You can always use a notebook to make your own guide. I think I still have one for SotN. I didn't have the guide or a computer at home when the game came out. So I used a spiral bound copybook to note all the drops and item locations because I knew it was a game I'd play multiple times.
I know I've printed out a bunch of things over the years, GameFaqs, StrategyWiki...and kept most of them. But they never stack up to the real thing because a book is much more than just a walkthrough. (Plus when it comes to printed paper I tend to be stingy with it. Several of my "guides" are four to a page, double-sided.)
As far as making my own guides, that only happens in games that really don't have any guide of their own
and I can share it with other people. There are a few obscure games that I've made guides to for their earlier parts, to gauge interest, but I haven't heard back from anyone, and I'm not that autistic about those games to dedicate some complete project, especially formatting.
The best I could manage in theory is something like the
hintbook to Cythera (PDF warning), which was written by the developers. (As the
CytheraGuides website explains, the hintbook suffers from some formatting and typographical errors, as well as a problem that occurs a few times in printed guides—referencing things that were changed or cut before the version 1.0 release.)
The sad part about Strategy Games, is that the Live Service aspects of today's games means that those said guides will become obsolete after a few patches, if they were still a common thing today.
Yup. As
@Gravityqueen4life stated, it would be impossible to have a good
World of Warcraft strategy guide. Anything published in 2004 was a lot less useful by the end of 2005, and completely useless now.
Some publishers tried to mitigate changes to guidebooks by including extra material to list changes, but those don't mesh well with the guide itself because they were usually just a sheet of standard paper. If you ordered the guide to
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening after 1998, you could get a double-sided sheet of paper about the DX version that showed a map of the Color Dungeon (color, but looked like it had been scanned in from a crappy inkjet printer) and how to access it (but zero strategies with the dungeon itself, or its monsters, all of which were exclusive to the dungeon), as well as the camera spots. Others had Internet integration for possible later updates, but that kind of defeated the purpose—if you had Internet access why buy it at all? (While it was a stand-alone game with no further updates, nowhere can that sort of thinking be more painfully obvious than the abysmal
Final Fantasy IX strategy guide what with its
integration with "PlayOnline.com").
I was optimistic for the future of strategy guides even as recently as 2017-ish, with Walmart stocking a few guides, like a big hardcover of
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and there were a bunch of
Minecraft books published. But
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was sold as a collectible item (over $50 instead of the $10-20)...and
Minecraft was a rare cultural phenomenon. Prima Games even published "Playing With Super Power", an interesting if sadly misguided look at the Super NES Classic Edition released in 2017, with coverage for (most of) the games, a few bits of strategy, maps, Nintendo Power scans, and trivia. Unfortunately, in addition to its awkward size and shape, none of these are done particularly well.
edit: fix to title
