Tutorials Suck
While most of the industry heaps pop-up on top of overlay in search of the perfect tutorial to help your mother/grandfather/spouse play their latest game, I’d like to step in with a reminder. The person who is most likely to be playing your game doesn’t need your shoehorned tutorial, and you’re just pissing them off.
How concerned are you that I won’t be able to figure out to press A to activate something? And if I need to hit something, don’t you think I’ll figure out in a hurry if it’s A, X, Y, B, or trigger? And– this is by far the worst offender– do you really need to stick a pop-up in my face to tell me that the right stick moves the camera? Look: I figured out the nearest game store, I heard about your game from someone, I dropped 60 bucks in addition to the entrance fee for the console of my choice. Do you think I’ve done all this without ever having played a game before?
Let me guess: you picked up some guy off the street and ran him through your focus test. After he figured out that the controller wasn’t a necklace, he made some comment like, “Hmm… I can’t figure out what the attack button is. Crap… oh, wait, it’s X! Awesome! Die, rat!” Your take-home from this was that you need to have a bunch of text (or even voice-acted dialog) telling the player about the attack button. (Your other take-home? Rats are AWESOME introductory enemies.)
Fun may involve learning, but learning isn’t sufficient. (Raph Koster elaborated on this recently, in a post discussing fun in games, class, and sex.) The fun doesn’t kick in until you’re using the tools the game gives you, pushing your boundaries, learning the new patterns the game is throwing your way. If that’s when the fun starts, don’t you want to get each player to that point as quickly as possible? And since players may be coming into your game with different levels of skill, doesn’t the beginning of the game need to be self-paced?
Halo 3′s tutorials are a pretty good example of how to do things properly. Early in the game, you’re presented with a ledge you need to jump over. If you jump over it– fantastic! You’ve already figured out the jump button. If not, pretty soon the game will display a text overlay telling you that A is the jump button. This is far less obtrusive than most games and, tellingly, more likely to be helpful– Halo’s much more likely to be someone’s first FPS than a lower-selling niche title.
Why all this antipathy towards tutorials? I’m knee-deep in Fable 2 right now, and loving it. Yet the first hour or so almost put me to sleep, even though, as far as tutorials go, it was really more elaborate and well-done than most I’ve seen. They tried to hide everything under backstory exposition, but look– I just bought the game, I want to get in the action now. And now that I’ve turned tutorials off in the menu, my screen’s still covered with tons of UI hints. I know you want your game to be accessible, but who’s the audience that doesn’t understand the A button 10 hours into the game?