. As limited as it was, I think the plaintext format had a lot going for it in terms of simplicity, searchability, and avoiding spoilers. The alternatives today seem to be either 100-page web guides laden with ads, YouTube videos with spoilers in the title, or incomplete wikis. GameFAQs did add the ability to make HTML guides with pictures (although as far as I know they're all multi-page), but by then it was too late.