Game tutorials should be easily skipped. Why is that so hard?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Elden Ring was hilarious though I looked at the tutorial cave and nooped out of going that way immediately as it looked way more scary than doing anything else.
Your point kind of proves the opposite. Many players will benefit from tutorials, of course. But if making them unskippable helps the bottom 10%, who otherwise can’t correctly judge if they would need them, then we get unskippable tutorials.
The same bullshit applies to dynamic (cheating) difficulty levels, another bane of modern game design where you can’t get ahead by doing well.
In any case, even it it were only 10% it's hardly a symmetrical tradeoff. Those bottom 10% cannot play the game at all without the tutorial, while for the rest it's a few minutes of boring content in an otherwise hours-long game. Seems like a worthwhile investment to add the tutorial.
One of the examples in the article was about spending an hour on intro levels before getting to the "meat" of the game.
Plus, "a few minutes of boring content" is no small thing to trudge through.
Before responding, please listen to this musical piece in its entirety[1]. It's only about four and a half minutes long in an otherwise hours-long conversation, so should not be a problem for you.
The 10% most familiar with the game/genre/developer/controls don't need the tutorial, and know it. I'd argue it's not the bottom 10% least familiar with the game that are harmed by the skip option; they know they need the tutorial, and aren't significantly harmed by the presence of a discrete skip option.
The 10% that cannot play the game because THEY chose to use the skip option, and not to return to the tutorial when they can't figure it out, but instead give up and leave a bad review... they're the only population (against their will!) from the removal of the skip button.
I have 2 hours of gaming per day during the week if I don't have anything else to do, which is rare, so it translates more to 2 hours once every 5 days (weekend is ad-hoc).
10 minutes is roughly 8% of that time, so if the game doesn't hook within 30 minutes (that can be with a nice intro, with a FUN tutorial, or throwing me into the gameplay) it gets dropped unless I have a strong referral from a friend.
That being said, most videogames I play have skippable tutorials. Not sure if that's a new problem specific to AAA, i rarely play those (although returnal on pc was very recent)
It's the "expert gamers" who skip tutorials and then get stuck and end up all frustrated and angry because the game doesn't work exactly like God Of Thing I Played Last Week.
> in the Consecrated Snowfield
The merchant outside of Leyndell sells an interesting torch that'll come in handy in Ordina, by the way.
The extra long exposition that’s basically an extended cut scene with forced interaction is an even worse trend imo. I played the new God of War for about an hour before getting bored of the horrifically bad story telling and uninstalling it. If you want to tell a story with a video game, then do it with the video game. If I want to play a video game, then I want to play a video game, not spend hours wandering between extra long cut scenes. Kojima is the only person I’ve ever forgiven for this sin, but I think that’s just because he crosses over some so bad it becomes good boundary.
Or you're not part of the target audience. For a AAA title, I agree. But I wouldn't blame, say, Crusader Kings for having complex mechanics because that's the entire point of the thing.
How so? It seems to me that being able to skip tutorials when you're not playing the game for the first time is a thing that would benefit almost all players.
There are several games that I probably will never play again because of unskippable tutorials.
And why is it suddenly OK to force players into doing stuff like this? If a player doesn't want the tutorial -- even when playing for the first time -- they shouldn't be forced to do so. It's their game and their game experience, after all.
That's pretty hyperbolic; nobody is forced to play a game. Maybe it sounds like I'm being pedantic, but you don't see anyone using the same language to talk about other parts of a game players are "forced" to go through. Nobody says you're forced to beat a tough boss, for example, even though you usually are if you want to make progress in the game.
You can probably make a good argument for treating tutorials differently from the rest of a game, but I think it's worth acknowledging that it's the norm for games to gate their content by making you complete other content first, with no way to bypass the gate. Tutorials are just a special case of that.
Yes, but that's actually playing the game. A tutorial is not. If I already know how to play the game and have to go through a tutorial anyway in order to get to the actual game, I'm being "forced" in the sense that it's a time-waster I have to go through to get to the game.
This is why there have been games I've never gone back to. Going through the tutorial yet again simply isn't worth it.
Like with any learning, people might have total knowledge, but they might have partial knowledge and _think they know_, only to end up just missing vital info. You want to have extra chances to get it.
Ultimately games are often about failing a bit, and then succeeding. Hard to balance that with over-tutorialization. Especially in the land of open world immersive sims where you can easily just break a quest chain on accident if there are no handrails.
I don't know what the "right answer" is, except that I've been every persona in this problem and the failure case sucks. Ultimately "tutorial that is more or less instant if you know" is the least worst IMO
Consider Redfall, the recent flop developed by Arkane Studios. It is completely obvious to me that the developers of Prey, Dishonored 1/2, and Deathloop know how to make great games that play well. The problem(IMO) is that Microsoft bought Arkane, and then kept Arkane on short leash. The publisher gets to go "hey can you add gear scores, the marketing department says that sells" "Hey can you add co-op multiplayer, we have no idea how the engine works but please do it anyway" and then gets to demand when they launch.
No Mans Sky fell into exactly this trap. They got a big publisher deal, the devs were terrified to deflate the hype because they didn't want to undo the work of their publisher (who is paying their rent/mortgages/food). They couldn't tell the truth about the # of features that were going to be there at launch because that might mean upsetting the publisher and taking massive financial hits.
Skippable tutorials don't make sales, they're not a marketable feature even if it's incredibly important for replay value. Because by the time you're replaying the game, you've already bought it and gone past the refund window.
Now-a-days, I just want a very good first time experience. If I can buy the game on the launch day and not experience gamebreaking bugs while the game more or less fulfills its promises I'll be happy (looking at you, Cyberpunk).
Which I guess is true for a lot of other games too.
Props to Final Fantasy XVI for shipping a finished product. I think they got enough flak for trying it on with XV that they realised they couldn't afford to burn anymore bad will.
I do want to defend that I'm right in spirit however - Arkane was receiving pressure from Zenimax (it's parent company) from even before the buyout. Microsoft didn't reverse that decision, and I think it was likely Arkane was still pressured to make/release a game they never would have made otherwise. I think the same idea of external pressure and short-termism still apply, and that's indicative of where the industry as a whole is.
> The team programmed some of the physics for aesthetic reasons. For instance, Duncan insisted on permitting moons to orbit closer to their planets than Newtonian physics would allow. When he desired the possibility of green skies, the team had to redesign the periodic table to create atmospheric particles that would diffract light at just the right wavelength.
I don't see how this could be chalked up to publisher pressure, a lot of the hype before it came out was just absurd bullshit that Sean Murray fed into.
[0] - https://archive.md/8KJIL
The problem is worse the longer the tutorial is.
I'll cut an indie developer some slack, and even the big game studios on making this mistake on the first release of a game. But I won't cut them slack if they get feedback on this point and then ignore it.
I feel like OW1 nailed the approach. Instead of forcing the player through a hand-holding experience with every character in the game (because god forbid someone play off-meta), they simply put the essential information regarding each under a common hotkey which you can view at your leisure.
I think if you can't fit all of the relevant information regarding what I need to know regarding the current context of gameplay on a 1080p viewport, then the game might not really be a game anymore. At a certain point, these turn into jobs with regard to complexity.
The Design of Everyday Things is just as applicable to game design as it is the design of doors and cars and light switches. I don't need to go through a 30 minute tutorial every time I buy a new car because they all follow similar human-oriented patterns. The cars themselves can be wildly different in many aspects, but I can still quickly ramp myself to a point of understanding without having it shoved down my throat each time.
It also forever ruined Robert Palmer's "Bad Case of Loving You," since that was the song I chose for the karaoke date you're supposed to ruin by singing it poorly.
Another trend that is popular is unobtrusively displaying control hints regularly during gameplay. That’s especially nice for context sensitive or infrequently used inputs.
Not only is it an unskippable tutorial, it's a goddamn driving test, and was impassible altogether unless you pulled off some poorly-detected stunt move you'll never need to use.
I've only ever managed to get past it once, despite repeat attempts.
Like c'mon, I get there was a lore explanation behind saves but c'monnnnnn
I hope there is a special circle of Hell for game designers who do this.
Not only I then barely understand the instructions (slalom, for example; fortunately, Gran Turismo 2 has the license test to explain how it works), the time limit of 60 seconds is very tight, and not all stunts performed are correctly marked as having performed, meaning that the particular stunt must be done again (if there's any time left, that is).
When a tutorial is done well it's seamlessly integrated with the narrative, such that you don't even realize you're playing through a tutorial.
There was this one level, which begins with a cutscene and then a car chase on a highway, eventually (after many game crashes, restarts, rewatches of the unskippable cutscene) lands you on ... I'd like to say an aircraft carrier?
Perhaps it was my hardware which was shit, but the game worked well enough on every other level, but that one. damn. level... it just kept crashing. Which lead to a restart and that unskippable. fricking. cutscene...
ugh. just ugh.
You can disable the startup movie from the settings after you sat through it once, but if you don't do that you'll get the same 8 minute movie again the next time you start the game.
1) The movie in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfjoCqEo6I
Anyway, my main grudge with GT is that you buy a new episode and start from scratch. Maybe they got smarter but I remember that when I bought GT4 I had to go through all the licenses again. That could be OK because even if the controller is the same there are changes in the physics model etc. What I don't forgive them is that I must unlock again everything. Cars, tracks, money, they take a massive amount of time. I had that time with GT3, I didn't have it anymore with GT4. Give me at least all the tracks and the cars and the money I had on the GT3 memory card. The result is that I unlocked some new tracks, I played only a tiny amount of the game, kept doing laps on the tracks that I unlocked and never bought a newer Playstation. That cost them some missed sales with me. I would pay an extra to buy a totally or partially unlocked game.
By the way, I play only racing games and I'm not interested to play against other people with a network connection. There are apparently too many jerks and lapping alone or against the AI is entertaining enough.
I don’t play online so I don’t know how well it works, but GT7 has a sportsmanship rating system that is supposed to combat this.
- Entering/exiting shrines (infuriatingly, you can skip about half the time, but not all of it). I've seen it a hundred times already (literally). I only needed to see it once, if even that. There's not even any variation.
- Unlocking a tower. You're making this a bigger deal than it really is.
- Interfacing with Great Fairies and Hestu. Again, some of it is skippable, but not everything. Why half-ass it?
- Pause and modal popup whenever you pick up certain items, even if you pick up some amber for the 1000th time. Why.
- Dialog and popups not immediately reacting to input, but every such thing has an artificial 1000-1500 ms delay. Can someone explain why this was added? For players to not accidentally choose an option without reading it? OK, maybe stop doing it after the first, I don't know, 100 times?
- Opening (and closing) chests.
- Praying in front of goddess statues and the things that ensue.
It's like they've done extra "fuck you" work to ruin your experience. Just let me skip. The whole thing. And don't fade in/out from/to white/black over 3 seconds, just cut it. Cut it. Begone.
You just climbed a tower-- behold this sweeping view while you catch your breath.
You can't feel the weight of this heavy chest lid, but you do feel it in how long it takes to open.
I hated the cooking animations (fuck those dancing vegetables), but they make you feel the effort involved in the process.
Letting you skip that stuff ruins the immersiveness. Nothing you can fast-forward through is ever going to feel epic. (It's not a fuck-you unless Hideo Kojima was involved.)
Red Dead Redemption did this too. By the end I had seen so many animals skinned it broke something inside me, which gave fourth-wall consequence to what I was doing in-game.
Also, games that have a twenty minute forced tutorial and don't let you save before it's done.
Nowadays, a lot of games ARE tutorials.
(You might discover the one mention of Elbereth in the guide, but I think it would be very difficult to make progress without consulting the larger NetHack wiki.)
That's not to say that I don't like a game that rewards me for figuring stuff out. But it should be actually significant stuff like a puzzle solution or how a certain place relates to a certain event in the world's history, not stuff like "I just died 10 times because I was pressing A when instead I should have been pressing RL+B which the game never told me was a thing I could do".
Obviously this works because it‘s so simple. What other games exist, where it‘s similar?
Multiply that ten thousand times with the added scale of 'real' games and things are just going to get cut if they're not essential to the experience.
I made an actual terminal Rogue-clone in University. It was a short game parodying the University experience and, though I haven't touched it since, was probably terrible. Even so, I was able to do all that + most of the mechanics (AoT procedural generation, leveling, various characters/enemies, a full event-based architecture, a terminal rendering system using ANSI codes, etc) in about a week of in-between class time. I am by no means an amazing gamedev, I just think you might be exaggerating a bit.
But the development side of it really isn't harder than any other software project of a similar scale. If you know how to build complex software, you can build complex games.
It's difficult because players refuse to read, and showing stuff to them rather than writing requires a stupid amount of work. Moreover, players can get distracted during the tutorial, misunderstand something, get lost, etc. So you have to build a lot of redundancies and safeties.
So maybe the developers unintentionally try to make it worth it by "forgetting" to offer a way to skip it.
Not as a bit, either - they genuinely spent a few hours not finding the first tower that it has 5 or 6 different prompts to tell you how to find and where, and gave up.
This isn't to denigrate the games, just to remark that for any level of well-done, there is still a sliding scale tradeoff between how obnoxiously prescriptive the tutorial is and how many people will get filtered out by not getting it.
Honestly I think most tutorials are fine. The boring stuff is usually very quick. The game specific mechanics are worth learning.