I Hate Tutorials in Games!

[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"