I think old CRPGs lost something when manuals became optional PDFs
What gets me about Baldur’s gate 2 is that the original manual was 264 pages long. You start the game and immediately get hit with Thac0, spell schools, weapon proficiencies and armor class working backwards. It feels like the game just refuses to explain anything.
But it did explain everything. Just not inside the game.
And the manual wasn’t some boring technical document either. It had lore, spell descriptions and Volo and Elminster arguing in the margins. I honestly think it was part of the game, not just something that happened to come in the box.
That’s probably why some older CRPGs feel more confusing now than they did when they were released. We still have the game, but we’re missing the thing players were expected to read before starting it.
Now I can’t help wondering how many badly explained old games actually have a perfectly good tutorial sitting in the installation folder as a pdf nobody bothered to open