Byere said:
A proper tutorial will be so ingrained into the game that you don't even realise you're doing one.
A good example of this in recent times is Fallout 3. Getting the player to walk around as a baby, pick stuff up and then moving them on to how to use guns and speech and the like before throwing them into the game is a very good way of doing things.
Fallout 3's tutorial was obvious, though. In fact, I would point to it as an example of a bad one. Stretching this stuff out to make you play as a baby, then a little kid, then an older kid, before you actually get to play. All this not just for an overgrown tutorial, but to try and make you care about the father character, which it also doesn't do terribly well considering how broken and disjointed the age jumps are and how little time you actually spend interacting with the father. That rather bad tutorial is why I let the game sit on my shelf for a month while I engrossed in better games. And then when I did start playing again, I still had no real idea what was going on outside of the basic controls because the tutorial didn't teach me anything beyond that.
mireko said:
-Offline co-op. No, not in all games (so it is a little off-topic), but if a game supports online co-op then it should support couch co-op as well. Actually, more games should have offline co-op in general.
I don't know to word this in any other way, so sorry if I seem rude when I don't mean to be, but you are completely incorrect. A game supporting online co-op doesn't mean it should have offline co-op as well. Many games are online co-op only because the hardware it's on can't properly render the world twice on one console for offline co-op. Online co-op is easier to produce, because each player gets their own console to render the game for them, so all the devs really have to do is make some kind of online coding that puts the players together. For offline though, they have to try and find some way to get the console to render the game twice at the same time for each player, and sometimes they just can't do enough with it to make it run smoothly. Hence, more online co-op than offline.
This is why Killzone 3 stupefies me, though. Guerrilla put in who knows how much time to stuff offline co-op into the game, and of course it is gimped. Smaller screens for each player making it harder to see what's going on, you cannot use the Move controller in co-op, the graphics are worse (not that it really matters too much, because graphics don't make a game fun, and because the screen size becomes so small). But there is no online co-op. I cannot for the life of me figured out why they put forth so much effort to put a very hard to accomplish co-op mode, but didn't put in a little more time to add a much easier to accomplish co-op mode which would have (in theory anyway) also allowed both players to use Move controllers if they want. Seriously Guerrilla, what the
hell?!
... Huh? Oh yeah. Things every game should have.
I say bug testing. I shouldn't have to say that, it should be part of the standard procedure. But a lot of recent games that have launched full of bugs, some game-breaking, says otherwise. Developers, test your games! And publishers, don't rush a buggy product out the door just to make the holiday sales period! Good reviews and no pissed off customers (in other words, good PR) later is way better than bad reviews, pissed off customers, and turned off potential buyers now.
MaxPowers666 said:
gold_digger22 said:
Yes, you are correct in some games. But I don't like to call them "tutorials" (such an ugly word); the exception of games that have done well teaching players would be Portal, Super Mario Galaxy, and Super Meat Boy.
Regardless that is exactly what they are. They are tutorials and they should be in games and should be either skippable or melded into the game as seamlessly as possible. I dont really like your portal example because once your finised the tutorial there is only a single level left.
Yeah, but Portal doesn't really feel like a tutorial at any time. The set-up of the game (you are a test subject completing increasingly difficult test chambers) makes it feel natural that you would start off with something as simple as "put a cube on a button", and have a room that teaches you "speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out (WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE)".
Also I would argue that the tutorial part of Portal ends long before the last level. I can't say where I feel it does end (it's integrated that well), but it doesn't last all the way until the last level, that much I do believe with 100% certainty.
