I want to shout out Left 4 Dead’s game instructor for smoothly teaching new players the game even while they’re playing with others. Get more ammo here. Use adrenaline to do stuff faster. Give Nick your pills. Rescue is coming - defend yourself! Then, once you’ve played enough, the help messages gradually become less frequent.
I’ll also shout it out for being my favourite implementation of HUD markers in any game. The icon pulses into view close to your crosshair, then flies over to the thing it’s pointing at. If it goes off-screen, the marker returns next to your crosshair, with an arrow indicating which direction to look in to see it again. A lot of other games have marker icons just suddenly appear at the spot and they crawl along the edge of the screen if the item is off-screen. The way L4D does it really draws my eyes.
Dark Souls since it doesn‘t stop you in your tracks much. I dislike tutorials that stop you and make you read walls of text or force you to input/click exactly what it wants you to.
I was coming here to mention Dark Souls. It's an excellent example of how to make a tutorial not feel like a tutorial. Either you take the time to understand what the game is telling you or not, up to you. Don't care about going through the entire tutorial area? Just beat the boss and start the real adventure.
Force them to jump in the tutorial, and solve the main boss thing through normal storytelling, whichever way makes sense for your game. If the only time you need to know something is late game and there’s nothing to remind you mid-game, that’s poor design.
Dark Souls has a good tutorial because it lets you skip it? That’s your bar for a good tutorial?
Souls games are terrible at even explaining what the buttons do. Every blind lets play I’ve seen it is like 30 minutes before the player even discovers they have estus or what it is for.
Yes, I prefer a game that lets me figure things out on my own through gameplay instead of popups. You are (arguably) forced to engage with the game‘s mechanics to beat the level, it has parries, environmental hazards, ambushes all in it without huge punishment in case of failure. I take the aha moment of using estus over „press square to heal.“ I‘m aware that others might need more guidance, but I didn’t and hence it‘s a great tutorial for me.
I wouldn‘t mind replaying the tutorial even now after having done it dozens of times already. It doesn‘t feel like one, I’m already playing the game and having fun, immersed in its world. So my bar is: The best tutorials don‘t feel like tutorials at all.
If I don’t want to play the tutorial and I get absolutely blasted, then I gotta walk my sorry self back to the tutorial like the idiot I chose to be. I like to press all the buttons and figure stuff out on my own, its part of the exploration process.
I don’t hate when certain gameplay elements are forced, but when I am given that impression I expect the whole game to be like that. The tutorial in Dark Souls promised me the game wasn’t going to hold my hand the whole time by letting me completely skip the tutorial, and then it kept that promise. It didn’t hold my hand. And I think that was great. Meanwhile Call of Duty tutorials hold your hand the whole time, and then your hand keeps getting held for the whole game. Also good.
The tutorials I think are bad are ones that fail to properly communicate important features of the game. If I choose to skip that part it is no fault of the game.
For example, Helldivers 2, which I enjoy greatly, has a tutorial that fails to teach the player what the Galactic War means, anything about the various mission types, or especially how to deal with supply lines and reinforcement routes. What happens in the players spend a lot of time and effort doing the wrong thing expecting the right result, a result they can never achieve because the game never actually told them how to do it. There isn’t a bestiary where players can read about various enemies and their weak spots, you just have to trial and error figure it out, or have someone else that did that already tell you.
I played an earlier version of Baldur’s Gate 3 and encountered a bug where I couldn’t for the life of me figure out a way to progress without killing Karlach. I stopped playing that save-file, because I didn’t want to kill her. Now I’m going to revisit it after the big update from awhile back.
Yup, this was me. I picked up Stellaris probably not even a year ago at this point. While not entirely friendly, I at least made peace with my neighbors during my first play through. And then for my second play through I pirated all the DLC because holy fucking shit that’s expensive. I ended up becoming the crisis, blew up some stars, and eventually the whole universe. Good times.
I don’t even know why. I have no interest in spending money on it so I’m locked out of most decent cards and I don’t even like card games/deckbuilders that much.
Maybe it’s just because it’s quick rounds and with characters I love and am relatively familiar with.
Technically I don’t think there’s a tutorial level per say as much as there is a tutorial set of levels, but Baba Is You.
The game starts off with only the controls on how to move and teaches you about how you can change the rules of the level to beat it if it isn’t possible normally, without explaining anything. Just from you exploring and testing different things. The only other time you’ll ever see any other form of level hint is maybe in the level names or if you end up in a position where you have to undo or restart the level from breaking the " [ object ] is you " rule in some way.
Amazing game. I remember hearing folks describe it, before I ever played. I couldn’t get my head around the concept. Then you play, and all the rules just make sense.
The first level of MegaMan x and good springs in fallout: New Vegas are really good examples of how to convey info to the player about how the game works and what you can do without pulling you out of the game itself into a separate tutorial
I had the reverse issue in Undertale. I went through it the first time and was mad at Undyne. I believe at the end of the normal route, I heard that Undyne still wanted to fight the humans or what have you. And I was like, “you think I’m monster? After I gave you water? I’LL SHOW YOU A MONSTER.” I felt super bad killing Papyrus, but I was like, “I’m sorry, it’s for the greater good.”
At the end, I was warned that the game wouldn’t forget that play through, and I was like, “Good.”
cyberpunk was nice. It had both an optional that really specifically laid things out and then in addition the first gig more casually does it. I seem to recall harry potter being so integrated that I can't remember it. I find a lot of games just sorta give popups that you can say stop to and then it basically just starts simple so you can learn the stuff without it seeming much like a tutorial. skyrim is sorta annoying in that its unskippable and you can't do a save before locking in a race that is after it like you could with oblivioun. So they went a bit backwards. Elden rings was completely skippable but it was also just pants. The tutorial is crazy easy compared to most games and does not prepare you at all for the brutal real game. Baldurs gate was unskippable but its pretty fast and did not really feel aweful to redo as its much like any quest in the game.
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