Are Built-in Tutorials Good Design?

As long as it's skip-able, I think that in game tutorials are great. But sometimes they aren't.

I find nothing so frustrating in a game as being forced to do something other than play it. And cramming in cut scenes and locking out features fit into this category for me too.

In Dead Rising 2, there are several cut scenes and a brief mini-game that come before the game itself. Each cut scene has to be skipped individually, meaning that even if I press start in the first second of a cut scene I have to wait through the too-slow loading of the next cut scene, which I will probably also skip just to stare at another loading screen. And even after that, passages between some sections of the map are locked for no reason and can only be unlocked by playing story missions until a character arbitrarily unlocks them. It's maddening.

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Original post by AesteroidBlues I can think of plenty of reasons to support their inclusion in a game (namely, getting the player accustomed to the game without having them read an instruction manual), but are there any drawbacks?

Can't you think of any? Really? If not, then just do it.

My main piece of advice: if you use it, make it skippable.

I like built in tutorials myself, but I hate getting stuck in them. The best solution I've seen is splitting the tutorials up and allowing the player to go through them in any order.

They are questionable design choices.

For most games genres we have fairly well defined control schemes. If you change something, then ideally you should be able to pick it up on the fly with a few very quick comments/tooltips/whatever. If I can't skip it, then the tutorial should be fun or interesting, even if I already know how to play.

Ideally an interactive 'demo' should be an option from the main screen. "How do I play" or something like that, and have it walk you through core concepts of how the interface works.

If I have played the game before, I should either not have to touch the tutorial again in my lifetime, or I should breeze through it in a minute or two. (And by never again in my lifetime, I mean I have the option to skip it from the get go. None of this play through once after installing and it goes away.)

Black and White was an excellent example of how NOT to do a tutorial. Long, unskippable, and with long and annoying parts of listening to nothing of importance that you again, couldn't skip.

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Original post by Talroth If I can't skip it, then the tutorial should be fun or interesting, even if I already know how to play.

It's funny, the moment I read that I thought of the tutorial for Mirror's Edge. I've got most of the achievements for it and I still play the tutorial when I start a new game, it's just fun. I totally agree about Black and White, that was arduous.

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Original post by Khaiy I find nothing so frustrating in a game as being forced to do something other than play it. And cramming in cut scenes and locking out features fit into this category for me too.

I find cut scenes in general to be unnecessary for a lot of modern games, I just don't have the patience for them anymore. It's especially devious when they put in quick time events to make you feel like you're still playing.

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Original post by Tom Sloper Can't you think of any? Really? If not, then just do it.

Just trying to stimulate some discussion on the topic, it's something I've seen a lot of mixed reactions over.

An actual case study:

The standard mainline Battle for Wesnoth distribution includes a tutorial "campaign".

Instead of appearing on the list of installed campaigns, it has its own invocation button or clickiething or whatever. Thus players might not even notice that there is a tutorial if they simply look at the list of available campaigns and pick one to play.

Unlike any of the (other) "mainline" campaigns, the tutorial allows you to choose who to play! You can choose to play a fighter of male gender or of female gender.

Thus, the tutorial looked to me to be the most apt campaign to hack at to start learning how to make my own campaign(s) because simply by asking the player who they want to play I could "bundle" many campaigns into one "add-on", cutting down the amount of clutter (read: spam) I could potentially add to the add-ons server by packaging each and every campaign as a complete add-on unto itself.

Result: my "Between the Worlds" add-on starts each character choice in a variant of the tutorial! Want to be a Time Lord - uh, make that Time Lad, apologies to the B.B.C. - no problem, presto, a Time Cadet Tutorial! Learn all the things a Time Cadet needs to know, such as how to convince your mentor that you know how to handle a sword, how to convince your mentor that you know how to recruit troops, how to convince your mentor that... well, maybe you get the idea.

In reality I actually want starting into such a career to be something you would really prefer NOT to have to do again. A lot of troops probably feel that way about Basic Training, and a lot of Basic Training is probably deliberately designed to be something the troops will not want to repeat.

It seems to have worked, I think. I did get people complaining that they did not want to be forced to play the tutorial.

Of course Time Cadets use as part of their standard equipment various Grand Nexus Uberplan (GNU) software tools planted on many worlds by the Mission Area Protectorate (MAP), and Battle for Wesnoth is one of those tools. So of course the character should be made to go through the tutorial! The character is supposed to know how to use Battle for Wesnoth! When the character advances to Holobarracks Programming the Battle for Wesnoth system will be one of the tools they use to storyboard holodramas!

So don't think of it as you the player being forced to play the tutorial, think of it as demonstrating to the player (show don't tell!) that the character does know how to do things the Battle for Wesnoth way!

If you like you can try the add-on for yourself and see whether or not having the character be a newbie being put through a tutorial is a good thing or a bad thing in your own experience...

I find that a good tutorial is often the most fun part of a game, because you are experimenting with a new gameplay element, not just doing the same old thing. Consider the zelda series - every single dungeon gives you a new tool and new puzzles requiring the use of that tool to solve. Similarly the single player campaigns for the Warcraft series - pretty much every campaign gives you a new unit and a situation in which that unit is particularly helpful. The tutorial is the game, and it's a good game.

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Original post by AesteroidBlues Just trying to stimulate some discussion on the topic, it's something I've seen a lot of mixed reactions over.

It would be better stimulant if you'd actually start the discussion (offer pros and cons yourself).

[Edited by - Tom Sloper on December 16, 2010 9:12:19 AM]

As you mentioned that you were led to this in the course of thinking about a game of your own, I will add this implementation tip for you to contemplate:

In my Space Cadet and Time Cadet campaigns, there is a distinction made in certain units that new players might find subtle and that conceivably even players with prior experience of Battle for Wesnoth campaigns might not pick up on right away:

Some of the units are "Elven" rather than "Elvish".

Players with knowledge of a certain multiplayer "Era" add-on will presumably already know that "Elven" units as distinct from "Elvish" units are unit lines that advance all the way to level five, rather than only to level 3 (or possibly four, if noble).

Thus if by the time you do go back and start over you have realised this fact, and have also noticed the lack of further opportunities to recruit such units, it is quite possible that the long term potential of the actions available to you within the tutorial scenario will be far more apparent to you than they might have been the first time around, when possibly you might have been to some extent dismissing it as "just a tutorial" instead of realising it as your one and only chance this whole campaign of ever recruiting one of these "special", "high potential" elves.

The tip in this is, hey, just because it appears to be, or even functions as, a tutorial need not require that it not be a very valuable scenario to play through.

(I still find myself going back to it to choose yet another different nationality to claim myself to be in order not only to see what is actually different throughout the campaign about the viewpoints and experiences of Time Cadets of different nationality backgrounds but also to find out how many such special units each nationality's Time Cadet actually has in it's cadre of friends / comrades / associates or to correct some nationality's Time Cadet's failure to make enough such friends while he had the chance to do so.)

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Original post by Programmer16 My main piece of advice: if you use it, make it skippable.

After giving it some thought I think this is the best way to go. Since I'm working on a Metroidvania style game, most of the elements of the gameplay should be familiar to a good number of gamers, so having the tutorial in non-linear optional stages is what I'm going to do.

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Original post by sunandshadow I find that a good tutorial is often the most fun part of a game, because you are experimenting with a new gameplay element, not just doing the same old thing

I like your analogy to Zelda. Once I'm done fleshing out all the power ups and abilities for my game, I'll definitely be thinking about how to implement this. I think Portal did an excellent job of a tutorial stage because the first half of the game was tutorial stages, though very subtly masked. The Valve commentary for Portal was pretty interesting from a design perspective, they talk about design challenges like helping the player understand how portals worked, and how to get them accustomed to new gameplay mechanics as they were introduced.

MarkM: I'm not working on an RTS, and I'm not familiar with Battle for Wesnoth, but I'll check it out over the weekend. I can see, though, how making a player do the tutorial for an RTS would be valuable (I play the tutorial stages every time I start an RTS, but then again I'm really bad at that genre,) and I agree with you that having a tutorial be a valuable scenario to play through can be interesting - though sometimes they introduce so much story in the tutorial stage that it gets back to what what Khaiy was saying about cut scenes and forcing the story into the early stages of the game. It's just not a very good way to draw people in on a more linear, story-based game type.

My response is mostly the same as the others, but instead of making it skippable, I would make it totally optional. When I played Prototype through all the difficulties, it kind of disturbed the experience when the same tutorial was gone through in the beginning. It's great that they're giving such a nice tutorial in the storyline, but I really don't have to read everything 3 or more times. Sames goes for GTA, but they have those stupid non-skippable "we-wait-til-you-can-read-everything"-screens, like when you die and they explain what happens there. And if you press Escape, you see the menu. Sucks so hard..

So I would like to see a separate tutorial-mode in games, which sort of flashes up in the main menu, but only before starting the actual singleplayer or multiplayer mode for the first time. Once you go ingame, you probably aren't as interested in tutorials as before.

Example of a really bad tutorial: The Witcher. The first part of the game was a forced tutorial where the player has very little interaction with the game, and the game does a movie-watching extravaganza with intermittant now-push-the-button segments.

Better tutorial: Age of Conan, where the first five levels of a character acclimatize the player without feeling like a wretched lecture.

Great tutorial: Titan Quest, where the first time a feature is present, a pop-up explanation window comes up, which can be disabled/enabled.