Tutorial Torture

[Voltano]

While reading this article I thought of a simple question: What about virtual manuals?

The appeal of a tutorial, to me, is the tutorial is meant to give the player experience with the game mechanics while holding their hands. See the tutorial sections in "Dungeons of Dredmor" as an example. Yet if the tutorials here are meant to tell the player what button to press or what to use to get past a door, why not just let them select help from a virtual manual?

The only flaw I can think of is the player(s) might not read the manual for the game. But isn't this the same as skipping and/or ignoring tutorials? Maybe a reason why tutorials are so annoying these days is because some players ignored reading the manuals?

 

[Kargathia]

Also 'tiers' of tutorials/hints.

For example (for a FPS) - on easy mode things would come up more regularly, also be different (r to reload) etc

Compared to 'hard' - where it would come up once or twice at the start and never come again (r to reload), because this is a common standard in FPS games. But things that are unique to the game (some kind of special attack) could be referenced more commonly.

Of course, a player could also disable the hints. Depending on their play style.

This is something that has bugged me for a while. If I'm playing a shooter on "hard", or "insane", then I'd think the game would be justified assuming that I know how to reload, crouch, and (if applicable) aim down sights.

Also, if you're going to have a tutorial level, then for the love of god: don't let it be mandatory every time you start a new playthrough.

 

[nixonhacker]

In Red Dead Redemption I died about a million and a half times because I had skipped over instructions on how to duel, but my honor and pigheadedness refused to allow me to just walk away from the jeering idiots challenging me in every town. The game doesn't include any kind of instruction screen for that particular mini-game, so I actually looked it up online.

 

[SageRuffin]

Ninja Gaiden 3/Razor's Edge is pretty bad with this. For starters, the moment you stop moving, the game assumes you have no idea what the fuck you're doing. Then you constantly get bombarded with messages detailing: how to attack, how to slide, how to climb walls, how to cast ninpo, how to swing on poles, how to wall run, how to brush your teeth, how to make a sandwich, how to masturbate (not "the most effective way to", outright how to do so)... and this continues well into the final moments of the game!

Fortunately, that's the one area of the game that's merciful and you can turn the sumbitches off, though doing so leaves you completely blind when those infamous QTEs show themselves...

 

[Aramis Night]

I'm disappointed that this thread title isn't actually what i hoped this thread would be about. Could have been such a promising thread.

 

[ghostrider409895]

I encounter problems with controls when I go back to play a game to try to have earn more trophies or achievements. Usually after I play a game through, with some exceptions, I like to take a break from it. I don't want to have a nonstop Dead Space horror marathon, or nothing but RPG Fallout overload. However, at the time that I have beat the game I had been very good at playing that particular game. I was very adept to quick reaction and aim in Dead Space, or combat timing in Arkham City, but when I leave a little of that deteriorates - especially if I go and play a game with a completely different control scheme. What makes it worse is that if I am going back to try to get more trophies most of those trophies are harder to earn ones, such as playing the game on the hardest difficulty, or beating extra challenges, so being a deteriorated expert is not something you want to do. Still, I think some games do provide a good job of having tutorial reminders available for selection so I could actually see what I was supposed to be doing, or prompt buttons often enough to remind you what something does.

The only time I was hurting from not knowing the controls was X-Men Legends for Gamecube, because I did not know how to use the vile that replenished my mutant powers until halfway through the game (the game only explained how it worked for health, and I didn't have the instruction book with the game copy I had). That was a bit annoying since I had to wait to use most mutant powers that had strength behind them. Other than that, I never had a real big issue with tutorial lack or pop ups. I think the Far Cry 3 prompts were a bit excessive, but you can disable them from the pause menu.

 

[Branindain]

Those tutorial messages are a pet peeve of mine. The reason being, I'm a slow, meticulous kind of player. This means that (a) I take care to get a handle on the various controls BEFORE I need them and (b) games keep assuming I must be stuck because I actually took a minute to explore the room for goodies. And I don't want my hand held, thankyou; modern games are easy enough already. When I played Shadow of the Colossus I had to keep turning away from the clues at the bottom of the screen during boss fights so that I wouldn't be told what to do, and it was the only thing about that game I didn't like.

 

[AtheistConservative]

As for combat related tutorials, enemy and player DPS would be great markers for what hints to give out. If a player is taking enormous amounts of damage, giving them defensive tips about sprint and crouch are a good idea. Meanwhile, if the player is only outputting half the damage they should be, maybe it's time to tell them how to switch from the pistol to the assault rifle.

 

[mrverbal]

Oh, assassins creed 2.
'
"To do this, press and "

well what the fuck button is foot, exactl...

"Oh no, you've been discovered! Press !!"

Face, I still don't know where foot is an....

"To take a bite out of the giant big as you hurl it at a guard, press , , "

Fuck this. '

If you're going to have tutorials, make them smart enough to show me the ACTUAL keybindings, or you're just being a dick.

 

[Voltano]

Maybe a reason why tutorials are so annoying these days is because some players ignored reading the manuals?

No, the reason tutorials are annoying (and always have been) is because:

They are forced upon you when you start a new campaign/story/game as a sort of pre-mission or first mission/level.
These pre or first levels are usually insulting your intelligence and patience, are long winded, and do not instruct you in an organic manner.
Tutorials never tell you what you want/need to know and are never just quick about it.
They are never just fun to do. (Disgea on the DS is an exception in case you wanted to know how a tutorial can be done right in many aspects.)

That seems to back up my point: Tutorials are always given once at the start of the campaign, they force you through them so you can get an understanding of the game, and they don't care what kind of knowledge you had from previous games by treating you as a baby who plays a video game for the first time.

In contrast, look at board games, card games, or paper & Pencil RPGs: There is no way to get a tutorial in these things as they break the flow of the game. Yet all players are expected to understand the rules before the game starts so it flows right. "Candy Land" is simple for kids to play, but the adults still needs to know the rules. "Magic: The Gathering" has a rule-system that is simple to explain in a manual, yet provides a great deal of depth from what the cards dictate. And in "Dungeons & Dragons" you are *literally* buying a thick, heavy manual describing how the game is played -- and are expected to read it to comprehend how the game is played.

Another example would be software that isn't gaming related. Netbeans IDE is used by Java programmers; Microsoft Word 2007 is good for writing documents; and yWorks is good for building UML (Unified Modeling Language) documents for graphs. Do any of these programs force users, after they are installed, in a mandatory tutorial? Each of them provides a virtual manual the user can refer to if they get stuck, or go onto forums these days to ask for help.

 

[moosemaimer]

Sands of Time.

I played through the entire game until I got to (as far as I remember) the only point in the game where you have access to a save point but not a drinking fountain. Inevitably, the next obstacle required you to take a tiny amount of falling damage and I had a similarly tiny amount of health left, with no way to replenish it. So I started again from scratch and found two powerful new moves I'd missed the first time round because the tutorial text appeared at the bottom of the screen mid-fight while I WAS BUSY FIGHTING DUDES. JEEZ.

I actually disabled the tooltips because I was getting sick of them always popping up, and ended up missing the one explaining how to do the instantly-kill-everything move.

 

[Kahani]

A great example of doing it wrong comes up in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which I decided to have another play with just recently - don't take control of the player and force them to do something when they're right in the middling of doing something else. Having a voiceover pop up and tell you what your new mission objective is and how to complete it is great. Having said voiceover take control and turn you around to face in the direction of your objective when you're in the middle of a big fight, on the other hand, really isn't. Especially since there's usually plenty of stuff in the way anyway and you just end up staring at a wall.

If you're going to have tutorials, make them smart enough to show me the ACTUAL keybindings, or you're just being a dick.

Not only that, but try and make sure that the key bindings you're showing actually make the slightest bit of sense. I've had a couple of games helpfully tell me "press (X) to not die" or something along those lines. I don't own a console or any controller, I've never had anything with an (X) button attached to my PC, I have the controls set to use keyboard and mouse, and I'm quite clearly using them to play the game. If you've gone to the trouble of allowing different input options, surely it can't be that difficult to figure out which one is actually being used.

I played all the way through Max Payne without realizing I could activate bullet time without needing to leap first.

But where's the fun in that?

 

[Idlemessiah]

I kinda like the method Assassin's creed uses. It teaches you the basics once, but because the main actions are context bound they show up in a little wheel in the top corner saying what they do at this particular moment. It's small enough to not notice and you can turn it off in the options once you've got the hang of it. If you come back to the game mid-way you can just turn it back on and there is enough information in that little diagram to not need a full tutorial again.

 

[Jumwa]

Zelda games are too long for me to finish in any realistic time frame these days. So when I was playing Twilight Princess there were huge gaps in between play, and I'd forget the many intricately detailed maneuvers you'd have to perform to defeat specific enemies.

It was very tedious for me, and to this day I've never finished it.

Just need to face the facts I don't have the time for certain games anymore.

 

[PirateRose]

Just put under options a switch. Turn on or turn off the hints.

I don't understand why that is so complicated.

It's like everyone is aware and fully accept that there are people who are too stubborn to pull over and ask for directions when they are going into unfamiliar territory. So car makers try to force GPS in all the vehicles to always give directions. So every day, the road you have driven for the last ten years of your life to get to work and back home, is obnoxiously directed but the GPS.

 

[KOMega]

Well, if I came back to a game after a long ass time and have forgotten the controls, I wouldn't mind replaying the tutorial.

I don't mean replay the first 40 mins of intro cutscenes and stuff I mean, there should be an option in the menu for example that just lets you replay the tutorial, or parts of the tutorial.

In metal gear solid 4 (I forget if 3 had this too) you could go to the menu and figure out how to do everything snake can do, from simple grabbing, to firing a gun, to interrogating people.

popups are alright I guess, but sometimes I want to know something different and a menu with some explanation of some of the mechanics I can use would be helpful, as long as it is only used for when the player wants to go back over stuff they are supposed to know but have forgotten rather than the main way the player learns about the mechanics.

 

[The_Great_Galendo]

I agree with most of what the article said, except for:

"We should not store the tutorial counters in the save file. We should allow for the fact that sometimes someone (the player's little brother, for example) might jump into the game in the middle. Or perhaps the player hasn't played a game in months and has forgotten everything."

It seems to me that we *should* store the information there, along with the time elapsed since the game was last loaded/saved. The fact that someone's little brother might start playing in the middle seems like a pretty fringe case -- why wouldn't he play on his own save, for instance? And even if he doesn't, how likely is it that he'll both know and use moves that the main player forgot?.

Now if it's been more than a few weeks since the game has been started up it probably makes sense to wipe the old tutorial counters and start anew. But there have been plenty of times when I've been stuck in a game and despite having no clue what to do I play the game for anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, then save after having gained more experience/money/items/whatever. If you make all your counters session-dependent, the player may never play long enough at a stretch to trigger the pertinent tutorial, especially for rarely used abilities (i.e., the ones most likely to be forgotten) that have a high tutorial counter threshold (because having a low threshold for rarely used abilities would be really annoying).

TLDR: Session-dependent tutorial counters would likely lead to over-spamming of known information and/or under-informing of needed information.

 

[MrBaskerville]

I think it´s kinda redundant to have on-screen button prompts, if you forget the controls you should try to press the buttons and see what happens, that might solve your problem^^.

Maybe the optimal solution would be: Press select for Controller Layout and a short summation of your abilites and how to execute them. I don´t really think games needs a lot more than that. I really hate the "press X to open" prompts, because it should be pretty damn obvious what you need to do. Back in the day you had an action button that you used on interactive stuff, that was pretty simple and easy to understand. It´s only a problem in games that have silly controller layouts or inconsistent use of button prompts (open doors with x, unless it´s a triangular door, then it´s the Square button). If the layout is logical, the prompts will be a 100% unncecary.

 

[s0p0g]

-speaking of bad tutorials - and NWN has already been mentioned - Black & White comes to mind
WHY do i HAVE to play the first §&%#$ world over and over and over again, with all stupid (and sloooowly presented) hints for every effing single thing

-just always give me the option to switch off in-game hints (if you just HAD to implement those -.- )
-don't force a gameplay-tutorial on me, make them additional and not campaign-related (Planetside 2, for instance)
-don't treat me like i have an iq of a rock, because rocks don't play videogames. usually. i'm smart enough to hit escape and look up what button reload/crouch/not-die is bound to; really, game - honest!
-don't get mad at me if i don't do what you prompt onscreen (there are a few games out there that actually don't care whether i followed their instruction to switch from assault rifle to pistol or not)
-digital manuals accessible from within the game, plz?

 

[Watershed]

I was recently playing God of War 2 HD. There is a section when you have to hit a switch to raise a pillar which has a grapple point on it. You then have to swing from point to point before the time limit runs out and the pillar drops again. I was on the last grapple point, about to swing on to solid ground when a pop up appeared; "press R1 to swing". Strange, considering I'd just demonstrated this ability, but no big deal. Until I realised that you have to press x to confirm you've seen the message. Until you do, Kratos will do nothing. Doing nothing also means he stopped swinging on the grapple point and fell to the floor, leaving me to repeat the section. Thanks tutorial message!