I was coming here to mention Dark Souls. It's an excellent example of how to make a tutorial not feel like a tutorial. Either you take the time to understand what the game is telling you or not, up to you. Don't care about going through the entire tutorial area? Just beat the boss and start the real adventure.
Comment on What game has the best tutorial, in your opinion?
caut_R@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Dark Souls since it doesn‘t stop you in your tracks much. I dislike tutorials that stop you and make you read walls of text or force you to input/click exactly what it wants you to.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 5 days ago
unit327@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Dark Souls has a good tutorial because it lets you skip it? That’s your bar for a good tutorial?
Souls games are terrible at even explaining what the buttons do. Every blind lets play I’ve seen it is like 30 minutes before the player even discovers they have estus or what it is for.
caut_R@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yes, I prefer a game that lets me figure things out on my own through gameplay instead of popups. You are (arguably) forced to engage with the game‘s mechanics to beat the level, it has parries, environmental hazards, ambushes all in it without huge punishment in case of failure. I take the aha moment of using estus over „press square to heal.“ I‘m aware that others might need more guidance, but I didn’t and hence it‘s a great tutorial for me.
I wouldn‘t mind replaying the tutorial even now after having done it dozens of times already. It doesn‘t feel like one, I’m already playing the game and having fun, immersed in its world. So my bar is: The best tutorials don‘t feel like tutorials at all.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If I don’t want to play the tutorial and I get absolutely blasted, then I gotta walk my sorry self back to the tutorial like the idiot I chose to be. I like to press all the buttons and figure stuff out on my own, its part of the exploration process.
I don’t hate when certain gameplay elements are forced, but when I am given that impression I expect the whole game to be like that. The tutorial in Dark Souls promised me the game wasn’t going to hold my hand the whole time by letting me completely skip the tutorial, and then it kept that promise. It didn’t hold my hand. And I think that was great. Meanwhile Call of Duty tutorials hold your hand the whole time, and then your hand keeps getting held for the whole game. Also good.
The tutorials I think are bad are ones that fail to properly communicate important features of the game. If I choose to skip that part it is no fault of the game.
For example, Helldivers 2, which I enjoy greatly, has a tutorial that fails to teach the player what the Galactic War means, anything about the various mission types, or especially how to deal with supply lines and reinforcement routes. What happens in the players spend a lot of time and effort doing the wrong thing expecting the right result, a result they can never achieve because the game never actually told them how to do it. There isn’t a bestiary where players can read about various enemies and their weak spots, you just have to trial and error figure it out, or have someone else that did that already tell you.