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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

The boring reason is that adding an option to skip means people will use it and then get stuck, complain about something that’s tutorialized and give up earlier or consider the game less fun. Games are generally mass-market products so any feature that only helps a very small percentage of buyers is much less likely to get added. Skippable tutorials on replay is definitely one of those. This is also why the tutorial gets baked into the story rather than sitting alongside.

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.

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> Games are generally mass-market products so any feature that only helps a very small percentage of buyers is much less likely to get added.

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.

That 10% figure you quote is pulled out of thin air. What if it's actually 80% of players who benefit from the tutorial? At least a little bit, like a refresher on the stealth or crafting system in this particular game?

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.

> while for the rest it's a few minutes of boring content in an otherwise hours-long game

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

We're not really discussing adding the tutorial or not, we're discussing not adding the button to skip the tutorial so that users cannot make their own choice of whether or not to watch it.

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 don't think you give the right weight to BORING,that's the issue here.

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)

Oh I like dynamic difficulty. I get so bored with Stellaris, Civ 6, or RimWorld when I'm so far ahead I can easily deal with any challenge. Dynamic difficulty lets you progress through a game without outpacing the AI.

RimWorld has so many ways to kick your ass if you're getting too comfy, unless you're playing on peaceful/builder. Some of the late game random events are brutally unfair unless you know specifically how to prepare for them.

To paraphrase SSethT's review -- Randy isn't ashamed to admit he's out for blood and DGAF. He'll make it rain toxic fallout, then drop 600 units of milk on you.

Actually it's the "bottom 10%" that'll keep trying different stuff until they figure it out.

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.

I thought it was pretty obvious it's a tutorial section, given there's a fixed text message at the floor telling you that it's the "cave of knowledge". And as long as there's a checkpoint outside there's nothing wrong with checking out scary depths. Just don't get cursed down there.

Don’t get cursed? It’s been a while since I started afresh and did that tutorial so I can’t think what this refers to

Curse was a status in previous dark souls titles, but not in Elden ring. The closest thing I can think of is deathblight but it’s not quite as punishing as getting cursed was. Both instantly kill you

Ah right but nothing can inflict deathblight on you in the Cave of Knowledge - there's only a few weaker enemies and, of course, Soldier of Godrick :D

Dark Souls 1 had an area called The Depths with enemies that could inflict the curse status. Curse not only instantly killed you but also halved the health bar.

At least they patched out the effect where Curse stacked with each death to the debuff. Imagine playing the game with half health, then a quarter health, then an eighth health...

Damn FromSoftware don't mess around. I'm still yet to finish Elden Ring (just defeated Fire Giant this weekend and I'm now pottering around in the Consecrated Snowfield) and I intend to play through either DS3, Sekiro or Bloodborne after but I need to play something a bit simpler, more mindless and on-rails in between :)

But the curse status also has an interesting positive side effect: with it you don't need the "transient curse" item to temporarily make ghost enemies vulnerable.

> in the Consecrated Snowfield

The merchant outside of Leyndell sells an interesting torch that'll come in handy in Ordina, by the way.

Ha I touched that site of grace just before I stopped playing. I'll snoop around first and will check out that merchant if (lol, when) I run into issues

Thanks for the tip, I would've been really quite stuck fighting those invisible assassins otherwise.

> Skippable tutorials on replay is definitely one of those.

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.

>And why is it suddenly OK to force players into doing stuff like this?

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.

> 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.

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.

It’s just lazy design. All Fromsoft games teach you how to play without some tedious time-consuming tutorial. If the mechanics need such a long explanation, they’re probably bad. I recently played the new Harry Potter game for nearly two hours before giving up on the endless tutorial quests.

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.

> If the mechanics need such a long explanation, they’re probably bad.

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.

I didn't say complex mechanics are bad, just that if you require your players to sit through a training session before they play the game, then you've probably designed your game poorly. Elden Ring has rather complex mechanics, with all of the gear and ability interactions, but the tutorial is mostly just the gameplay, and the skippable tutorial at the beginning is just a short section of gameplay with pop-up tips.

I didn’t even see the tutorial cave. Somehow missed it then got stuck trying to work out how to play the game before refunding it.

I just refund the game.

Which is your right but you’re a minority in that sentiment.

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