I Hate Tutorials in Games!

[TehCookie]

I hate tutorials, I liked manuals. It didn't interrupt the flow of the game at all, you had the option to figure things out on your own because I find it fun to see what you can do. Then if you get stuck you can read it and learn all sorts of new tricks. The best part is it's never forced down your throat. Not to mention they make great bathroom reading material.

 

[Dethenger]

Kingdom Hearts games are slow as balls to get into. The tutorial should either be optional or brief. Even the Call of Duty games do that right. In CoD4, the tutorial actually gave you a time to beat and was engaging.

EDIT: The Bard's Tale had an amusing tutorial, with the player character actually listening to someone tell him to press the A button to jump.
"Button? What button? Whatever, I'll humour you, old man."

 

[The Lunatic]

I find tutorials to be very annoying.

Especially if they're forced and you have no option to skip them.

For the most part, they're simple to an elementary level and treat the player like a complete idiot.

 

[Brutal Peanut]

I enjoyed the Fallout - New Vegas tutorial.

"Here are the very basics of shooting. Want to know more? No? Okay get outta here." Me: "=D BAI!"

I also echo the Skyrim sentiment - love the game, hate the opening. Every time? Come on.

 

[WanderingFool]

One bad tutorial isn't an indictment of tutorials as a whole. I like tutorials as I don't particularly like being thrown into a game without the slightest inkling of what to do.

It's gotta be done right of course.


Takes less than five minutes to complete and you're taught the basics. Short and sweet, good tutorial.

That was a good tutorial, short, sweet, and to the point.

Tutorials I really hate though are the ones that you have to go through, like the Vault in FO3 or the prison escape in TES4 (and the escape in Skyrim as well.) One of the first things I do is make a save game for the sole purpose of skiping that crap. Great the first time through, but after that, just sucks to have to go through again and again.

Off-Topic: This brings up a quick question, why do people miss manuals?

 

[Doclector]

Assassin's creed 3 has terrible tutorials. The only thing that makes the massive amount of time sunk into tutorials tolerable is the fact that Haytham's a badass, a war of independence James Bond with the witty remarks to match.

Oh, and the plot twist which genuinely took me by surprise.

Spoiler

At the end of that tutorial period, it's revealed that you've been working for the templars for this part of the game. It's a well executed little twist, even if it ultimately means little.

It's kinda a shame. Once the game opens up, and you finally get a grasp of the multitudes of side quests available, it's really good. Special mention to the ship battles, probably the closest I've come to the feeling of being a pirate ship's captain since "sid meyer's pirates!". I kinda hope they make a full game building on that. But, while I don't find him quite as unengaging as many reviewers have said, Connor is still a pretty lacklustre protagonist, especially when compared to Ezio, or even Haytham.

 

[Doclector]

One bad tutorial isn't an indictment of tutorials as a whole. I like tutorials as I don't particularly like being thrown into a game without the slightest inkling of what to do.

It's gotta be done right of course.


Takes less than five minutes to complete and you're taught the basics. Short and sweet, good tutorial.

That was a good tutorial, short, sweet, and to the point.

Tutorials I really hate though are the ones that you have to go through, like the Vault in FO3 or the prison escape in TES4 (and the escape in Skyrim as well.) One of the first things I do is make a save game for the sole purpose of skiping that crap. Great the first time through, but after that, just sucks to have to go through again and again.

Off-Topic: This brings up a quick question, why do people miss manuals?

Well, the manual for assassin's creed 3 is in game, an increasing trend these days. It's not that bad an idea, if well done. The manual for AC3 is not. There is no simple controller layout page, forcing you to scroll through tiny text to find whatever button you forgot. Personally, I always felt that paper manuals were better. Being able to have the controller layout right in front of you if you had gotten rusty that you could check at a quick glance, instead of having to pause the game, find wherever the manual was, scroll through god knows how much text to find what you want.

X-com enemy unknown had a pretty good tutorial. Sure, it goes on for ages, at some points I wondered when, I'd be able to freely look around my base without being limited to whatever the game wanted to show me next, but it makes up for it by making the majority of the tutorials story based. Some of the game's most unsettling parts come up here, to the point that when the handholding ends, you'll kinda miss it.

Red dead redemption was another good one. Again, many things to teach, and the lessons go pretty far into the game, but you're not limited to it. Beyond the first few missions, you're free to go do something more action orientated. Sure, you have to complete the tutorials eventually to progress, but at least it gives you the option to take breaks from them.

 

[V8 Ninja]

Skyrim's tutorial/opening sequence is boring as hell.
The first time was cool, but once you've seen the big scary dragon once, the rest is just linear, boring, asdfghjkl-inducing bullshit.

At least Skyrim shows you a GOD-DAMN DRAGON and things happening rather than Oblivion's boring cave-filled roller coaster. God, Oblivion's tutorial was horrendous!

(Sorry if that felt like an attack. I didn't mean it to be.)

ANYWAYS: Hmm... tutorials I dislike... although I wouldn't call the following tutorial "Boring" or "Bad", the tutorial for indie game inMomentum is not what I would call great either. The appeal of inMomentum is the feeling of speed and maneuverability that the game offers, two aspects which are completely absent from the tutorial. The flow from moving to each new learning section is completely off, with long pauses and boring narrators filling in a large chunk of time.

 

[Bostur]

Go play a Paradox game without a tutorial, see how that goes.

Heh. That's the first thing I thought too. Crusader Kings 2 has a 27-part tutorial. I think I spent 80 minutes on just the first part, because I moused over every single thing on the screen and read everything before clicking through to what it told me to do next. Every time you think you've hit bottom, it just keeps going deeper. One of these days they're going to get to the point that they have to start including tutorials for their tutorials.

Paradox tutorials would be ok if the player could actually refer to them during gameplay. Instead one has to save the game, quit the game, reboot the game (which takes ages) and then start the tutorial. Anything the tutorial does could have been done better with a decent in-game manual IMHO. Especially with topics as complex as those in Paradox games tutorials are a bad fit.

Don't get me wrong, I love their games in spite of the tutorials and the sluggish engine. But I think it serves as a perfect example of how not to do things.

The Civilization approach works better for me, anytime I encounter a game concept that I'm unclear about I can bring up the in-game manual and look it up.

Off-Topic: This brings up a quick question, why do people miss manuals?

Paper manuals is the superiour technology for learning in my opinion, especially so for complex subjects. They can run alongside the game, they don't need specialized hardware and can be used anywhere, and one doesn't need to go through several layers of menus to get to the content. Navigation sometimes take a bit longer though depending on the layout.

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

They have never bothered me. Tutorials can actually be fun if they are done right and include the story.

Pretty much this.
That said, while it doesn't include any story really, the tutorial for God Of War was pretty good.

 

[Roxor]

Actually, I'd like to see a return to the DOS days' convention of including an Instructions section on the main menu from which you could read everything which would have been included in the manual. Even today, if I see such a section on the main menu when I load up a new game, I'll go and read through that before starting a new game.

 

[Doom972]

There are two good ways to make a tutorial:

1) Make outside of the main game - In games like Deus Ex and Half Life, and The Witcher 2, you can get to a special training level that takes place outside of the main game from the main menu.

2) Integrate it seemlessly into the game - More difficult to pull off, but works even better. I can only think of Portal 1 & 2 as examples right now.

It's very annoying when good game, like Kmights of the Old Republic, have a mandatory and boring tutorial level.

 

[oliver.begg]

Simple enough - I hate game tutorials.

Go play a Paradox game without a tutorial, see how that goes.

Heh. That's the first thing I thought too. Crusader Kings 2 has a 27-part tutorial. I think I spent 80 minutes on just the first part, because I moused over every single thing on the screen and read everything before clicking through to what it told me to do next. Every time you think you've hit bottom, it just keeps going deeper. One of these days they're going to get to the point that they have to start including tutorials for their tutorials.

have you played HOI3? the tutorials are a bit weak, and the terms need explaing, so yes in the really hardcore grand strats/wargames tutorials need tutorials

that or do what paradox does now, and put a "go to the forum, the scarily knowledgeable people there can help"