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Comment by joemi | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.

I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.

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As soon as I bought Minecraft I opened the Wiki and used that to figure out how to craft stuff.

It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.

>It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.

the wow wiki was from 04, the minecraft wiki is from 09.

... and wow was very documentation based for people pre-quest-helpers.

That's impressive. I thought the NetHack wiki would be older, but it dates to 2005, although I suspect there was an earlier version somewhere else.

You cannot be serious! That comparison is a joke. There's worlds between the complexity of Minecraft and DF.

How would you suggest someone make a good tutorial for DF that doesn't leave the player exhausted by the time they start a new game?

That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.

At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.

Why you ask me that?

Because this is a discussion about tutorials and on-ramps to new players, and their necessity in games, specifically in Dwarf Fortress.

He changed the topic with his questions and you fell for his cheap trick. Hahaha

Several people have given the opinion in this thread that DF is basically immune to having a tutorial; I am trying to figure out why. I don't see a tutorial as an end-to-end blueprint of everything the game is capable of. It's just a series of info, hints, and follow-along instructions, possibly with railroaded / simplified UI. I mean, the first time I booted up DF with no context circa 2013, it took me a few minutes to figure out that we're seeing a top-down view. I certainly would have appreciated a hint or a tutorial (though I do not necessarily fault the game for not having one; it's _not_ a game that is aimed at onboarding heaps of fresh newbies by the truckload each week).

Regardless of the difference in complexity, I think the fact that it became the bestselling videogame of all time despite the fact that it essentially "has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players" makes it a valid example for showing why tutorials and on-ramps for new players are not as important as the comment I replied to made it sound.

If you disagree, I'd like to hear your thoughts on where you think the threshold in complexity is when games should start including a tutorial and/or on-ramps for new players.

I don't know where the threshold is, but the comparison lacks in the same way that a coloring book doesn't need a tutorial, but a blank paper that has HANGMAN written on it does need one or people don't know how to play it.

You can't say because minecraft doesn't have a tutorial, dwarf fortress doesn't need one either. That's just retarded

Unlike dwarf fortress, minecraft is fun and engaging from minute zero, and exposes its systems to you naturally over time. Terrible comparison.

Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix.

I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.

It also has effectively zero physics. I still remember being annoyed at how water worked in Minecraft when playing with my kid, and the fact that trees don't collapse if you cut 'em down.

(Yes, yes, mods exist.)

It depends what you mean by "early game." The first night cycle happens within minutes of starting and it's very interesting.

Back in my day, villages weren't even in the game. My highschool classmates and I still found something compelling about it.

I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.

Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?

Yeah, I think this actually supports the idea that Dwarf Fortress is needlessly bad at onboarding players. Every time I try to get into it, I end up confused by why people enjoy it and unable to figure out how to play it. Whereas with Minecraft, exploring how to play it was actually fun, with Dwarf Fortress, it felt frustrating and unnecessarily obscure.

That's because the UX/UI is utterly awful. It's cargo cult: the game. (And BTW my complaints have nothing to do with the controls. The actual UX is just... not thought out at all).

> minecraft is fun and engaging

It depends, for me it is boring and has pretty dim graphics. I wanted to love it, but it is not fun. It looks like a Sims game, it lacks what e.g. factorio has, that "spark".

DF sounds like it might have that "spark", but I'm afraid to touch it.

Even though I'm a big fan of the game and have been playing it for over a decade now, "fun and engaging from minute zero" is not how I'd describe it. I've seen a number of people (both kids and adults) become frustrated with it almost immediately, and that's with someone experienced nearby to answer questions and let them know what they can do. Without such guidance, they'd definitely have quit and never played it again.

I think the old adage from film industry applies, in that you shouldn't underestimate your audience.

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