I still remember the Portal 2 tutorial. Wheatley tells you to say "apple", the game says press spacebar to say "apple", and turns out, spacebar is actually the jump key, and you've just learned how to jump while Wheatley is suspecting you might have a minor case of serious brain damage.
I remember the beginning of Portal, but I didn't really think of it as a tutorial, per se. And I think that's the point. If the user is very aware that this is a tutorial, it might be because it's a bad one. Portal felt like you were playing the game and learning as you went because that's what you were doing. It didn't have or need a strong delineation between "here we're learning" and "here we're playing." They were teaching the whole way through and we were playing the whole way through. The developer commentary actually makes this clear because they talk about "It's been awhile since we had them use this mechanic and we want to make sure it's in mind in a puzzle coming up, so we put a thing here to remind them about the mechanic now." It clearly took a lot of work to incorporate the learning into the game so seamlessly, but it also clearly paid off.
11:15 That's actually genius! Telling the user to look in a direction and then adjusting the control scheme based on which way they push. Imagine playing it and thinking "nice, inverted controls are the default!" when there literally ISNT a default. You just told the game your preferences without even realising it!
it would be fun to make a prototype where all controls are defined like that. Maybe start asking the player to do some random stuff after a while and they just keep "guessing right"
If I don't know that a game works that way, I will doom myself, as I always do exactly the opposite that the tutorial tells me to do just in case there's an easter egg to my left when I'm told to go right.
0:51 i'm so dumb, it just clicked for me that the long drawn out "hand holding" sequence in undertale was not only to build toriel's character, but it was a meta joke about game tutorials as well. i'm 6 years late, but good one toby lol
The hand-holding sequence is Undertale winking at the camera straight from the beginning to let you know what you're in for, since later on the game [ REDACTED SPOILERS ]
An important note on information overload: It's not about how much information is made available to the player, it's about how much you feed to them directly. Availability of information is good. Especially if it's information that's not engaging to acquire by other means. Make lots of information accessible to the player if possible, just don't force them to read through everything. Like, I like to have a wiki-like codex of information in the game itself. Not for lore, but for studying details about the gameplay.
I was playing Total War Warhammer recently and I found this very helpful. Having an in-game wiki with all the details about every unit was incredibly helpful.
one idea i had for an rpg like pokemon is having an encyclopedia with everything that should be common knowledge to the character, so npcs dont have to expain basic things that the character suposedly already knows, then when they say something that is important use a different color so the player knows they can check the codex for details the idea for the vaults in fallout was to make the player character not know anything about the world without using the amnesia excuse
I think it depends on a game, if you are making strategy or RPG game, walls of text sometimes are even welcome. When playarbase cares about minimaxing and finding optimal strategy the more information about game mechanics thay have, the better. While having no text tutorial and access to things like unit and skills statistic is harming for the game. Any seamless tutorial in game with lots of complicated mechanics will most likely shallow the depth of the game. Popup tutorials arent always bad, for me the best example of those are jrpg-s. Games like Xenoblade, Persona, Trials of. Even tho thay introduce mechanics slowly (sometimes some mechanics are introduces after 40 hours of gameplay), thay have some unintuitive but extremely fun when you understand them mechanics. Without popups I cant imagine how to show enough information to player to properly use them. And making them follow one by one "look you have this button click it now" won't respect them. I think that popups tutorials are the best way to show tuts when you can't show mechanic seamless.
my personal pet peeve with some tutorials is when the characters IN UNIVERSE tell you the controls. nothings more bizarre than hearing the voice of a character telling you what the A button is in universe.
Reminds me of the Emperor's New Groove PS1 game where Kuzco is like "how the fuck did you jump the chasm" and the character says "by using the action button!"
Most of the time, but there are exceptions. In any game where the 4th wall is supposed to be broken its good imo, like Ralsei in deltarune potentially (hopefully) hinting at some hidden depth when he tells you to use this and that control.
Terraria actually have a tutorial NPC and had it since 1.0 release, unlike Minecraft which for years made people check the wiki to find out how to craft stuff.
@@trickytreyperfected1482 Console and mobile terraria have tutorial area where guide teaches you how to dig and build and what chest are... and even info about flying islands...
@@trickytreyperfected1482 yea, I mean, there’s a reason why you sacrifice him to summon the Wall of Flesh. (Not that it really matters since another guide will take his place 5 minute later) EDIT - actually, the guide can tell you what can be crafted using a specific item by giving the item to him. That can come in handy if I’m sick of checking the wiki for the 15th time in the last hour.
@@trickytreyperfected1482 He actually does tell you a bunch of useful info that would be helpful to new players.... but I wouldn't know since I just checked the wiki anyways
It's actually fucking genius. I never knew that and I knew a LOT about those Ratchet games. I did know that what constituted the terms "normal" and "inverted" controls was a topic of great debate within Insomniac at the time, and that at least prior to Deadlocked they were always unsure which default setting to ship the game with.
It’s such a simple but genius little move. It just tells you to look up and then watches what you do in response. Nobody actively thinks about y inversion when they boot a game, so they just do what they naturally would without ever knowing the game basically just tricked them into perfectly adjusting their settings.
Basically I literally flipped when it hit me and pulled up a message tab to tell that to my fam, cuz it's bloody genious Wouldn't be genious in a game for all like a game you can play with family, in case someone prefers inverted while other prefer traditional, but still, it's actually unusual and insightful
18:00 there's actually a game called heat signature which allows you to pause at any point, stop and thing, then keep going. Pausing is actually one of its mechanics, but while paused, you can do a number of things, such as hover over your inventory items to see what they do, hover over an enemy to see what weapon they have. The game has a pretty bare bones tutorial for how many mechanics the game has, but it doesn't throw everything at you at once. It slowly unlocks as you progress. It's probably my favourite game and the entire thing is a learning experience
I personally love the tutorial for Portal 2 a lot. Everything is taught to you in a very comedic way. You’re taught to look up and down as “exercise” and when the game tells you to press A to speak to a character, you jump instead, and the character asks you if you have brain damage.
the best tutorial I’ve played Has to be from baba is you. Assuming the player goes in completely blind, level 0 makes the game look like a basic sokoban game where you push rocks around and try to get to the flag. But in level 1, you are trapped in a small area with seemingly no way out, except for the fact that inside that area are the words ‘WALL IS STOP’, and the only way to get out is by breaking up that text. This perfectly teaches the player the main gameplay loop of manipulating text in order to get to a goal.
Baba Is You does a very good job blending the tutorial into the rest of the game in terms of difficulty. Then the game makes the main levels feel like a tutorial for the end of the game.
I love how the _read more_ on this comments cuts on "but on level 1 yo...", That is very convenient as i'm interested in watching the Baba is you series here on TH-cam
@@gregg8721 i'm a fucking unemployed 15 yo from a 3rd world contry, i won't be afording anything for myself by myself anytime soon, that's why i'm going to watch a series on it, and not play the game
I like the tutorial(s) in Celeste. Most of it is done organically, like the game gives you new mechanics and lets you play around them in a relatively safe environment. But there are a few moments that do stand out. 1. The Bird. Whenever there is an essential mechanic that the player has to learn, such as dashing, wavedashing, or hyperdashing, and that mechanic cannot be explained without words, they use the bird. So rather than some nameless voice telling you what to do, the tutorial is delivered through a blue bird. And it's even better because narratively, this bird is guiding the main character, while practically it also guides the player. So the player is in resonance with the main character in with how you both think of the bird. 2. The monsters. The weird lovecraftian eye-teeth things in the mirror temple are really the only thing that can be a "normal enemy" in Celeste. So to fully introduce the mechanics associated with them, there is a brief dream/nightmare sequence where you play AS a monster, literally walking a mile in their shoes, so you learn how to deal with them
This is where Celeste is kinda opposed to Geometry Dash despite both being very hard. Celeste is very enjoyable to play since its difficulty grows smoothly, and the game is long, while in GD, victory attempts in all levels take like half an hour, but those levels are already very hard, and you often have to spend much time to beat them, plus they are ordered not in order of difficulty. Meanwhile, all levels the DLC named World is way easier than first level, and there are lots of new custom "star rated" levels that are literally a few clicks, plus modern levels often literally show where to jump. Thus, treating official levels like something you have to beat first, is completely wrong, treating them as a tutorial is even more wrong (though you can still beat them in practice mode to slowly get used to gameplay features). And when you beat some official levels, the best idea is to go online and play online levels. GD is a game to be played, not to be completed, it's a community-based game, and, like in Minecraft, you have to learn it all by yourself. When I beat Deadlocked, I've been playing GD 6 years and more than 700 hours, and by that moment I've completed it over 95%.
@@KirikkSiSq Well, to be fair, Geometry dash is easier to understand without help than minecraft. There's only so much you can do with only clicking as your controls. But with minecraft, all the building, structures, crafting... Isn't that well explained
@@leritykay8911 yeah, GD is easy to understand for normal people, but not for some stupid let's play youtubers who are too lazy to simply learn the portal and orb colors. Ofc, in 2.2 there will be an option to show guide marks for those (but not for jump pads), but 2.2 isn't out yet. Plus, GD has pretty big menu since 2.1 and those ytbers just ignore most of buttons because they don't want to find out what they mean (plus they are bad at English), while some of those buttons have some really good content. Let's say, only one of them found Vault of Secrets (and then left because he thought he had to beat daily levels, he got hard one that time, and he didn't find better ways to get diamonds, which are daily chests, quests and treasure room). Other ones found, at best, Gauntlets or level search button GD World has some sort of "progression" that unlocks online levels after beating levels, but those aren't sorted. It seems GD should be treated as an arcade, but a very different one than common arcades As for Minecraft, it's kinda weird how most popular edition among ytbers is Java edition with zero tutorial, while Legacy is only known among fans since its development was stopped.
I like portal 2's tutorial; it's just like portal 1's, but with humourous writing sprinkled in, like how you have brain damage and the smooth jazz to calm you. It's great, and opens up the themes of the game; humour, puzzle solving, and mystery; the complete portal gun is in a room surrounded by drawings of... you.
Hello, Portal Nerd here. To correct the end of your comment, you gain the Singular Portal Gun (the one that only shoots blue portals) in the drawings of you room, not the complete one. You gain the Complete Portal Gun in the Incinerator Room right before Chapter 2 begins.
Also have to say that in both games, the choice to introduce a partial portal gun first was really smart, while integrating everything into some basic puzzles right off the bat. Other than the start of 2 walking you through the looking around and the “jump” joke (still both really clever and well done, mind you) I never feel like the Portal 1 and 2 opening parts actually feel like tutorials at all once you get going.
I will always love the way Boneworks presents its tutorial. It isn't the most invisible tutorial, as it does tell you what you need to do outright, but it presents it as a tour inside a "VR museum" from the future, designed to serve as a tech demo for this fictional massive VR company to show how innovative their new headset is. There's even exhibits and demonstrational videos depicting the games controls and features that separate it from the rest of the competition. Basically it just flows into the lore and it's presented so well that even in other playthroughs, I still stick around to look at the tutorial exhibits instead of just running through it.
I clearly remember that during my first time playing boneworks, when I entered the puzzle tutorial. Just using physics to solve the puzzle, looking at the enormous platforms and hearing the amazing music made it one of the best experiences im my gaming carrer. And it was just a tutorial.
As someone who followed Stress Level Zero from its birth (waaaay back when Brandon was a new intern of Corridor Digital), to the foundation of the studio just next door in the same warehouse... I am somewhat proud of how far they got and how good they are considering they were "late" to the entire VR thing.
i was brand-new to vr when i got boneworks and it really taught me a lot about just being in vr too. like it took multiple tries to throw the cups and stuff into the archive bin things. it's not just a tutorial on how to the play the game, it's also a tutorial on how to play in vr, which i find pretty cool.
bonework's tutorial will feel long and outdrawn in the future when people get more used to VR, kinda like how most games don't have to tell you to look around with the mouse and move with "WASD" anymore, but imo as a guy who played boneworks as his first VR game it was 100% necessary at the time. since it was basically the first of it's kind it didn't just teach you how to play boneworks, it taught you the design language of physics based VR games in general, and it did an awesome job at it.
One thing that has impacted the style of tutorials, is the lack of instruction booklets old videogame had, so you could tell the players what the keys would do, so you can just dump in an easy, safe area for them to explore, without needing to put popups or texts about how the button A makes you jump
Very interesting point! Imagine what modern devs could do with invisible tutorials mixed with the more explicitly informational but still attention grabbing nature of those manuals. Of course, it's hard to nudge players into reading them with digital media.
I remember years back as a kid, I'd get a new game and on the way home I'd look through the instruction booklet, so when I got home I could get straight to playing😊
Five nights at freddy’s has a pretty good tutorial by these standards. The opening lore drops on each night give you a little information about what you’re up against, the first two nights are almost entirely safe, and it never once tells you how to use the controls, it just uses very good point-and-click game visual language. It’s compounded by the fact that the animatronics pull their punches and subliminally teach their hidden mechanics in the earlier nights, with the tutorial experience invisibly fading out into open-water gameplay.
The thing about the Great Plateau is that only a few minutes of it are actually "tutorial" in the "spoon-feed the player information" sense, and those are spread out over the entire thing. After you have the basic movement down, the Old Man gives you some goals and sets you loose, with the rest of the Great Plateau teaching you by giving you relatively clear examples of a problem and relative safety to experiment. The shrines themselves repeat this. Once you know the buttons to use the new rune, it gives you problems to solve with it.
14:47 Hollow Knight teaches it's starting mechanics brilliantly, it's only got a few bits of text explaining what buttons to press for the basic mechanics, and from there it teaches it all with examples. For instance, you come across an enemy you can't kill, and then when you pick up a new spell you have to kill that same kind of enemy to leave the area.
Also the text bits are entirely optional, and a really good example is when you get desolate dive, because the boss you fight to get it uses that move very, very frequently (and then almost exclusively in his second stage), so you get a really good idea of how it's used given that you just fought against it.
Gotta say that Outer Wilds hits it out of the park with it's "tutorial", the first section before you get the launch codes. If you know what you're doing, you can just go straight there, but you can also explore Timber Hearth along the way and pick up on most of the games key mechanics, such as Ghost Matter, the Scouter, the Zero-G Cave and the Model Ship.
Seconding this. Outer Wilds is amazing from start to end and it is one of the very few games out there i would willingly wipe my memories of in order to experience it for the first time again.
Not to mention an introduction to a ton of stuff in the museum, such as with the quantum rocks in the little grove and all the little objects that you can choose to read about and get some idea of what you could be getting into- such as the little angler.
yeah came here to say the exact same thing, if you'renot conscious about it you don't even notice the end of the tutorial until you've restarted the loop for the first time.
Yea I was thinking about outerwilds too. It doesn't really tell you much because what it does tell you just feels like part of the game and part of the setup for your first launch and really got me excited to get going
On the pop-up/presentation part, in Celeste's final chapter there is a literal presentation to the teach the player wave-dashing since it's pretty much required to complete most of the chapter, tho it's followed by a short area to try it out
It is at least diegetic, though. And the final chapter was (free) DLC, so it had to be taught within that chapter. Also, it comes right after a progression check that makes sure you have a fighting chance at the next section, but that check can be skipped with a wavedash if you know how to do it. You _could_ skip it on your first playthrough after learning about it online... if you want to suffer.
But on the other hand, that one's also a parody of terrible powerpoint presentations, which means it's a *funny* tutorial. Although my most popular video is a meme edit of that exact tutorial so I might be a bit biased...
Hades does a great job of introducing mechanics gradually. In some ways, you’re still in the tutorial until you escape for the first time, but you’d never know it.
I personally love the minimalist approach like Minecraft or The Binding of Isaac. TBoI just has the basic controls written on the floor in the first room of every run you do. Most of the time you'll ignore them, but if you need them they are there.
This is the first video I worked on editing and capturing footage for this channel! It was a blast to work on this video and I’m very excited for the future and for all you guys to see all the amazing content we’re cooking up for the channel!
17:27 I relate to this so dang hard. In many games, I find it easier to just start a new game rather than continue, because I've forgotten how to play the game and everything about it.
Breath of the Wild did a great job, with the entire Great Plateau essentially being a tutorial area. Everything there serves to suggest things the player can do and encourages experimentation on the part of the player
@@ghasterra8950that can be true, however with the way botw is, the Great Plateau doesn’t have a set time that it always takes to complete. You complete the Great Plateau much faster on your second game than your first, and even faster on your third, and it’s never the same, since you’re typically using some new trick you learned how to do before starting a new game.
honestly i'm shocked cuphead wasn't mentioned, not only because it's infamous but also i think it's a really good tutorial. it's quick, teaches you the basics without popups or text walls, and is optional, but suggested.
"Will You Snail" by Jonas Tyroller was particularly memorable for me, because the tutorial text fragments also doubled as lore segments, recontextualised at the end of the game - meaning that text box which explains how the level selection screen works is also a part of the story!
I think one of the biggest dislikes I have when it comes to gaming, is a game that supposedly puts me into the game itself, but then stops everything and slaps a big amount of things to read on the screen before I _actually_ have time to do anything, then asks me to do one thing, allows me to move freely for about 30 seconds, just slightly getting curious about my surrounding and then halts everything again with the same process. It feels so unbelievably annoying when the game pretends that it's the player "playing", but any input is just very mandatory, brief thing. I'd much rather even watch a tutorial video while having my controller on my lap, where the game shows the beginning gameplay with brief explanations and examples, than basically hiccup through preachy text boxes and mandatory button prompts. Sure, I do prefer when tutorials teach by making me do things instead of telling me about them, but if that's the case, it needs to be actually me doing it, not the game literally telling exactly what to do and I just push the buttons like a lab monkey. Second worst offender is information overload. I've wanted to try an MMO for a long time and have tried to get into a few, like Black Desert not too long ago and there, the game's just open up so fast that I'll feel straight up anxiety about the overabundance of items, statistics, info etc. and often just peace out before getting to do anything actually enjoyable. It feels like I need to have a studysession of my own before beginning to do anything and then have several classes afterwards to google up whatever things mean, since they are completely clueless in how they could actually pass the info in a nice way. Instead, often giving ridiculously monotonous "Get 15x Simblinious Green Folvoshberries for Fraljrnorvm The Waitress", "Get 30x Hembom-Goofter Accelerators for Timmy-Elisabeth" quests in a row for the next 2 hours, most of which feel completely detached from my actual interests, since I have no idea who those people are or what those items are. (Often, those items are quite literally nothing. Just there for the sake of being one more trash item to sell, or pad a quest) With that said, if anyone has any good truely-new-to-MMO friendly MMO's in mind that might actually start a player's journey off fairly coherently, I'll welcome the recommendation!
Ah yes. The worst kind of tutorial is when you can't click on anything other than what the tutorial wants you to click. It's even worse if the tutorial is so long almost like never ends and we already familiar with the gameplay mechanics
There was one game that did tutorials well - it had a very short controls tutorial plus lore starting the game, then unlocked most of the functionality. When you had something that would use one of the other functions, it gave you a tutorial quest. But these tutorials were just a 3 page description of how to use the function and were triggered the first time you used the function, and were skippable. So you could play the game after a few minutes, and learn things at your own pace. Unfortunately, the game itself got boring after not too long.
I really like the tutorial in Just Shapes and Beats. It is a very simple game so I guess there wasn't too much they could have messed up on, but I really like the way it was made anyway. The way it goes is simple, the song it chooses is a song that gradually adds more elements before the drop, and they all loop really well so what they did is turn each segment into a little micro stage. The first one has no obstacles, it just let's you see how to move yourself and then you can progress to the next one. Then it just shows you that you cannot touch the pink stuff through a simple attack pattern at the center of the screen, then it just shows you how other types of attacks like explosives and telegraphed attacks work. After those you are introduced to your main movement mechanic the dash, where you have to go through a static wall with it, and if you take to long some little birds appear and dash through the wall to teach you how to do it, after that it shows you how to do it with moving walls. And once you are done with that and have seen and learned how all attacks work, the drop of the music comes and it shows you how the real game actually is, by combining all of the types of attacks you had seen before and using them all at once, still being pretty easy and not overwhelming yet showing you a good taste of the type of chaos that the game has to offer. And all of that happens in a 3 minute song.
Undertale has the best tutoriel But seriously right after the intro cutscene theres a little "press Z or ENTER" right before you get the main menu I never thought about it but later on there is a sign that tells you you can read signs with z which proves that the little "press Z or ENTER" worked really well EDIT: when your health reaches zero you lose Also the combat tutorial is great "Collect the pellets they will give you LOVE"
The Just shapes and beats tutorial is extremely fun imo It barely tells you what to do for controls but gets the basic down of Getting triangle=Progress with each time you get it in the tutorial it ramps up the song and difficulty untill the end part of it where it lets go and just lets you play it
18:23 That's a good rule of thumb for the final boss too. As the game designer, you are usally better at your game than most players will ever be. You will have to make about ten games before you learn how to not underestimate the difficulty.
probably mentioned already, but i love the great plateau in breath of the wild. it's a clear tutorial once you complete it but in the game it justifies it's existence in the narrative very well and teaches you alot more than you realize at first.
Yeah, when I first played it I thought that plateau was about 30% of the map and had a lot of fun playing it, until I finished it and found out it was only the tutorial and the rest of the game was much bigger.
I didn't realize that the Great Plateau was the 'tutorial' for Breath of the Wild until I was halfway through the game. The fact that it gave me access to bows, bombs, defensive equipment, temperature resistance, cooking, elemental arrows, and a mini-boss made it feel less like a tutorial and more like I was just... playing the game.
VA-11 HALL-A, a visual novel with a bartending minigame, has a tutorial for said minigame that is fairly bog-standard, except for one key detail: At the beginning of the tutorial, your character is said to have been a little out of practice due to being away for some time (at least, if I remember correctly), and so to make sure that you still know what you're doing, your coworker instructs you on how to make a simple drink: The Sugar Rush. However, he also tells you that if you serve him a Piano Man - a more complex drink - he will leave you to it and thus end the tutorial immediately. While it's rather overt in its presentation, the technique in VA-11 HALL-A's tutorial of "serve me this simple drink to continue, or serve me this complex one to skip" is a brilliant way of implementing a tutorial skip. Since he doesn't tell you how to make a Piano Man, but he does tell you how to make a Sugar Rush, the only players who will be able to skip the tutorial are those who can figure out the mechanics of the minigame themselves through experimentation, or those who already know it from a previous playthrough.
I loved the Titanfall 2 tutorial, i spent hours trying to speed run the marathon so i could get an achievement and thanks to me getting that achievement i got better in the multiplayer and enjoyed the game even more 👍
Same for me with Modern Warfare 1. I've been a very poor level shooter player by that point, to the level that I couldn't make it past first encounters with soldiers in Half-Life without god mode. I've barely made it out the ship in over a minute, and my best result was, maybe, 54 seconds or something like that. The game suggested I take it on Easy mode, and I was ok with that. It was fun, I've died a lot of times, but deaths in MW weren't very frustrating. And then I remember taking the course just for fun after I've finished the game. This is, once again, the first time the Smol Me played an FPS without cheats. And I make it in like 27 seconds. x2 from my previous record. I was FLOORED. I felt like taking on the WORLD. And I did just that - I've started the game up again, this time on Veteran, and the experience of playing FPS changed for me forever then. This game, and its mechanics, and its tutorial, single-handedly transformed the FPS genre for me then
I remember watching another TH-cam video about making a non-gamer play Portal. I thought it would progress smoothly, but it turns out they spent the first few chambers never looking around because the game never told them they could use the mouse to look around.
In horizon zero dawn, you learn to hunt together with you father figure as a little girl. While you in game father figure tells your character how to do everything in the in game world, you get to learn the controlls for yourself. For me it really felt like I was learning together with my character (just like portal, except Chell wasn't a little girl in the tutorial) and that really got me into the game and the character.
I really like your occasional super dry humor. It is well appreciated. As for good tutorials, I'm skimming my favorite games in my head and they all have rather bad tutorials now that I think about it.
The Witness' lack of a tutorial always intrigued me. Despite the game being a brutalist puzzle game there is no formal introduction _whatsoever_ to any of the puzzle elements. The game leaves the player to figure out what each element does by themselves, which makes for quite the patience testing experience. It also occasionally sprinkles in puzzles that might change your developed perspective on how a certain element works. As infuriating as that game can be, it's quite clever and extremely rewarding once you do figure it out.
This channel is litteraly gold, and i'm so glad that i'm here to see its rise! The work you put into your videos are very much appriciated. Especially am i very fond of your "text-in-scene" that works as titles for each part of the video, they're sick!
i honestly really enjoyed inscryptions approach to the tutorial, even though its walls of text, its fun walls of text. and the fact that your first run IS the tutorial, it teaches you that dying is part of the experience, and slowly introduces more complicated mechanics, like bones. its genius, and i really enjoyed the game because of it.
I think one of the interesting things about portal is you are experiencing the tutorial at the same time as chell (the main character) this makes it seem more hidden because she has no idea what's going on either, and glados is there as a guide.
Now that i think of it, most games I played were like: "hey, do the think" "the what?" "You know that thing, if you dont hurry you'll die in a horrible way"
There were also games that were like: "oh ok i'm someone with a supersuit and I reached a vietnamese island" * 32 pages powerpoint presentation shows up *
Like playing a horror game and seeing "press X to hide under bed" never has a tutorial been as terrifying as in horror games honestly, you just KNOW something's going to go down when you see the tutorial message
@@cassou124 I’ve always loved the little “no no no why did you just tell me how to do that” tutorial messages in horror games. It’s a very clever way of building anticipation and dread while teaching the core mechanics.
I really enjoyed the Firewatch tutorial, it sets up how you got there through story, while also teaching you basic movement controls like running and jumping. Overall a really great game and would recommend to anyone that has an extra 3 hours (yes it’s that short)
A game i like with an interesting tutorial is crosscode, because the character you play as is inside an mmo you get taught by other characters in said world without it feeling disjointed. The intro does feel like it drags on but thats more so due to setting up the story and not the tutorial, fortunately theres an option to skip it if youve beaten the game and want to mess around with the ng+ features. Past the intro it introduces mechanics at a very good pace.
I really like the tutorial in Outer Wilds. It has probably to do with that it’s one of my favorite games, but I really like how it’s made. You talk to people in the village, steer a model shuttle, play hide and seek with some child’s and go to locations marked by signs on the way to get what you need to start into the game. It might not be subtle, that it explains you how the game works, but it feels really organic.
Little Big Planet 2. That game was my absolute childhood and I will NEVER forget the first time I played it. The narrator is lovely and the world is so quirky. Never did it make you feel stupid, and if you had played 1 (I hadn't at the time) you could just breeze through it if you wanted. Perfect game, perfect tutorial, nostalgia hits hard. I miss LBP2 😞😞
i’d say hollow knight has a really good tutorial progression that really lasts the whole game without handholding, each unlock ability unlocking a new area to progress gives the player a desire to learn each new game mechanic.
@@swootproonce634 One of the first grubs has a spiked platform stair leading up to it, it's very on the nose. Then once you know how to pogo spikes, you unluck the Mawlek boss which requires you to get to the other side of him when he shoots gunk into the air, except he's too big to simply jump across, so since you were pogoing spikes to reach the boss, you will automatically try to pogo him as well at that point. That's one way the game teaches you, there's more. But even if everything fails, you will eventually learn on the bouncy mushrooms in fungal wastes how to do a pogo.
@@swootproonce634 You didn't get the point of the video, pop ups aren't always bad, he just only gave bad examples because pop ups are predominately bad. Hollow Knight's pop ups are story based and always before or after encounters so it isn't interrupting gameplay and used more as an aesthetic choice or story element. Imagine you just picked up the abilities off the floor like you do with normal items, you really wouldn't have any idea of what they do. Metroidvanias have a requirement of telling what mechanics do and how to use them including the original metroid games. Every time you pick up a new ability like mothwing cloak for example, after defeating hornet it is obvious you can't go back the way you came as the doorway was too high. So they make it to where you can only exit through one path, as you take that path you see that there are long jumps over acid, you clearly can't jump so you use the ability, and it makes you do it 3 times in a row in an attempt to get the muscle memory down before needing to use it for platforming. If the game told you how to pogo it would have to use arrows or a pop up menu, there are a couple ways to portray it without but it would be sequence breaking for a new player. A new player learns to pogo either from just thinking about how to get one of the first grubs/charms that requires it or if you don't get it then, you would learn in the Fungal Wastes with the bouncy mushrooms. They don't want you learning how to pogo early on because it can lead to skipping over major sections of the game or getting to the brooding mawlek early, which for a new player is a very difficult boss fight if you don't have any spells or mothwing cloak. That is precisely why they chose not to teach the ability to pogo early.
@@swootproonce634 they don't feel like popups in any way shape or form, and you can go through the whole game without pogo'ing, so it just feels nice and rewarding to find out about it by yourself. begone, good games hater.
I think Breath Of the wild has a pretty good tutorial, gives you guidance of where to go in the context of the story, won't tell you a mechanic till you are in a position to use it (eg how to swap weapons is only told to you once you pick up a weapon), introduces all the mechanics gradually and lets you set your own pace. There's also some brilliant design as the corridor in the shrine of resurrection before the segment you have to climb, is the perfect length for your stamina bar to decrease completely if you sprint. Its also brilliant as its a microcosm for the game as a whole, it gives you an open area, with some areas lacking any direction to go there, an optional miniboss, 4 shrines which give you the 4 runes which you use for the rest of the game.
Also something, not just the tutorial, but all of Breath of The Wild, it doesn’t punish you for doing a challenge your way, there’s many different approaches a player can do at a challenge, BoTW will let the player do it their unique way, the dev intended method is only a suggestion. For example, Mount Hylia, there’s a couple ways to get to the shrine. The two dev intended ways is that you read the old mans note book telling the player he’d give his cold resistant shirt to them if they give him a certain food. Or the player can also easily cook some heat resistant food. Those are two of the dev intended method, but methods that also work is the player lighting a weapon on fire and just walking through, the player can even eat food when their about to die. All those methods work, and I think that’s the true beauty of BoTW
I will always love and remember Breath of the Wild's tutorial. The Great Plateau is just really great at teaching the workings of the game without having to tell you, instead letting people figure things out on their own and only explaining things when they are actually relevant.
The only think I don’t like is the fourth shrines location It’s annoying but tolerable later in the game but the extreme temperatures is a serious issue when locked to that area since it requires you to carry fire around the place and prevents you from sprinting or fighting in certain areas Though later the flame sword was really useful since I had no idea how to get armour and such outside of chests
@@jmurray1110 i just threw in five peppers each time and I was fine. For the cold area on the great plateau you only need level 1 cold resistance anyway.
Perfect Dark. The tutorial was entirely optional, accessible only by walking away from the terminal that serves as your menu and indulging your curiosity by walking around the Carrington Institute. You could take training exercises for the various gadgets that you would use in the actual gameplay missions. You could chase high scores by taking mastery challenges for every weapon in the game (that would reward you with ingame cheat modes). And even savvy players likely wouldn't realize that being allowed to explore the institute was a tutorial in and of itself because it was used as a level late into the game!
Man, this got me to remember that one time when I was playing Legend of Grimrock and the game told me to "loose a rock" so I was trying to interact with all rocks etc and I was stuck there for almost an hour trying to interact with anything... well I needed to look up a walkthrough and the solution to this was simply to push a part of a cracked stonewall - the aforementioned rock. I really loved the game but I was quite frustrated in the tutorial and it might be quite obvious but it did not cross my mind at all.
I always hate when I don't play a game for a while, forget most of its mechanics and usually restart from the beginning to learn them again. More games should have a quick recap on how to play and of the story if you haven't touched the game in a while.
You completely hit the nail on the head when you talked about information overload and full UIs from the start. I personally stopped playing many games precisely because of that. Introducing stuff once at a time is SO much better.
In contrast, i really dislike when games hide HUD elements arbitrarily and do not show stats that are necessary to figure out the effectiveness of weapons and stuff.
The Great Plateau (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) is one of the best tutorial section of all time. Even the most seasoned gamer may not realize it is one, it's so good!
And it doesn't even tell you everything about the game. There's so many contextual tutorial popups that actually feel helpful and useful instead of intrusive.
One of the best tutorials i've seen is the obligatory training in Advance Wars 1, wich is a whole campaign that goes from "move your infantry into the cover of the mountains and attack" to "hey, here's how fog of war works, have fun !". Even though it is very much a tutorial that holds your hand, it is memorable and fun because it is as long as two thirds of the game and it feels like you've won a big wars all by yourself at the end.
Only now I realise that Command & Conquer 1 did the "partial UI" thing; the sidebar doesn't pop up until the player gets construction options, either by creating or by discovering their base. And in missions without any base building, you simply have more screen area.
Another great video. Quality and style is on par with Game Maker's Toolkit, I hope your channel blows up. Also, I really love the idea at 18:00. Not exactly the same, but I've had several instances were I stop playing a game for a while, come back and end up reseting my progress because I forget things like controls or the story, so some sort of "recap" option would be amazing.
Outer Wilds has a very good tutorial, by making you either talk to the npcs at the beginning and checking a museum, ignoring them and coming back later, or even figuring things out as you go. The game spawns you right beside the “tutorial” every time you die but its never needed to go back there
one of my favorite thinds is when there’s something deadly happening and a pop up shows you how to avert it-it could be as simple as blocking to anything as complex as resurrection or time stop-it provides a sense of excitement while also teaching
breath of the wild had a really good tutorial. teaching how to traverse the cold by either cooking food with the recipe, cooking your own food, or using a jacket from the top of a mountain. it fit into the story. it taught everything really well, and it wasn't an afterthought. you can even go back to the place where you started to find a korok seed.
Skyrim has a good tutorial, you start with your hands bound, so all you can do is run and jump, then after you get introduced to the stormcloaks (ralof) and the imperials (hadvar) you choose which side. Then your hands are unbound, and you get introduced to either searching in chests/looting bodies depending on who you choose but they both teach basically the same thing. The only weapon is a sword, which you then use to fight some people right after, introducing you to the sword. later you find a wizard's body and you get a spellbook and cloak, allowing you to switch to a mage build, and finally you encounter a bear and are given a bow to shoot it with or you sneak around. The tutorial introduced you to all the different builds you can choose for your character in a natural feeling way so that when you leave helgen you can choose which one you enjoyed most and you can play as that
It is good... For the first time. On each subsequent playthrough, you'll have to go through the entire section again, it's unskippable. Oblivion did it better: You create a character and find yourself in a cell. There *are* popups for controls, but they're concise. You can walk and jump about the cell for about a minute while an npc talks smack at you from another cell, until some guards appear and tell you to move back. They then escort the emperor through a secret passage found in your cell while mostly ignoring you, only the emperor seems to slightly care. You have the option to talk a bit to some of the guards while following them through the secret passage to learn lore. At some point you're separated from them and explore a cave system on your own, find different sorts of weapons that you can experiment with while fighting rats and goblins with having options to try picking some chests and gather some plants for alchemy purposes. Then you get reunited with the emperor and his guards, and they happen to be attacked by assassins at just this point, so you can help if you're feeling brave or just watch the guards deal with them if you don't have a great grasp of the controls/mechanics yet. The emperor then asks you what your star sign is, prompting a window where you can select one that suits your playstyle, which you already had a chance to experiment with. Continuing on, there's some more dungeon-crawling, and eventually some assassins do get the emperor, but not before he passes on you the duty to follow the main story of the game. The guard captain lets you go and tells you that you can find an exit from this dungeon right over there, while remarking that you would make a great [class]. That's right, all this time while you were crawling in a safe environment, the game sneakily kept track of your playstyle so this NPC could recommend you a class that would suit you. Which is then prompted by a window to select a class or make your own class, with the one the NPC mentioned being highlighted as the default option. After you select your class, there's like two more minutes of easy dungeon crawling and you find the sewer gate. Here's the kicker: when you interact with the gate, it gives you a prompt that lets you completely change your character. The race, appearance, star sign, class, the entire build. That means that you can make a separate save right before exiting the sewers if you want to play a different character later on. You won't have to do the tutorial again As soon as you leave the sewer, the entire world is open to you, you can go in any direction and do anything, there are no more tutorial prompts after this
Back to Skyrim's issues compared to this. You create your character after a several minute unskippable cart ride. Then there's the dragon chase sequence, the dungeon, and you leave helgen. But while there is no more apparent tutorial from this point, there's still a path you're expected to follow. There's a trail going from Helgen to Riverwood, where, btw, your companion of choice tells you to visit. On the road there, you see a set of guardian stones that you're expected to interact with. After Riverwood, it's another straight road, to Whiterun. Here are the issues: while you can go in any direction from here, you're still expected to talk to the Jarl of Whiterun, prompting the quest where a dragon attacks that tower, and then the Greybeards send you a voice message that you should go up their mountain to get a couple shouts. If you don't do all that, you'll be stuck with the weakest version of Unrelenting Force. If you do want to get it, you're forced to sit through a tutorial on how to use your shouts, which you'll be bored through on a subsequent playthrough. And even then, you don't get the last word of the Unrelenting Force Shout. They send you on a quest to retrieve some horn before they teach you Dah. All in all, it takes like 4 hours for you to go from the start menu to a point where you have all you need for a basic build and to be able to go in any direction. And if you want to make a new character and start a new playthrough, you'll have to do all of that again. And yes, replayability is a big factor in this kind of game, so forcing all of this tutorial on experienced players just as well as the new players, is poor practice TLDR: while the intro sequence of Skyrim may seem good, especially on the first playthrough, there's a not-so-subtle extended tutorial for like 3 more hours after leaving the first dungeon
*Noita* has a fairly interesting tutorial, it always starts a run with background button prompts for all your available actions (left/right-click, [i] for inventory) and always has an object to kick to teach you the use of it. But then you're mostly on your own from that point onwards. But occasionally the game will hint towards useful gameplay knowledge like for instance the first "level" for the mountain, the mines, is extremely flammable, and you will often be in danger of being set very much alight. To counter this you always spawn with a position, often water, which the player can use you drench themselves, preventing fire-based shenanigans. The game then builds on this by introducing a very dangerous rare enemy for that stage of the game, the Stendari (Fire Mage). This enemy throws fireballs, deals high damage, bleeds extremely dangerous _lava_ when shot or cut, and in general an all-around nuisance, but by priming the player with the knowledge that _water puts out fire,_ the player is encouraged to throw of spray their water potion on them, killing the very efficiently and without spawning lava. There are a couple other things like how in the between level shops the game will force open your inventory if you haven't moved anything, telling them that they can edit their loadout, and the background of the shop describes what spells are being triggered each time you use your wand, helping experimentation with non-visual spells. If you want a bad tutorial though, I have to call out one of my favourite games, *_Rain World._* It teaches you some basics, how to eat, how to long jump, and to hibernate before _the rain_ arrives, and then it leaves you to figure out the rest on your own. Unfortunately, it fails to mention _unique button combinations_ that are basically vital to play the game! I can forgive not explaining some movement tech (but it really should teach you how to backflip and _at least_ how to roll, I have seen so many people, myself included, not understand why they landed and immediately rolled forward off a cliff) but not explaining that _double tapping grab swaps items between your left and right hand_ and _pressing down+grab safely drops what you're holding_ is baffling! These are extremely important QOL actions that are never mentioned in-game and is in my opinion the game's greatest failing, which is why I always say when recommending the game "play for a couple of hours, then look up a control/movement guide."
If you told me you’d been doing TH-cam for 5 years, I honestly would be inclined to believe you. A lot of these videos lose my attention at some point and have to draw me back in but these are just jammed full of interesting stuff! Also, the way you ask to like, subscribe, and comment flows so well with the video compared to a lot of other people. I fully expect this channel to blow up to the level of GMTK. Godspeed.
The best tutorial for me is Jedi: Fallen Order. Cal learns new skills over time and when he does, it tends to pull you out of the main gameplay into a training room. It may pull you away, but the training room is perfectly intertwined with the story, putting you into Cal's place as he learns like you learn. It establishes his relationship with his master and why the death of his master had such an impact on him. He shuts himself off from the force, causing you (and him) to relearn it over time.
Titanfall 2’s Tutorial is extremely memorable and replayable, but it makes sense because your character is training to become a pilot. The gauntlet is an in-universe simulation and it’s your character’s first time trying it out, so it makes sense that Captain Lastimosa explains alot of the basics to you. He never explains the controls, the game does that through its UI, and instead he lets you try the gauntlet for yourself. The replayability comes in because there’s a scoreboard of the previous pilots that have tried it out. Obviously since it your first time you won’t get first place, meaning once you’ve completed the campaign once and even every once in a while I find myself playing it again.
One of the key elements of the "respect" point you had is to respect the player's agency. Don't DISABLE (but still show) choices you don't think they are ready to handle yet, don't interrupt their actions and force them to close your pop-up, etc. etc. See also: GMTK's video on ; It deals with this kind of issue as it applies to complex schemes where you kind of have to be A LITTLE annoying just to make sure the mechanics don't become bug reports.
i think its also interesting to look at how some tutorials might be expecting that you are a gamer, and you know the basics, or even worse they dont have a tutorial. i think it was rasbuten who made a video on the subject.
I feel like titinfall2 had a great tutorial while not seamless it gives us the game macanic and a safe environment to practice it in while also having it progress the story and have us learn the titin later in chapter one as part of the story with BT guiding you.
I found this channel today and binged absolutely everything! I was amazed when I found out you developed move or die, that was one of my favourite games (even though i havent played it in a while). You should make a video on AI, I'm especially curious of your process with the snarky bots in your game :)
I would like to add one other option "make the tutorial 'memorable'". One of my favorite example is the tutorial in V:tM Bloodlines. It is very obviously a tutorial. It is lengthy, has mandatory failable stealth sections, popups, and essentially breaks every single rule on this list. But the way that Smiling Jack (the tutoral explainer dude) reacts to your choices and explains the lore/world to you is a delight. It's just the right mix of humour, action, and character that I love replaying it.
VtM:B is the best worst game I've ever played. From bugs requiring me to reload from a previous save to the haunted house making me feel like I was in mortal peril when I was perfectly safe throughout most of the journey, every single moment is laden with both the best and worst experiences I've ever had in gaming. A solid 0/10 and 10/10.
I love astroneer. It has missions that give you things gradually, as well as telling you what to do with said items in a small box that you can re-read at any time
Counterargument: The best tutorial could also be one you remember vividly because of how cool, fun, innovative, et cetera, it was. I personally quite liked the tutorial to Project Zomboid - as did the rest of my friends - because at the very end, it pulls a sneaky beaky and has you taunt to summon DROVES of zombies, telling you that Q administers an antidote when scratched or bitten when no such thing exists in the game. I was leery myself when I read the tip, but still shocked by the massive wave of rotting flesh ambling towards me, and it lead to a really memorable and rather funny experience. On the other hand, games like MGSV, as you mentioned, have tutorials that are so engrossing and attention capturing with the sudden story or action going on that you hardly think back on them as tutorials, and more just the intro to the game. I dunno, maybe my opinion of what makes a piece of media "good" is more generous than most people, but I enjoy a fair number of games and even tutorials that are admittedly flawed or not the best made. Maybe I'm just easy to please when it comes to games and movies and such, but honestly I see that as a perk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A good tutorial is determined if you don't remember playing it That is, built in the first few levels as new mechanics So, you actually have played it but not consciously enough to realize
The Nier:Automata "tutorial" is one of my favorites - it's an essential part of the story, doesn't feel boring and can be quite challenging already (there is also the easteregg that let's you skip to the ending of the game from there :P)
Small criticism for Nier:Automata's tutorial, if you die you have to do a large part all over again. I got distracted and died, after which I almost put the game down when I realized I had to re-do the flying sequence, because it was easy and boring the second time around.
The most confusing game to pick up for me was Hearts of Iron 4, I remember opening it up for the first time and not having a clue what all the symbols and menus and statistics meant
good day. just an FYI, I quit any game that dumps a wall of text at me. my time to play games is very limited and the last thing I want to do is spend half of the time reading, then forget what I need to do when I come back to it.
Factorio somehow manages to do it right and wrong at the same time. - On the first stage, to learn how the game works, you have to set up the tutorial robot so it shows you what to do. - On the second stage, to learn how electricity works, you see it on the tech tree and screw with the water pipes until it works. It will overheat at some point and then you'll learn how to manage your power resources. - On the third stage, to learn how oil works, the first thing you need to do is go to Wikipedia and learn some petroleum engineering fundamentals. Now, this part might be jst me, bt I suck at driving cars in video games, so I never bother getting the rover at first and instead use the conveyor belts as transport. And the rover is electric anyway, so once you optimise the conveyor belt system past a certain point there's literally nothing you can do until you master oil processing. To add to this, you use the same pipes for oil and water and gas and you have to just hope youu don't mix them or your whole facility is useless and you have to start unbuilding and rebuilding everything, all under a time constraint because you screwed up the electric system so if you don't figure it out quickly the whole plant shuts down and you can't build the stuff you need. Starting the oil stage of the game has zero incentives, all drawbacks and the game never tells you how to do anything when it's so different from all you did before, so it becomes overwhelming. There's an engagement bottleneck that at least for me means I always drop the game when I get to that stage becase there's nothing else I can do without teaching myself fluid mechanics, which is an astonishingly tough expectation especially considering how intuitive everything was before.
overheating is a thing in factorio? I have reached around about the point where you start mass producing red circuits and i have also completed the tutorial but never saw anything like overheating or a tutorial "robot". Although I can totally relate to the oil processing bit being a big engagement bottleneck.
I mean Having a character explain the rules of the game is better than having to look at the pause menu for the controls like in the original Doom games, it took me 5 minutes to learn I could press buttons on the wall because those old games didn't have a tutorial
i loved nier automatas tutorial because it was set up after doing things that would make you go "man I wish I knew how to change the fov/audio" as well as it introducing how the androids and black boxes work. plus being able to revisit yourself interacting with the menus in the start of ending b. truely the only tutorial that had me praising it past just quick humor (like portal 2)
a hat in time has one of the best tutorials I've seen. Pretty much throughout the whole game you'll be learning new elements very naturally. but they're still super fun to replay despite that, because once you master the movement/hat mechanics in a level there are always new things to look for, and you can always redo your platforming alot better than you did the first time.
Hollow Knight is a great example in my mind, especially the one area which teaches you that you can hit yourself off of spikes so you're actually able to traverse over them (similarly to the Mario coins example). Only problem is, the first time I played it I never even realized this anyway and just went on through a bunch of the game completely without that mechanic. I guess the only problem about these invisible tutorials is how they can effectively be made pointless by how stupid users can be sometimes!
The great part about that section is that on a first playthrough you will find out about being able to pogo in the fungal wastes and when you go back to forgotten crossroads, you'll realize you can pogo off of many things.
I love god of war 2018 but I can’t comprehend how the “minimal tutorials” option means have 99% of the same pop ups that take a lifetime before you can close them, and will actively restrict your ability’s until that stupid pop up appears, and while they still did a few pop ups that take an eternity to close, with ragnarok, they put a lot less and they don’t restrict any of your ability’s, so a great step in the right direction.
"Best tutorial is one you don't remember" except Portal. Like you literally mentioned it, and it's the ONE tutorial I always remember and love doing
Indeed!
I still remember the Portal 2 tutorial. Wheatley tells you to say "apple", the game says press spacebar to say "apple", and turns out, spacebar is actually the jump key, and you've just learned how to jump while Wheatley is suspecting you might have a minor case of serious brain damage.
I remember the beginning of Portal, but I didn't really think of it as a tutorial, per se. And I think that's the point. If the user is very aware that this is a tutorial, it might be because it's a bad one. Portal felt like you were playing the game and learning as you went because that's what you were doing. It didn't have or need a strong delineation between "here we're learning" and "here we're playing." They were teaching the whole way through and we were playing the whole way through. The developer commentary actually makes this clear because they talk about "It's been awhile since we had them use this mechanic and we want to make sure it's in mind in a puzzle coming up, so we put a thing here to remind them about the mechanic now." It clearly took a lot of work to incorporate the learning into the game so seamlessly, but it also clearly paid off.
@@pleasegoawaydude Question: Know Hbomberguy?
@@nenmaster5218 Hbomberguy is neat
11:15 That's actually genius! Telling the user to look in a direction and then adjusting the control scheme based on which way they push. Imagine playing it and thinking "nice, inverted controls are the default!" when there literally ISNT a default. You just told the game your preferences without even realising it!
it would be fun to make a prototype where all controls are defined like that. Maybe start asking the player to do some random stuff after a while and they just keep "guessing right"
As far as I know Halo was first to do that and lots of games after it
makes you wonder... how many other controls could also be done in this way, let alone viewing controls.
Hope you have a great day & Safe Travels!
If I don't know that a game works that way, I will doom myself, as I always do exactly the opposite that the tutorial tells me to do just in case there's an easter egg to my left when I'm told to go right.
I actually played deadlocked a ton as a kid. Would usually have to change the controls manually during the tutorial.
0:51 i'm so dumb, it just clicked for me that the long drawn out "hand holding" sequence in undertale was not only to build toriel's character, but it was a meta joke about game tutorials as well. i'm 6 years late, but good one toby lol
Fuck....
SHE LITTERALLY HANDHOLDS YOU
Hi, fellow dumbass. You have brought me a realisation that probably would never have clicked
dude
tu-toriel
@@richthe1kid I knew the joke within the name but never realised how it's literally a handholding experience lol
same but dont tell anyone D:
The hand-holding sequence is Undertale winking at the camera straight from the beginning to let you know what you're in for, since later on the game [ REDACTED SPOILERS ]
An important note on information overload: It's not about how much information is made available to the player, it's about how much you feed to them directly.
Availability of information is good. Especially if it's information that's not engaging to acquire by other means. Make lots of information accessible to the player if possible, just don't force them to read through everything.
Like, I like to have a wiki-like codex of information in the game itself. Not for lore, but for studying details about the gameplay.
Imagine if tf2 gave you a tutorial for rocket jumping lol
I was playing Total War Warhammer recently and I found this very helpful. Having an in-game wiki with all the details about every unit was incredibly helpful.
one idea i had for an rpg like pokemon is having an encyclopedia with everything that should be common knowledge to the character, so npcs dont have to expain basic things that the character suposedly already knows, then when they say something that is important use a different color so the player knows they can check the codex for details
the idea for the vaults in fallout was to make the player character not know anything about the world without using the amnesia excuse
That's not for a tutorial, though. An ingame-wiki can be nice but its not a good introduction to a game.
I think it depends on a game, if you are making strategy or RPG game, walls of text sometimes are even welcome. When playarbase cares about minimaxing and finding optimal strategy the more information about game mechanics thay have, the better. While having no text tutorial and access to things like unit and skills statistic is harming for the game.
Any seamless tutorial in game with lots of complicated mechanics will most likely shallow the depth of the game. Popup tutorials arent always bad, for me the best example of those are jrpg-s. Games like Xenoblade, Persona, Trials of. Even tho thay introduce mechanics slowly (sometimes some mechanics are introduces after 40 hours of gameplay), thay have some unintuitive but extremely fun when you understand them mechanics. Without popups I cant imagine how to show enough information to player to properly use them.
And making them follow one by one "look you have this button click it now" won't respect them. I think that popups tutorials are the best way to show tuts when you can't show mechanic seamless.
“Remember, switching to your pistol is always faster than reloading”
my personal pet peeve with some tutorials is when the characters IN UNIVERSE tell you the controls. nothings more bizarre than hearing the voice of a character telling you what the A button is in universe.
Reminds me of the Emperor's New Groove PS1 game where Kuzco is like "how the fuck did you jump the chasm" and the character says "by using the action button!"
Most of the time, but there are exceptions. In any game where the 4th wall is supposed to be broken its good imo, like Ralsei in deltarune potentially (hopefully) hinting at some hidden depth when he tells you to use this and that control.
@@plazma0325 susie: "what the hell is a Z key?"
@@thesatelliteslickers907 yes
unless of course it's the kind of game that doesn't care about the fourth wall, then it's fun
Meanwhile Terraria and Minecraft:
"Ok buddy, you go have fun. Just remember that HP = 0 is bad ok?"
Terraria actually have a tutorial NPC and had it since 1.0 release, unlike Minecraft which for years made people check the wiki to find out how to craft stuff.
@@sevret313 that NPC is next to useless despite telling you the requirements for a house imo.
@@trickytreyperfected1482 Console and mobile terraria have tutorial area where guide teaches you how to dig and build and what chest are... and even info about flying islands...
@@trickytreyperfected1482 yea, I mean, there’s a reason why you sacrifice him to summon the Wall of Flesh. (Not that it really matters since another guide will take his place 5 minute later)
EDIT - actually, the guide can tell you what can be crafted using a specific item by giving the item to him. That can come in handy if I’m sick of checking the wiki for the 15th time in the last hour.
@@trickytreyperfected1482 He actually does tell you a bunch of useful info that would be helpful to new players.... but I wouldn't know since I just checked the wiki anyways
That Ratchet: Deadlocked automatically sets your controls to how *you* personally use them just floored me.
It's actually fucking genius. I never knew that and I knew a LOT about those Ratchet games.
I did know that what constituted the terms "normal" and "inverted" controls was a topic of great debate within Insomniac at the time, and that at least prior to Deadlocked they were always unsure which default setting to ship the game with.
Yea it's insane and i wish more games did something like it
It’s such a simple but genius little move. It just tells you to look up and then watches what you do in response. Nobody actively thinks about y inversion when they boot a game, so they just do what they naturally would without ever knowing the game basically just tricked them into perfectly adjusting their settings.
Basically
I literally flipped when it hit me and pulled up a message tab to tell that to my fam, cuz it's bloody genious
Wouldn't be genious in a game for all like a game you can play with family, in case someone prefers inverted while other prefer traditional, but still, it's actually unusual and insightful
They also did that in Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier when setting the plane controls
18:00 there's actually a game called heat signature which allows you to pause at any point, stop and thing, then keep going. Pausing is actually one of its mechanics, but while paused, you can do a number of things, such as hover over your inventory items to see what they do, hover over an enemy to see what weapon they have. The game has a pretty bare bones tutorial for how many mechanics the game has, but it doesn't throw everything at you at once. It slowly unlocks as you progress. It's probably my favourite game and the entire thing is a learning experience
i love heat signature it's a shame the ending is kinda meh :(
Absolutely my favorite game, would kill for a sequel that cranks the content up to the max
What genre is that game? I might check it out
What game is in the background when he's talking there, I didn't see the game in the footage list
I personally love the tutorial for Portal 2 a lot. Everything is taught to you in a very comedic way. You’re taught to look up and down as “exercise” and when the game tells you to press A to speak to a character, you jump instead, and the character asks you if you have brain damage.
...oh, that part probably makes more sense on controller lmao
It's just space on KB+M, and it always just felt... awkward
I only just recently got the chance to play the Portal games an started Portal 2, the opening is so funny I agree it's a great tutorial lol
I will be watching your career with great interest.
Sup check. (I think i said the same thing lol)
Well, he’s basically already made it.
Not in TH-cam yet though.
oh yes
Nice star wars reference
*We
This video is so good I will barely remember it.
one might say this video was visibly invisible
We have a fast learner here
What video?
where am i, who is this. who am i?
This taught me gradually through watching.
the best tutorial I’ve played Has to be from baba is you. Assuming the player goes in completely blind, level 0 makes the game look like a basic sokoban game where you push rocks around and try to get to the flag. But in level 1, you are trapped in a small area with seemingly no way out, except for the fact that inside that area are the words ‘WALL IS STOP’, and the only way to get out is by breaking up that text. This perfectly teaches the player the main gameplay loop of manipulating text in order to get to a goal.
Baba Is You does a very good job blending the tutorial into the rest of the game in terms of difficulty.
Then the game makes the main levels feel like a tutorial for the end of the game.
@@jlco And then the endgame feels like trying to figure out how the fucking Schwarzschild metric works.
I love how the _read more_ on this comments cuts on "but on level 1 yo...", That is very convenient as i'm interested in watching the Baba is you series here on TH-cam
@@kristyandesouza5980 if you can, please get it if it interests you
@@gregg8721 i'm a fucking unemployed 15 yo from a 3rd world contry, i won't be afording anything for myself by myself anytime soon, that's why i'm going to watch a series on it, and not play the game
I like the tutorial(s) in Celeste.
Most of it is done organically, like the game gives you new mechanics and lets you play around them in a relatively safe environment.
But there are a few moments that do stand out.
1. The Bird. Whenever there is an essential mechanic that the player has to learn, such as dashing, wavedashing, or hyperdashing, and that mechanic cannot be explained without words, they use the bird. So rather than some nameless voice telling you what to do, the tutorial is delivered through a blue bird. And it's even better because narratively, this bird is guiding the main character, while practically it also guides the player. So the player is in resonance with the main character in with how you both think of the bird.
2. The monsters.
The weird lovecraftian eye-teeth things in the mirror temple are really the only thing that can be a "normal enemy" in Celeste. So to fully introduce the mechanics associated with them, there is a brief dream/nightmare sequence where you play AS a monster, literally walking a mile in their shoes, so you learn how to deal with them
This is where Celeste is kinda opposed to Geometry Dash despite both being very hard. Celeste is very enjoyable to play since its difficulty grows smoothly, and the game is long, while in GD, victory attempts in all levels take like half an hour, but those levels are already very hard, and you often have to spend much time to beat them, plus they are ordered not in order of difficulty. Meanwhile, all levels the DLC named World is way easier than first level, and there are lots of new custom "star rated" levels that are literally a few clicks, plus modern levels often literally show where to jump. Thus, treating official levels like something you have to beat first, is completely wrong, treating them as a tutorial is even more wrong (though you can still beat them in practice mode to slowly get used to gameplay features). And when you beat some official levels, the best idea is to go online and play online levels. GD is a game to be played, not to be completed, it's a community-based game, and, like in Minecraft, you have to learn it all by yourself. When I beat Deadlocked, I've been playing GD 6 years and more than 700 hours, and by that moment I've completed it over 95%.
@@KirikkSiSq Well, to be fair, Geometry dash is easier to understand without help than minecraft. There's only so much you can do with only clicking as your controls. But with minecraft, all the building, structures, crafting... Isn't that well explained
@@leritykay8911 yeah, GD is easy to understand for normal people, but not for some stupid let's play youtubers who are too lazy to simply learn the portal and orb colors. Ofc, in 2.2 there will be an option to show guide marks for those (but not for jump pads), but 2.2 isn't out yet. Plus, GD has pretty big menu since 2.1 and those ytbers just ignore most of buttons because they don't want to find out what they mean (plus they are bad at English), while some of those buttons have some really good content. Let's say, only one of them found Vault of Secrets (and then left because he thought he had to beat daily levels, he got hard one that time, and he didn't find better ways to get diamonds, which are daily chests, quests and treasure room). Other ones found, at best, Gauntlets or level search button
GD World has some sort of "progression" that unlocks online levels after beating levels, but those aren't sorted.
It seems GD should be treated as an arcade, but a very different one than common arcades
As for Minecraft, it's kinda weird how most popular edition among ytbers is Java edition with zero tutorial, while Legacy is only known among fans since its development was stopped.
... And then Farewell has a PowerPoint explanation for how to wavedash, which the game outright calls "wavedash.ppt".
@@toricon8070 To be fair, that powerpoint presentation WAS very funny
I like portal 2's tutorial; it's just like portal 1's, but with humourous writing sprinkled in, like how you have brain damage and the smooth jazz to calm you. It's great, and opens up the themes of the game; humour, puzzle solving, and mystery; the complete portal gun is in a room surrounded by drawings of... you.
Hello, Portal Nerd here. To correct the end of your comment, you gain the Singular Portal Gun (the one that only shoots blue portals) in the drawings of you room, not the complete one. You gain the Complete Portal Gun in the Incinerator Room right before Chapter 2 begins.
Also have to say that in both games, the choice to introduce a partial portal gun first was really smart, while integrating everything into some basic puzzles right off the bat. Other than the start of 2 walking you through the looking around and the “jump” joke (still both really clever and well done, mind you) I never feel like the Portal 1 and 2 opening parts actually feel like tutorials at all once you get going.
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" - God, Futurama
I will always love the way Boneworks presents its tutorial. It isn't the most invisible tutorial, as it does tell you what you need to do outright, but it presents it as a tour inside a "VR museum" from the future, designed to serve as a tech demo for this fictional massive VR company to show how innovative their new headset is. There's even exhibits and demonstrational videos depicting the games controls and features that separate it from the rest of the competition. Basically it just flows into the lore and it's presented so well that even in other playthroughs, I still stick around to look at the tutorial exhibits instead of just running through it.
I clearly remember that during my first time playing boneworks, when I entered the puzzle tutorial. Just using physics to solve the puzzle, looking at the enormous platforms and hearing the amazing music made it one of the best experiences im my gaming carrer. And it was just a tutorial.
As someone who followed Stress Level Zero from its birth (waaaay back when Brandon was a new intern of Corridor Digital), to the foundation of the studio just next door in the same warehouse...
I am somewhat proud of how far they got and how good they are considering they were "late" to the entire VR thing.
i was brand-new to vr when i got boneworks and it really taught me a lot about just being in vr too. like it took multiple tries to throw the cups and stuff into the archive bin things. it's not just a tutorial on how to the play the game, it's also a tutorial on how to play in vr, which i find pretty cool.
Hope it's good just bought the game yesterday
bonework's tutorial will feel long and outdrawn in the future when people get more used to VR, kinda like how most games don't have to tell you to look around with the mouse and move with "WASD" anymore, but imo as a guy who played boneworks as his first VR game it was 100% necessary at the time. since it was basically the first of it's kind it didn't just teach you how to play boneworks, it taught you the design language of physics based VR games in general, and it did an awesome job at it.
One thing that has impacted the style of tutorials, is the lack of instruction booklets old videogame had, so you could tell the players what the keys would do, so you can just dump in an easy, safe area for them to explore, without needing to put popups or texts about how the button A makes you jump
Very interesting point! Imagine what modern devs could do with invisible tutorials mixed with the more explicitly informational but still attention grabbing nature of those manuals. Of course, it's hard to nudge players into reading them with digital media.
I remember years back as a kid, I'd get a new game and on the way home I'd look through the instruction booklet, so when I got home I could get straight to playing😊
Five nights at freddy’s has a pretty good tutorial by these standards. The opening lore drops on each night give you a little information about what you’re up against, the first two nights are almost entirely safe, and it never once tells you how to use the controls, it just uses very good point-and-click game visual language. It’s compounded by the fact that the animatronics pull their punches and subliminally teach their hidden mechanics in the earlier nights, with the tutorial experience invisibly fading out into open-water gameplay.
And then SB comes in with pop up tutorials and unfinished gameplay
@@hormigatomic1 SB is so funny because it gives you popups on how to click a button but fails to explain large swaths of the game mechanics
Yeah, exactly what I've just realised! I love phone guy even more now!
Except fnaf 4 they completely throw that shit out the window
@Nubbs to be fair, it's hard to have, like, a phone guy in some kids house
I consider Breath of the Wild's tutorial, the Great Plateau, to be incredibly well designed, and its one of the most memorable parts of the game, imo
was about to comment the same thing
The thing about the Great Plateau is that only a few minutes of it are actually "tutorial" in the "spoon-feed the player information" sense, and those are spread out over the entire thing. After you have the basic movement down, the Old Man gives you some goals and sets you loose, with the rest of the Great Plateau teaching you by giving you relatively clear examples of a problem and relative safety to experiment. The shrines themselves repeat this. Once you know the buttons to use the new rune, it gives you problems to solve with it.
14:47 Hollow Knight teaches it's starting mechanics brilliantly, it's only got a few bits of text explaining what buttons to press for the basic mechanics, and from there it teaches it all with examples. For instance, you come across an enemy you can't kill, and then when you pick up a new spell you have to kill that same kind of enemy to leave the area.
If you hadn’t said it, I would have. HK did a pretty good job with its tutorial.
Also the text bits are entirely optional, and a really good example is when you get desolate dive, because the boss you fight to get it uses that move very, very frequently (and then almost exclusively in his second stage), so you get a really good idea of how it's used given that you just fought against it.
@@JanbluTheDerg Yeah or the white palace and how it steadily introduces you to more complex platforming concepts.
the earlier areas are a bit slow though, and unfortunately turns a lot of people away from it.
Still love HK though, favorite video game
I came to the comments just to see if someone had my exact thoughts lmfao
Gotta say that Outer Wilds hits it out of the park with it's "tutorial", the first section before you get the launch codes. If you know what you're doing, you can just go straight there, but you can also explore Timber Hearth along the way and pick up on most of the games key mechanics, such as Ghost Matter, the Scouter, the Zero-G Cave and the Model Ship.
Seconding this. Outer Wilds is amazing from start to end and it is one of the very few games out there i would willingly wipe my memories of in order to experience it for the first time again.
Not to mention an introduction to a ton of stuff in the museum, such as with the quantum rocks in the little grove and all the little objects that you can choose to read about and get some idea of what you could be getting into- such as the little angler.
yeah came here to say the exact same thing, if you'renot conscious about it you don't even notice the end of the tutorial until you've restarted the loop for the first time.
and the signal scope!
Yea I was thinking about outerwilds too. It doesn't really tell you much because what it does tell you just feels like part of the game and part of the setup for your first launch and really got me excited to get going
On the pop-up/presentation part, in Celeste's final chapter there is a literal presentation to the teach the player wave-dashing since it's pretty much required to complete most of the chapter, tho it's followed by a short area to try it out
It is at least diegetic, though. And the final chapter was (free) DLC, so it had to be taught within that chapter.
Also, it comes right after a progression check that makes sure you have a fighting chance at the next section, but that check can be skipped with a wavedash if you know how to do it.
You _could_ skip it on your first playthrough after learning about it online... if you want to suffer.
not to mention you have the option to view it, and plus it was fun and entertaining
And also the player was taught hyper dashing in 8c and wall boosting in 7c
you can actually skip the heart wall before it with a well-timed wavedash as well
But on the other hand, that one's also a parody of terrible powerpoint presentations, which means it's a *funny* tutorial.
Although my most popular video is a meme edit of that exact tutorial so I might be a bit biased...
Hades does a great job of introducing mechanics gradually. In some ways, you’re still in the tutorial until you escape for the first time, but you’d never know it.
I personally love the minimalist approach like Minecraft or The Binding of Isaac. TBoI just has the basic controls written on the floor in the first room of every run you do. Most of the time you'll ignore them, but if you need them they are there.
Repentance steps it up a notch too making the stuff on the floor different for each character.
This is the first video I worked on editing and capturing footage for this channel! It was a blast to work on this video and I’m very excited for the future and for all you guys to see all the amazing content we’re cooking up for the channel!
17:27 I relate to this so dang hard. In many games, I find it easier to just start a new game rather than continue, because I've forgotten how to play the game and everything about it.
Breath of the Wild did a great job, with the entire Great Plateau essentially being a tutorial area. Everything there serves to suggest things the player can do and encourages experimentation on the part of the player
yea but in future runs it can become a chore to unlock your kit and get to the rest of the game
@@ghasterra8950that can be true, however with the way botw is, the Great Plateau doesn’t have a set time that it always takes to complete. You complete the Great Plateau much faster on your second game than your first, and even faster on your third, and it’s never the same, since you’re typically using some new trick you learned how to do before starting a new game.
@@tanakisoup still a chore though
@@ghasterra8950 not really
@@ssaneitt yes really
honestly i'm shocked cuphead wasn't mentioned, not only because it's infamous but also i think it's a really good tutorial. it's quick, teaches you the basics without popups or text walls, and is optional, but suggested.
Yeah, also it has most of the basic movements.
"Will You Snail" by Jonas Tyroller was particularly memorable for me, because the tutorial text fragments also doubled as lore segments, recontextualised at the end of the game - meaning that text box which explains how the level selection screen works is also a part of the story!
what about the old minecraft tutorial world? I remember that and thats perfection right....
True
I played on pc and never went though the tutorial world and fared just fine, like every other pc player
Maybe console players just too dumb..
@@coreblaster6809 imagine a person that never heard about Minecraft and this game mechanics. That tutorial world for them.
@@timesnewrman I first booted up minecraft never hearing of the game or its mechanics?
@@coreblaster6809 it was a fun tutorial it and it worked, maybe you didnt need it but others did its not about being dumb neithet
I think one of the biggest dislikes I have when it comes to gaming, is a game that supposedly puts me into the game itself, but then stops everything and slaps a big amount of things to read on the screen before I _actually_ have time to do anything, then asks me to do one thing, allows me to move freely for about 30 seconds, just slightly getting curious about my surrounding and then halts everything again with the same process.
It feels so unbelievably annoying when the game pretends that it's the player "playing", but any input is just very mandatory, brief thing. I'd much rather even watch a tutorial video while having my controller on my lap, where the game shows the beginning gameplay with brief explanations and examples, than basically hiccup through preachy text boxes and mandatory button prompts. Sure, I do prefer when tutorials teach by making me do things instead of telling me about them, but if that's the case, it needs to be actually me doing it, not the game literally telling exactly what to do and I just push the buttons like a lab monkey.
Second worst offender is information overload. I've wanted to try an MMO for a long time and have tried to get into a few, like Black Desert not too long ago and there, the game's just open up so fast that I'll feel straight up anxiety about the overabundance of items, statistics, info etc. and often just peace out before getting to do anything actually enjoyable.
It feels like I need to have a studysession of my own before beginning to do anything and then have several classes afterwards to google up whatever things mean, since they are completely clueless in how they could actually pass the info in a nice way. Instead, often giving ridiculously monotonous "Get 15x Simblinious Green Folvoshberries for Fraljrnorvm The Waitress", "Get 30x Hembom-Goofter Accelerators for Timmy-Elisabeth" quests in a row for the next 2 hours, most of which feel completely detached from my actual interests, since I have no idea who those people are or what those items are. (Often, those items are quite literally nothing. Just there for the sake of being one more trash item to sell, or pad a quest)
With that said, if anyone has any good truely-new-to-MMO friendly MMO's in mind that might actually start a player's journey off fairly coherently, I'll welcome the recommendation!
Ah yes. The worst kind of tutorial is when you can't click on anything other than what the tutorial wants you to click. It's even worse if the tutorial is so long almost like never ends and we already familiar with the gameplay mechanics
I guess "adventure quest 3d" is a good one
There was one game that did tutorials well - it had a very short controls tutorial plus lore starting the game, then unlocked most of the functionality.
When you had something that would use one of the other functions, it gave you a tutorial quest. But these tutorials were just a 3 page description of how to use the function and were triggered the first time you used the function, and were skippable.
So you could play the game after a few minutes, and learn things at your own pace.
Unfortunately, the game itself got boring after not too long.
The first mission in Dishonored is one of the best tutorials I've ever seen
it really is
you should play, prey 2017, completely blinded to see the tutorial. (is from arkane studios)
@@DavidRamirez-lq2co I'll check it out
I really like the tutorial in Just Shapes and Beats. It is a very simple game so I guess there wasn't too much they could have messed up on, but I really like the way it was made anyway.
The way it goes is simple, the song it chooses is a song that gradually adds more elements before the drop, and they all loop really well so what they did is turn each segment into a little micro stage. The first one has no obstacles, it just let's you see how to move yourself and then you can progress to the next one. Then it just shows you that you cannot touch the pink stuff through a simple attack pattern at the center of the screen, then it just shows you how other types of attacks like explosives and telegraphed attacks work. After those you are introduced to your main movement mechanic the dash, where you have to go through a static wall with it, and if you take to long some little birds appear and dash through the wall to teach you how to do it, after that it shows you how to do it with moving walls. And once you are done with that and have seen and learned how all attacks work, the drop of the music comes and it shows you how the real game actually is, by combining all of the types of attacks you had seen before and using them all at once, still being pretty easy and not overwhelming yet showing you a good taste of the type of chaos that the game has to offer. And all of that happens in a 3 minute song.
I was watching a playthrough and I knew I had to get it for myself right after seeing the tutorial!
Undertale has the best tutoriel
But seriously right after the intro cutscene theres a little "press Z or ENTER" right before you get the main menu
I never thought about it but later on there is a sign that tells you you can read signs with z which proves that the little "press Z or ENTER" worked really well
EDIT: when your health reaches zero you lose
Also the combat tutorial is great
"Collect the pellets they will give you LOVE"
I agree!
The Just shapes and beats tutorial is extremely fun imo
It barely tells you what to do for controls but gets the basic down of Getting triangle=Progress with each time you get it in the tutorial it ramps up the song and difficulty untill the end part of it where it lets go and just lets you play it
18:23 That's a good rule of thumb for the final boss too. As the game designer, you are usally better at your game than most players will ever be. You will have to make about ten games before you learn how to not underestimate the difficulty.
Just make the difficulty you play at "hard mode"
@@Da_maul Freedom Planet 1 did that
The Hard Mode final boss speed was the original speed
the average game designer could never come close to speedrunning there games as fast as actual speedrunners.
probably mentioned already, but i love the great plateau in breath of the wild. it's a clear tutorial once you complete it but in the game it justifies it's existence in the narrative very well and teaches you alot more than you realize at first.
Yeah, when I first played it I thought that plateau was about 30% of the map and had a lot of fun playing it, until I finished it and found out it was only the tutorial and the rest of the game was much bigger.
I didn't realize that the Great Plateau was the 'tutorial' for Breath of the Wild until I was halfway through the game. The fact that it gave me access to bows, bombs, defensive equipment, temperature resistance, cooking, elemental arrows, and a mini-boss made it feel less like a tutorial and more like I was just... playing the game.
When I first played breath of the wild, I thought the Great Plateau was the entire map. Boy was I wrong.
My favorite tutorial is from OneShot. It's a simple puzzle that shows you what to expect from the rest of the game, and sets up the premise nicely.
GOATED COMMENT
I failed to solve the tutorial puzzle and couldn't progress. :(
VA-11 HALL-A, a visual novel with a bartending minigame, has a tutorial for said minigame that is fairly bog-standard, except for one key detail: At the beginning of the tutorial, your character is said to have been a little out of practice due to being away for some time (at least, if I remember correctly), and so to make sure that you still know what you're doing, your coworker instructs you on how to make a simple drink: The Sugar Rush. However, he also tells you that if you serve him a Piano Man - a more complex drink - he will leave you to it and thus end the tutorial immediately.
While it's rather overt in its presentation, the technique in VA-11 HALL-A's tutorial of "serve me this simple drink to continue, or serve me this complex one to skip" is a brilliant way of implementing a tutorial skip. Since he doesn't tell you how to make a Piano Man, but he does tell you how to make a Sugar Rush, the only players who will be able to skip the tutorial are those who can figure out the mechanics of the minigame themselves through experimentation, or those who already know it from a previous playthrough.
eyyyy!!! :D we love that one over here a lot
ahhh such a brilliant game, gotta replay that one
And it's very necessary! I can count on a single hand the amount of people that managed to make their first Beer for Donovan a Big one.
@@gabrote42 i feel like a lot of people see drinks and always make them big and read optional karmotrine as max karmotrine
@@andersonzl13 Honestly never seen that. But maybe you read reviews and saw posts I didn't
I loved the Titanfall 2 tutorial, i spent hours trying to speed run the marathon so i could get an achievement and thanks to me getting that achievement i got better in the multiplayer and enjoyed the game even more 👍
I agreed titanfalls tutorial is prob one of the best out there
both titanfall games have pretty good tutorials
Same for me with Modern Warfare 1.
I've been a very poor level shooter player by that point, to the level that I couldn't make it past first encounters with soldiers in Half-Life without god mode. I've barely made it out the ship in over a minute, and my best result was, maybe, 54 seconds or something like that. The game suggested I take it on Easy mode, and I was ok with that. It was fun, I've died a lot of times, but deaths in MW weren't very frustrating.
And then I remember taking the course just for fun after I've finished the game. This is, once again, the first time the Smol Me played an FPS without cheats.
And I make it in like 27 seconds. x2 from my previous record. I was FLOORED. I felt like taking on the WORLD. And I did just that - I've started the game up again, this time on Veteran, and the experience of playing FPS changed for me forever then. This game, and its mechanics, and its tutorial, single-handedly transformed the FPS genre for me then
Hi I was looking at picking up the TitanFalls but was curious if their multiplayer servers are still up?
@@TheRighteousDawn yes they're still up but i recommend you play titanfall 2's multiplayer since the first one is kind of dead 😅
I remember watching another TH-cam video about making a non-gamer play Portal. I thought it would progress smoothly, but it turns out they spent the first few chambers never looking around because the game never told them they could use the mouse to look around.
Razbuten!
I think valve made up with it in portal 2 (the excercise part) xD
Yeah, seen the video. Did the same test with my nephew and he struggled with the same thing. Albeit he is pretty young.
razbuten did a ton more of these kinds of tests, its really interesting to see everything we take for granted in games
@@diondegraaff9400 I'm pretty sure it's etra games
New games : *unnecessary long tutorial*
Old doom: here's a gun go have fun
In horizon zero dawn, you learn to hunt together with you father figure as a little girl. While you in game father figure tells your character how to do everything in the in game world, you get to learn the controlls for yourself. For me it really felt like I was learning together with my character (just like portal, except Chell wasn't a little girl in the tutorial) and that really got me into the game and the character.
I really like your occasional super dry humor. It is well appreciated.
As for good tutorials, I'm skimming my favorite games in my head and they all have rather bad tutorials now that I think about it.
The Witness' lack of a tutorial always intrigued me. Despite the game being a brutalist puzzle game there is no formal introduction _whatsoever_ to any of the puzzle elements. The game leaves the player to figure out what each element does by themselves, which makes for quite the patience testing experience.
It also occasionally sprinkles in puzzles that might change your developed perspective on how a certain element works.
As infuriating as that game can be, it's quite clever and extremely rewarding once you do figure it out.
This channel is litteraly gold, and i'm so glad that i'm here to see its rise! The work you put into your videos are very much appriciated. Especially am i very fond of your "text-in-scene" that works as titles for each part of the video, they're sick!
i honestly really enjoyed inscryptions approach to the tutorial, even though its walls of text, its fun walls of text.
and the fact that your first run IS the tutorial, it teaches you that dying is part of the experience, and slowly introduces more complicated mechanics, like bones. its genius, and i really enjoyed the game because of it.
I think one of the interesting things about portal is you are experiencing the tutorial at the same time as chell (the main character) this makes it seem more hidden because she has no idea what's going on either, and glados is there as a guide.
Now that i think of it, most games I played were like:
"hey, do the think"
"the what?"
"You know that thing, if you dont hurry you'll die in a horrible way"
There were also games that were like:
"oh ok i'm someone with a supersuit and I reached a vietnamese island"
* 32 pages powerpoint presentation shows up *
Like playing a horror game and seeing "press X to hide under bed"
never has a tutorial been as terrifying as in horror games honestly, you just KNOW something's going to go down when you see the tutorial message
@@cassou124 "hold Z to still breathing" umm... why would i need to know tha-
@@cassou124 I’ve always loved the little “no no no why did you just tell me how to do that” tutorial messages in horror games. It’s a very clever way of building anticipation and dread while teaching the core mechanics.
@@cassou124 "Hold Shift to run"
Other games: Neat
Horror Games: Oh no.
I really enjoyed the Firewatch tutorial, it sets up how you got there through story, while also teaching you basic movement controls like running and jumping. Overall a really great game and would recommend to anyone that has an extra 3 hours (yes it’s that short)
A game i like with an interesting tutorial is crosscode, because the character you play as is inside an mmo you get taught by other characters in said world without it feeling disjointed. The intro does feel like it drags on but thats more so due to setting up the story and not the tutorial, fortunately theres an option to skip it if youve beaten the game and want to mess around with the ng+ features.
Past the intro it introduces mechanics at a very good pace.
Another CrossCode player here! The tutorial makes sense story-wise; but it still drags on at times.
I really like the tutorial in Outer Wilds. It has probably to do with that it’s one of my favorite games, but I really like how it’s made. You talk to people in the village, steer a model shuttle, play hide and seek with some child’s and go to locations marked by signs on the way to get what you need to start into the game. It might not be subtle, that it explains you how the game works, but it feels really organic.
Little Big Planet 2. That game was my absolute childhood and I will NEVER forget the first time I played it. The narrator is lovely and the world is so quirky. Never did it make you feel stupid, and if you had played 1 (I hadn't at the time) you could just breeze through it if you wanted. Perfect game, perfect tutorial, nostalgia hits hard. I miss LBP2 😞😞
Yeah, the LBP tutorials were great!
i’d say hollow knight has a really good tutorial progression that really lasts the whole game without handholding, each unlock ability unlocking a new area to progress gives the player a desire to learn each new game mechanic.
But it has pop ups. And it never teaches you that you can pogo off spikes and enemies
@@swootproonce634 One of the first grubs has a spiked platform stair leading up to it, it's very on the nose. Then once you know how to pogo spikes, you unluck the Mawlek boss which requires you to get to the other side of him when he shoots gunk into the air, except he's too big to simply jump across, so since you were pogoing spikes to reach the boss, you will automatically try to pogo him as well at that point. That's one way the game teaches you, there's more. But even if everything fails, you will eventually learn on the bouncy mushrooms in fungal wastes how to do a pogo.
Mushroom waste's bouncy mushrooms act as a safezone for you to learn to pogo without danger of getting hit too
@@swootproonce634 You didn't get the point of the video, pop ups aren't always bad, he just only gave bad examples because pop ups are predominately bad. Hollow Knight's pop ups are story based and always before or after encounters so it isn't interrupting gameplay and used more as an aesthetic choice or story element. Imagine you just picked up the abilities off the floor like you do with normal items, you really wouldn't have any idea of what they do. Metroidvanias have a requirement of telling what mechanics do and how to use them including the original metroid games. Every time you pick up a new ability like mothwing cloak for example, after defeating hornet it is obvious you can't go back the way you came as the doorway was too high. So they make it to where you can only exit through one path, as you take that path you see that there are long jumps over acid, you clearly can't jump so you use the ability, and it makes you do it 3 times in a row in an attempt to get the muscle memory down before needing to use it for platforming.
If the game told you how to pogo it would have to use arrows or a pop up menu, there are a couple ways to portray it without but it would be sequence breaking for a new player. A new player learns to pogo either from just thinking about how to get one of the first grubs/charms that requires it or if you don't get it then, you would learn in the Fungal Wastes with the bouncy mushrooms. They don't want you learning how to pogo early on because it can lead to skipping over major sections of the game or getting to the brooding mawlek early, which for a new player is a very difficult boss fight if you don't have any spells or mothwing cloak. That is precisely why they chose not to teach the ability to pogo early.
@@swootproonce634 they don't feel like popups in any way shape or form, and you can go through the whole game without pogo'ing, so it just feels nice and rewarding to find out about it by yourself.
begone, good games hater.
I think Breath Of the wild has a pretty good tutorial, gives you guidance of where to go in the context of the story, won't tell you a mechanic till you are in a position to use it (eg how to swap weapons is only told to you once you pick up a weapon), introduces all the mechanics gradually and lets you set your own pace. There's also some brilliant design as the corridor in the shrine of resurrection before the segment you have to climb, is the perfect length for your stamina bar to decrease completely if you sprint. Its also brilliant as its a microcosm for the game as a whole, it gives you an open area, with some areas lacking any direction to go there, an optional miniboss, 4 shrines which give you the 4 runes which you use for the rest of the game.
Also how they limit the scope of the open world.
Also something, not just the tutorial, but all of Breath of The Wild, it doesn’t punish you for doing a challenge your way, there’s many different approaches a player can do at a challenge, BoTW will let the player do it their unique way, the dev intended method is only a suggestion.
For example, Mount Hylia, there’s a couple ways to get to the shrine. The two dev intended ways is that you read the old mans note book telling the player he’d give his cold resistant shirt to them if they give him a certain food. Or the player can also easily cook some heat resistant food.
Those are two of the dev intended method, but methods that also work is the player lighting a weapon on fire and just walking through, the player can even eat food when their about to die.
All those methods work, and I think that’s the true beauty of BoTW
@@aaronl19 If you climb one of the mountains on the starting area, the old man will just be there and give you the shirt, funnily enough.
I will always love and remember Breath of the Wild's tutorial. The Great Plateau is just really great at teaching the workings of the game without having to tell you, instead letting people figure things out on their own and only explaining things when they are actually relevant.
The only think I don’t like is the fourth shrines location
It’s annoying but tolerable later in the game but the extreme temperatures is a serious issue when locked to that area since it requires you to carry fire around the place and prevents you from sprinting or fighting in certain areas
Though later the flame sword was really useful since I had no idea how to get armour and such outside of chests
@@jmurray1110 Couldn't you make a cold resistant meal?
@@thijsdeboer6968 theoretically but you can only use peppers and they are a lot less consistency on the effects than sunshrooms
@@jmurray1110 i just threw in five peppers each time and I was fine. For the cold area on the great plateau you only need level 1 cold resistance anyway.
Perfect Dark. The tutorial was entirely optional, accessible only by walking away from the terminal that serves as your menu and indulging your curiosity by walking around the Carrington Institute.
You could take training exercises for the various gadgets that you would use in the actual gameplay missions.
You could chase high scores by taking mastery challenges for every weapon in the game (that would reward you with ingame cheat modes).
And even savvy players likely wouldn't realize that being allowed to explore the institute was a tutorial in and of itself because it was used as a level late into the game!
Man, this got me to remember that one time when I was playing Legend of Grimrock and the game told me to "loose a rock" so I was trying to interact with all rocks etc and I was stuck there for almost an hour trying to interact with anything... well I needed to look up a walkthrough and the solution to this was simply to push a part of a cracked stonewall - the aforementioned rock. I really loved the game but I was quite frustrated in the tutorial and it might be quite obvious but it did not cross my mind at all.
I always hate when I don't play a game for a while, forget most of its mechanics and usually restart from the beginning to learn them again. More games should have a quick recap on how to play and of the story if you haven't touched the game in a while.
free fire had that system
You completely hit the nail on the head when you talked about information overload and full UIs from the start. I personally stopped playing many games precisely because of that. Introducing stuff once at a time is SO much better.
Having the UI be overloaded is possibly the worst way to introduce the game
@@noticeme6412the beginning of Star Wars the Old Republic is a great example
In contrast, i really dislike when games hide HUD elements arbitrarily and do not show stats that are necessary to figure out the effectiveness of weapons and stuff.
The Great Plateau (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) is one of the best tutorial section of all time. Even the most seasoned gamer may not realize it is one, it's so good!
And it doesn't even tell you everything about the game. There's so many contextual tutorial popups that actually feel helpful and useful instead of intrusive.
One of the best tutorials i've seen is the obligatory training in Advance Wars 1, wich is a whole campaign that goes from "move your infantry into the cover of the mountains and attack" to "hey, here's how fog of war works, have fun !".
Even though it is very much a tutorial that holds your hand, it is memorable and fun because it is as long as two thirds of the game and it feels like you've won a big wars all by yourself at the end.
Only now I realise that Command & Conquer 1 did the "partial UI" thing; the sidebar doesn't pop up until the player gets construction options, either by creating or by discovering their base. And in missions without any base building, you simply have more screen area.
Another great video. Quality and style is on par with Game Maker's Toolkit, I hope your channel blows up. Also, I really love the idea at 18:00.
Not exactly the same, but I've had several instances were I stop playing a game for a while, come back and end up reseting my progress because I forget things like controls or the story, so some sort of "recap" option would be amazing.
Outer Wilds has a very good tutorial, by making you either talk to the npcs at the beginning and checking a museum, ignoring them and coming back later, or even figuring things out as you go. The game spawns you right beside the “tutorial” every time you die but its never needed to go back there
one of my favorite thinds is when there’s something deadly happening and a pop up shows you how to avert it-it could be as simple as blocking to anything as complex as resurrection or time stop-it provides a sense of excitement while also teaching
breath of the wild had a really good tutorial. teaching how to traverse the cold by either cooking food with the recipe, cooking your own food, or using a jacket from the top of a mountain. it fit into the story. it taught everything really well, and it wasn't an afterthought. you can even go back to the place where you started to find a korok seed.
Skyrim has a good tutorial, you start with your hands bound, so all you can do is run and jump, then after you get introduced to the stormcloaks (ralof) and the imperials (hadvar) you choose which side. Then your hands are unbound, and you get introduced to either searching in chests/looting bodies depending on who you choose but they both teach basically the same thing. The only weapon is a sword, which you then use to fight some people right after, introducing you to the sword. later you find a wizard's body and you get a spellbook and cloak, allowing you to switch to a mage build, and finally you encounter a bear and are given a bow to shoot it with or you sneak around. The tutorial introduced you to all the different builds you can choose for your character in a natural feeling way so that when you leave helgen you can choose which one you enjoyed most and you can play as that
It is good... For the first time. On each subsequent playthrough, you'll have to go through the entire section again, it's unskippable.
Oblivion did it better: You create a character and find yourself in a cell. There *are* popups for controls, but they're concise. You can walk and jump about the cell for about a minute while an npc talks smack at you from another cell, until some guards appear and tell you to move back. They then escort the emperor through a secret passage found in your cell while mostly ignoring you, only the emperor seems to slightly care. You have the option to talk a bit to some of the guards while following them through the secret passage to learn lore. At some point you're separated from them and explore a cave system on your own, find different sorts of weapons that you can experiment with while fighting rats and goblins with having options to try picking some chests and gather some plants for alchemy purposes. Then you get reunited with the emperor and his guards, and they happen to be attacked by assassins at just this point, so you can help if you're feeling brave or just watch the guards deal with them if you don't have a great grasp of the controls/mechanics yet. The emperor then asks you what your star sign is, prompting a window where you can select one that suits your playstyle, which you already had a chance to experiment with. Continuing on, there's some more dungeon-crawling, and eventually some assassins do get the emperor, but not before he passes on you the duty to follow the main story of the game. The guard captain lets you go and tells you that you can find an exit from this dungeon right over there, while remarking that you would make a great [class]. That's right, all this time while you were crawling in a safe environment, the game sneakily kept track of your playstyle so this NPC could recommend you a class that would suit you. Which is then prompted by a window to select a class or make your own class, with the one the NPC mentioned being highlighted as the default option. After you select your class, there's like two more minutes of easy dungeon crawling and you find the sewer gate.
Here's the kicker: when you interact with the gate, it gives you a prompt that lets you completely change your character. The race, appearance, star sign, class, the entire build. That means that you can make a separate save right before exiting the sewers if you want to play a different character later on. You won't have to do the tutorial again
As soon as you leave the sewer, the entire world is open to you, you can go in any direction and do anything, there are no more tutorial prompts after this
Back to Skyrim's issues compared to this. You create your character after a several minute unskippable cart ride. Then there's the dragon chase sequence, the dungeon, and you leave helgen. But while there is no more apparent tutorial from this point, there's still a path you're expected to follow. There's a trail going from Helgen to Riverwood, where, btw, your companion of choice tells you to visit. On the road there, you see a set of guardian stones that you're expected to interact with. After Riverwood, it's another straight road, to Whiterun. Here are the issues: while you can go in any direction from here, you're still expected to talk to the Jarl of Whiterun, prompting the quest where a dragon attacks that tower, and then the Greybeards send you a voice message that you should go up their mountain to get a couple shouts. If you don't do all that, you'll be stuck with the weakest version of Unrelenting Force. If you do want to get it, you're forced to sit through a tutorial on how to use your shouts, which you'll be bored through on a subsequent playthrough. And even then, you don't get the last word of the Unrelenting Force Shout. They send you on a quest to retrieve some horn before they teach you Dah. All in all, it takes like 4 hours for you to go from the start menu to a point where you have all you need for a basic build and to be able to go in any direction. And if you want to make a new character and start a new playthrough, you'll have to do all of that again. And yes, replayability is a big factor in this kind of game, so forcing all of this tutorial on experienced players just as well as the new players, is poor practice
TLDR: while the intro sequence of Skyrim may seem good, especially on the first playthrough, there's a not-so-subtle extended tutorial for like 3 more hours after leaving the first dungeon
*Noita* has a fairly interesting tutorial, it always starts a run with background button prompts for all your available actions (left/right-click, [i] for inventory) and always has an object to kick to teach you the use of it. But then you're mostly on your own from that point onwards. But occasionally the game will hint towards useful gameplay knowledge like for instance the first "level" for the mountain, the mines, is extremely flammable, and you will often be in danger of being set very much alight. To counter this you always spawn with a position, often water, which the player can use you drench themselves, preventing fire-based shenanigans. The game then builds on this by introducing a very dangerous rare enemy for that stage of the game, the Stendari (Fire Mage). This enemy throws fireballs, deals high damage, bleeds extremely dangerous _lava_ when shot or cut, and in general an all-around nuisance, but by priming the player with the knowledge that _water puts out fire,_ the player is encouraged to throw of spray their water potion on them, killing the very efficiently and without spawning lava. There are a couple other things like how in the between level shops the game will force open your inventory if you haven't moved anything, telling them that they can edit their loadout, and the background of the shop describes what spells are being triggered each time you use your wand, helping experimentation with non-visual spells.
If you want a bad tutorial though, I have to call out one of my favourite games, *_Rain World._* It teaches you some basics, how to eat, how to long jump, and to hibernate before _the rain_ arrives, and then it leaves you to figure out the rest on your own. Unfortunately, it fails to mention _unique button combinations_ that are basically vital to play the game! I can forgive not explaining some movement tech (but it really should teach you how to backflip and _at least_ how to roll, I have seen so many people, myself included, not understand why they landed and immediately rolled forward off a cliff) but not explaining that _double tapping grab swaps items between your left and right hand_ and _pressing down+grab safely drops what you're holding_ is baffling! These are extremely important QOL actions that are never mentioned in-game and is in my opinion the game's greatest failing, which is why I always say when recommending the game "play for a couple of hours, then look up a control/movement guide."
If you told me you’d been doing TH-cam for 5 years, I honestly would be inclined to believe you. A lot of these videos lose my attention at some point and have to draw me back in but these are just jammed full of interesting stuff! Also, the way you ask to like, subscribe, and comment flows so well with the video compared to a lot of other people. I fully expect this channel to blow up to the level of GMTK. Godspeed.
I absolutely agree with everything you just said. And I was thinking maybe there should be MC game jam?
The best tutorial for me is Jedi: Fallen Order. Cal learns new skills over time and when he does, it tends to pull you out of the main gameplay into a training room. It may pull you away, but the training room is perfectly intertwined with the story, putting you into Cal's place as he learns like you learn. It establishes his relationship with his master and why the death of his master had such an impact on him. He shuts himself off from the force, causing you (and him) to relearn it over time.
Titanfall 2’s Tutorial is extremely memorable and replayable, but it makes sense because your character is training to become a pilot. The gauntlet is an in-universe simulation and it’s your character’s first time trying it out, so it makes sense that Captain Lastimosa explains alot of the basics to you. He never explains the controls, the game does that through its UI, and instead he lets you try the gauntlet for yourself. The replayability comes in because there’s a scoreboard of the previous pilots that have tried it out. Obviously since it your first time you won’t get first place, meaning once you’ve completed the campaign once and even every once in a while I find myself playing it again.
One of the key elements of the "respect" point you had is to respect the player's agency. Don't DISABLE (but still show) choices you don't think they are ready to handle yet, don't interrupt their actions and force them to close your pop-up, etc. etc.
See also: GMTK's video on ; It deals with this kind of issue as it applies to complex schemes where you kind of have to be A LITTLE annoying just to make sure the mechanics don't become bug reports.
i think its also interesting to look at how some tutorials might be expecting that you are a gamer, and you know the basics, or even worse they dont have a tutorial. i think it was rasbuten who made a video on the subject.
I feel like titinfall2 had a great tutorial while not seamless it gives us the game macanic and a safe environment to practice it in while also having it progress the story and have us learn the titin later in chapter one as part of the story with BT guiding you.
I found this channel today and binged absolutely everything! I was amazed when I found out you developed move or die, that was one of my favourite games (even though i havent played it in a while). You should make a video on AI, I'm especially curious of your process with the snarky bots in your game :)
I would like to add one other option "make the tutorial 'memorable'".
One of my favorite example is the tutorial in V:tM Bloodlines. It is very obviously a tutorial. It is lengthy, has mandatory failable stealth sections, popups, and essentially breaks every single rule on this list. But the way that Smiling Jack (the tutoral explainer dude) reacts to your choices and explains the lore/world to you is a delight. It's just the right mix of humour, action, and character that I love replaying it.
VtM:B is the best worst game I've ever played. From bugs requiring me to reload from a previous save to the haunted house making me feel like I was in mortal peril when I was perfectly safe throughout most of the journey, every single moment is laden with both the best and worst experiences I've ever had in gaming. A solid 0/10 and 10/10.
I love astroneer. It has missions that give you things gradually, as well as telling you what to do with said items in a small box that you can re-read at any time
While I don't have a pc, I keep watching these videos to get an idea of what to do in my game. I loved the video!
I realize there's a footage list in the end, but displaying on the screen the name of the game being shown would be nice : )
9:38 "or even through the help of framing within your level design if you're extra sneaky"
ah yes very sneaky, stanley parable
Counterargument: The best tutorial could also be one you remember vividly because of how cool, fun, innovative, et cetera, it was. I personally quite liked the tutorial to Project Zomboid - as did the rest of my friends - because at the very end, it pulls a sneaky beaky and has you taunt to summon DROVES of zombies, telling you that Q administers an antidote when scratched or bitten when no such thing exists in the game. I was leery myself when I read the tip, but still shocked by the massive wave of rotting flesh ambling towards me, and it lead to a really memorable and rather funny experience. On the other hand, games like MGSV, as you mentioned, have tutorials that are so engrossing and attention capturing with the sudden story or action going on that you hardly think back on them as tutorials, and more just the intro to the game. I dunno, maybe my opinion of what makes a piece of media "good" is more generous than most people, but I enjoy a fair number of games and even tutorials that are admittedly flawed or not the best made. Maybe I'm just easy to please when it comes to games and movies and such, but honestly I see that as a perk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A good tutorial is determined if you don't remember playing it
That is, built in the first few levels as new mechanics
So, you actually have played it but not consciously enough to realize
THIS GUY WONT MISS
honestly ur stuff has so much quality, its both entrtaining and educative... its amazing
The Nier:Automata "tutorial" is one of my favorites - it's an essential part of the story, doesn't feel boring and can be quite challenging already (there is also the easteregg that let's you skip to the ending of the game from there :P)
Small criticism for Nier:Automata's tutorial, if you die you have to do a large part all over again. I got distracted and died, after which I almost put the game down when I realized I had to re-do the flying sequence, because it was easy and boring the second time around.
@@cookiecan10 I mean that kinda prepares you for the rest of the game though? :D
@@derhesligebonsaibaum I mean, I suppose it does. It tells you: "Buckle up this one's gonna be a real slog to get through"
@@albertkrieger5700 yep and given that you have somewhat spread safepoints in Automata it fits in with the rest of the game.
The most confusing game to pick up for me was Hearts of Iron 4, I remember opening it up for the first time and not having a clue what all the symbols and menus and statistics meant
good day.
just an FYI, I quit any game that dumps a wall of text at me.
my time to play games is very limited and the last thing I want to do is spend half of the time reading, then forget what I need to do when I come back to it.
Another tutorial trope is the: 'you have everything, oh wait, now you lost it all' one
Factorio somehow manages to do it right and wrong at the same time.
- On the first stage, to learn how the game works, you have to set up the tutorial robot so it shows you what to do.
- On the second stage, to learn how electricity works, you see it on the tech tree and screw with the water pipes until it works. It will overheat at some point and then you'll learn how to manage your power resources.
- On the third stage, to learn how oil works, the first thing you need to do is go to Wikipedia and learn some petroleum engineering fundamentals.
Now, this part might be jst me, bt I suck at driving cars in video games, so I never bother getting the rover at first and instead use the conveyor belts as transport. And the rover is electric anyway, so once you optimise the conveyor belt system past a certain point there's literally nothing you can do until you master oil processing. To add to this, you use the same pipes for oil and water and gas and you have to just hope youu don't mix them or your whole facility is useless and you have to start unbuilding and rebuilding everything, all under a time constraint because you screwed up the electric system so if you don't figure it out quickly the whole plant shuts down and you can't build the stuff you need. Starting the oil stage of the game has zero incentives, all drawbacks and the game never tells you how to do anything when it's so different from all you did before, so it becomes overwhelming. There's an engagement bottleneck that at least for me means I always drop the game when I get to that stage becase there's nothing else I can do without teaching myself fluid mechanics, which is an astonishingly tough expectation especially considering how intuitive everything was before.
overheating is a thing in factorio? I have reached around about the point where you start mass producing red circuits and i have also completed the tutorial but never saw anything like overheating or a tutorial "robot". Although I can totally relate to the oil processing bit being a big engagement bottleneck.
Tutorial robot? Overheating? Electric rover? Are you sure it was Factorio?
Journey has some of the best mechanic (and lore) discoverability I've ever experienced.
It's also a fairly simple game mechanically
I mean Having a character explain the rules of the game is better than having to look at the pause menu for the controls like in the original Doom games, it took me 5 minutes to learn I could press buttons on the wall because those old games didn't have a tutorial
i loved nier automatas tutorial because it was set up after doing things that would make you go "man I wish I knew how to change the fov/audio" as well as it introducing how the androids and black boxes work. plus being able to revisit yourself interacting with the menus in the start of ending b. truely the only tutorial that had me praising it past just quick humor (like portal 2)
a hat in time has one of the best tutorials I've seen. Pretty much throughout the whole game you'll be learning new elements very naturally. but they're still super fun to replay despite that, because once you master the movement/hat mechanics in a level there are always new things to look for, and you can always redo your platforming alot better than you did the first time.
It also probably helps that there's like, 3 basic buttons
Jump, attack, ability
Then that's about it
Hollow Knight is a great example in my mind, especially the one area which teaches you that you can hit yourself off of spikes so you're actually able to traverse over them (similarly to the Mario coins example).
Only problem is, the first time I played it I never even realized this anyway and just went on through a bunch of the game completely without that mechanic.
I guess the only problem about these invisible tutorials is how they can effectively be made pointless by how stupid users can be sometimes!
The great part about that section is that on a first playthrough you will find out about being able to pogo in the fungal wastes and when you go back to forgotten crossroads, you'll realize you can pogo off of many things.
i just finished watching all your videos, this was perfect timing!
"any tutorial you remember sucks" *proceeds to list things that make tutorials fun/memorable*
I believe that was more to emphasize how making an invisible, seamless tutorial is the way to go in their opinion.
I love god of war 2018 but I can’t comprehend how the “minimal tutorials” option means have 99% of the same pop ups that take a lifetime before you can close them, and will actively restrict your ability’s until that stupid pop up appears, and while they still did a few pop ups that take an eternity to close, with ragnarok, they put a lot less and they don’t restrict any of your ability’s, so a great step in the right direction.