This is the second game I have (and I am sure there are more, btw.) where no manual exists, except something in game. This is an awful trend in the gaming industry, and we players/customers let them get away with it.
Editing and printing costs money, and it is just not done to save money. Even editing and making a PDF from it for download seems to expensive nowadays.
I absolutely hate game manuals which are 'integrated' into the game. The second game I have where they did this (despite protests of many customers) is Age of Wonders 3. You have to start the entire game including an expensive graphic engine just to read the manual. The argued that it is 'impossible to keep the manual up to date with patches and DLC, so they integrate it with the game'. The game does have a lot of fans and therefore they got away with this.
It is just the same with ED. And game journalists are guilty too, they should talk about such things, but they accept it.
I am grateful for the myriads of external programs and web sites, but in the long run I think it is rather damaging for ED, since more and more of the games content description is now in external hands. Several years ago things like EDDB or EDSM would have been called 'spoiler' web sites, and posts for things like the Guardian sites or Davs Hope and countless other in game features would have been called 'spoilers'. Now ED (and probably other games) depend on these things, because the games content is unorganized, buggy, and half done and the game would just not be playable without these external helpers.
Imagine what would happen to ED when all the external web sites would cease to function, would be switched off. This is not under control of the game makers, and the game would become practically unplayable in a moment. A game designer should not accept this. Is Frontier a game designer?
