I hear a lot about frustrating, unskippable tutorials. What games do a good job at teaching you what you need to know?
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The legacy console editions of Minecraft have always done a good job in my opinion as a tutorial. It’s hard to skip it (or at least was for me) and it really walks you through the basics. Then you have the choice of learning more or just… going out and playing minecraft
Plants vs Zombies
Driver for ps1. I’m not sure though if I’m sarcastic.
Kind of tangential but I’ve always found the start of fallout 3 (the iconic scene where you exit the vault) to be a lesson in game design. Here’s a completely open world but I can guarantee in ten minutes you’ll be at the entrance of megaton. No direct prompting, just subtle framing and environmental clues.
For all the faults Nintendo embody, they know how to make tutorials, especially with the Mario series. You may think “there are no tutorials in Mario” but that’s part of it. Nintendo’s design formula for making stages for Mario games consist of “introduction, escalation, complication.” First they throw a new mechanic at you, maybe the stage has rotating cylinders you need to stay on top of to progress, and not fall down. Then they up the difficulty a bit, adding more factors to the gameplay like introducing enemies that you have to dodge simultaneously. Then finally they turn the new concept up to 11 towards the end, by making you have to juggle both the new mechanics and some other modifiers, perhaps having to fight a boss at the same time, or perhaps requiring some more advanced platforming maneuvers to progress. That way a stage can be a tutorial, and you don’t even realize it.
Hard agree, BOTW in particular was spectacular. The Great Plateau.
When you finish the tutorial bits and it’s like “you need to go over here” and the map just opens up and you realize this game is FUCKING HUGE 🤌
The best tutorials are ones that are fun to play both on your first time and subsequent playthroughs
Something like portal, hollow knight or hades
Mega Man is a pretty sweet example, explained by this blast from the past.
Super Mario Bros.
The first level literally is designed to progressively teach you everything you need to know how to play the game and it doesn’t even have a single line of text to do it.
Although I do have to say it is a bit funny that Dark Souls’ tutorial is just some messages on the ground and the first one tells you how to move. But you have to move over to it to read it in the first place.
I can tell you what the worst tutorial is.
It’s Monster Hunter World.
I’m going to guess with near certainty that Monster Hunter World was your first Monster Hunter game if you think THAT tutorial was the worst hahaha
Yeah, it was. Trying to play, and it keeps stopping you with multiple full screens of text.
I don’t think they understand the concept of tutorials tbh.
I started on the first PSP game and it was heavily more obtuse, with almost zero direction, tutorial, hints, anything hahaha. It got a LITTLE better with later “old style” games but it was still pretty obtuse. World NEEDED a tutorial that explained every little detail and held yer hand, otherwise new players would be hella turned off by the game and it wouldn’t have blown up like it did.
Pokemon games also routinely come close.
I was expecting a joke comment mentioning Driver.
I am disappointed I had to scroll this far to find something like that.
Dead cells, there are people out there with hours of gameplay that haven’t completed the tutorial.
absolutely not Warframe.
Yeah haha. They made the tutorial slightly better nowadays, but your still getting thrown in the deep end after the Vor quest line.
The original Portal game does a good job of this. The first several puzzles are essentially tutorials that still manage to feel fun and interesting.
I’m here to say Portal as well, specifically because, once you really look for it, you realise that about 90% of the game is tutorial. Like, seriously, basically everything leading up to “The cake is a lie” is teaching you the skills you need for the final sequence. It’s a massive tutorial followed by one level of actual game, and it’s beautiful, precisely because you don’t even notice that the tutorial hasn’t ended.
A lot of the game before you escape the testing track, minus maybe the point you are told about momentum jumps, feel like one big tutorial without even realizing you’re in one. It’s done very well.
Portal 2 imo. Stephen Marchant makes everything better
Portal 2 has the best introduction to jumping controls of any tutorial in existence.
Apple
Stephen Merchant.
Correction not to be an asshole, but because looking up Stephen Marchant brings up a different human
When I played through Portal in dev commentary mode, I was surprised at the time to realize they’re basically trying to teach you things through the whole game (or at least heavily signpost). Made me realize a lot about game design, and design in general.
Tribes: Vengeance’s campaign story is basically one giant tutorial (and a great one at that) on how you move and play in multiplayer.
Too bad that the game didn’t take off at all back then, now there’s just small communities that get together once in a while :l
There’s a lot of videos and articles like this one discussing how Stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros for the NES is a cleverly designed tutorial for the core game mechanics.
Yeah, this is still the GOAT 🐐.
I want to shout out Left 4 Dead’s game instructor for smoothly teaching new players the game even while they’re playing with others. Get more ammo here. Use adrenaline to do stuff faster. Give Nick your pills. Rescue is coming - defend yourself! Then, once you’ve played enough, the help messages gradually become less frequent.
I’ll also shout it out for being my favourite implementation of HUD markers in any game. The icon pulses into view close to your crosshair, then flies over to the thing it’s pointing at. If it goes off-screen, the marker returns next to your crosshair, with an arrow indicating which direction to look in to see it again. A lot of other games have marker icons just suddenly appear at the spot and they crawl along the edge of the screen if the item is off-screen. The way L4D does it really draws my eyes.
Hopefully once HL3 is released we get a L4D3
