I hear a lot about frustrating, unskippable tutorials. What games do a good job at teaching you what you need to know?
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absolutely not Warframe.
Yeah haha. They made the tutorial slightly better nowadays, but your still getting thrown in the deep end after the Vor quest line.
Super Mario Bros.
The first level literally is designed to progressively teach you everything you need to know how to play the game and it doesn’t even have a single line of text to do it.
Although I do have to say it is a bit funny that Dark Souls’ tutorial is just some messages on the ground and the first one tells you how to move. But you have to move over to it to read it in the first place.
Dark Souls since it doesn‘t stop you in your tracks much. I dislike tutorials that stop you and make you read walls of text or force you to input/click exactly what it wants you to.
I was coming here to mention Dark Souls. It’s an excellent example of how to make a tutorial not feel like a tutorial. Either you take the time to understand what the game is telling you or not, up to you. Don’t care about going through the entire tutorial area? Just beat the boss and start the real adventure.
Dark Souls has a good tutorial because it lets you skip it? That’s your bar for a good tutorial?
Souls games are terrible at even explaining what the buttons do. Every blind lets play I’ve seen it is like 30 minutes before the player even discovers they have estus or what it is for.
Yes, I prefer a game that lets me figure things out on my own through gameplay instead of popups. You are (arguably) forced to engage with the game‘s mechanics to beat the level, it has parries, environmental hazards, ambushes all in it without huge punishment in case of failure. I take the aha moment of using estus over „press square to heal.“ I‘m aware that others might need more guidance, but I didn’t and hence it‘s a great tutorial for me.
I wouldn‘t mind replaying the tutorial even now after having done it dozens of times already. It doesn‘t feel like one, I’m already playing the game and having fun, immersed in its world. So my bar is: The best tutorials don‘t feel like tutorials at all.
On the other hand if you don’t make people read, you end up with “Who the hell is John MainBoss?” or “This game sucks, how do I jump?”
Force them to jump in the tutorial, and solve the main boss thing through normal storytelling, whichever way makes sense for your game. If the only time you need to know something is late game and there’s nothing to remind you mid-game, that’s poor design.
Tribes: Vengeance’s campaign story is basically one giant tutorial (and a great one at that) on how you move and play in multiplayer.
Too bad that the game didn’t take off at all back then, now there’s just small communities that get together once in a while :l
The best tutorials are ones that are fun to play both on your first time and subsequent playthroughs
Something like portal, hollow knight or hades
Dead cells, there are people out there with hours of gameplay that haven’t completed the tutorial.
For all the faults Nintendo embody, they know how to make tutorials, especially with the Mario series. You may think “there are no tutorials in Mario” but that’s part of it. Nintendo’s design formula for making stages for Mario games consist of “introduction, escalation, complication.” First they throw a new mechanic at you, maybe the stage has rotating cylinders you need to stay on top of to progress, and not fall down. Then they up the difficulty a bit, adding more factors to the gameplay like introducing enemies that you have to dodge simultaneously. Then finally they turn the new concept up to 11 towards the end, by making you have to juggle both the new mechanics and some other modifiers, perhaps having to fight a boss at the same time, or perhaps requiring some more advanced platforming maneuvers to progress. That way a stage can be a tutorial, and you don’t even realize it.
Hard agree, BOTW in particular was spectacular. The Great Plateau.
When you finish the tutorial bits and it’s like “you need to go over here” and the map just opens up and you realize this game is FUCKING HUGE 🤌
I can tell you what the worst tutorial is.
It’s Monster Hunter World.
Pokemon games also routinely come close.
I was expecting a joke comment mentioning Driver.
I am disappointed I had to scroll this far to find something like that.
I’m going to guess with near certainty that Monster Hunter World was your first Monster Hunter game if you think THAT tutorial was the worst hahaha
Yeah, it was. Trying to play, and it keeps stopping you with multiple full screens of text.
I don’t think they understand the concept of tutorials tbh.
Is this where we bring up the old Mega Man X Sequelitis video again? Chances are the best tutorial is the one you don’t even realize is a tutorial. There was also a trend that I first noticed around the time of Gears of War where the tutorial would not only be built into the story so that you wouldn’t feel like it was chore, but they’d also give you the opportunity to just skip it.
A Dance of Fire and Ice is the best one. You get how the game works within the main menu itself, songs can have their own tutorials for specific patterns later on the song but are fully skippable.
Rhythm Doctor also has really good tutorials, a fully skippable tutorial that tells you anything newly introduced in the upcoming track
The first level of MegaMan x and good springs in fallout: New Vegas are really good examples of how to convey info to the player about how the game works and what you can do without pulling you out of the game itself a separate tutorial
The original Portal game does a good job of this. The first several puzzles are essentially tutorials that still manage to feel fun and interesting.
A lot of the game before you escape the testing track, minus maybe the point you are told about momentum jumps, feel like one big tutorial without even realizing you’re in one. It’s done very well.
Portal 2 imo. Stephen Marchant makes everything better
Portal 2 has the best introduction to jumping controls of any tutorial in existence.
Apple
Stephen Merchant.
Correction not to be an asshole, but because looking up Stephen Marchant brings up a different human
When I played through Portal in dev commentary mode, I was surprised at the time to realize they’re basically trying to teach you things through the whole game (or at least heavily signpost). Made me realize a lot about game design, and design in general.
I’m here to say Portal as well, specifically because, once you really look for it, you realise that about 90% of the game is tutorial. Like, seriously, basically everything leading up to “The cake is a lie” is teaching you the skills you need for the final sequence. It’s a massive tutorial followed by one level of actual game, and it’s beautiful, precisely because you don’t even notice that the tutorial hasn’t ended.
Outer Wilds has a very elegant diagetic tutorial in the form of a museum and, well, a training ground, whole game is really a multi layered tutorial with scaling level of complexity.
Came to say this as well :)
Breath of the Wild. It’s integrated so smoothly you don’t even realise it’s a tutorial. It seemlessly transforms into regular gameplay.
Maybe it’s not a bad tutorial, but it is long and slow.
My mom really though the Plateau was gonna be the entire game lol. When the game gave her a paraglider she was like “oh there’s gonna be more?”
I think the Great Plateau is roughly the size of OOT’s entire world, so if she only played classic titles that may feel reasonable.
The one that sticks out in my mind is the original BioShock. Spoilers if you haven’t played it.
Bioshock
The first thing that happens is a voice over the intercom asks, “Would you kindly pick up that weapon.” And of course you do it, or the game does not progress. The voice is very polite and resonable, helping you navigate this dank maze of horrors. “Would you kindly open that door?” “Would you kindly kill that monster?” The calm manners contrast starkly against the modern horrors you’re experiencing in the game. Of course every request seems like a great idea at the time, and of course the game ends if you fail.
Then halfway into the game, you finally meet the man behind the voice and he explains that you are a mind-controlled slave, conditions to obey any command that begins with “would you kindly…” He’s trying to destroy the tyranny of the system and commands you to kill him, sacrificing himself to free you from the control phrase. The “tutorial” seemed like it was just helpful instructions, but you didn’t really have a choice, did you? The majority of players just followed those instructions without question, never considering whether they were good choices or moral actions. And could you say no? Without the wrench, you can’t survive the first attack. Without opening the door, you remain in the first room forever. Your world is pre-ordained and tightly controlled. How much free will do you have in the game and outside of it? At what point do you stop making decisions and start following orders? And when can you stop again?
I was going to mention Bioshock too, but what I love about it is the voiceovers never pause gameplay. The worst tutorials are the ones that make you sit through cutscenes that are longer than you want to sit through.
I hate to break it to the both of you but… that’s not a tutorial.
