I keep thinking back to "The Last Remnant", where a battle began where a tutorial message popped up about how the bar at the bottom of the screen shows which side has the moral advantage and how that makes the respestive troups do better in battle........... que a scripted fight where both the player characters and monsters always miss, and said bar never moves and stays at 50-50 until it just ends. ............ oh yeah, now I know... thanks game

prey (2017) is a fun game--but i felt like the tutorials were super overhwelming. for the first act of the game, my screen was getting covered by popups & text tutorials--oftentimes while i was exploring, fighting, etc--so i ended up ignoring most of the tutorials... also main story characters talking to me while i was in combat was very annoying, & i could barely focus on the story i was being told. tl;dr prey's a good game, but i hate how it throws a bunch of information at me all at once, especially in the form of text. i dont mind reading but i find excessive popups like that to be annoying, distracting, & overwhelming. oftentimes to the point where i would just ignore it instead (& the same applies to story information....) :-[

The hypnotorious example made me think about why the game was designed like that. My immediate thought is to get people talking and giving hints for people that are playing it for the first time thinking of it as a relatively cooperative game, preventing people doing unfun play styles like lying about answers or being deliberately vague and quite. On the other side why people who have played it bring it up to new players is that it's unfair and unfun for some players to know and not others but in contrast to just new players in theory it should be fine as long as those that played before set a good example of how to play in a fun way. As for the complaint bout game balance I haven't played it and can't say how it works out in practice, but for a party game bundled with a bunch of other party games most people might play anywhere from a few of times a month to a couple times a year. as long as the balance issues aren't both obvious and egregious it shouldn't prevent it from being enjoyable.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons does this really bizarre thing in the beginning when they introduce bridges. The first one is made by crafting it - gathering materials, and putting them together at a crafting table. You're never able to make bridges that way again. From that point on, you say you want to build a bridge then raise funds for it.

TEARS OF THE KINGDOM HAD A SHRINE SENSOR!??!?!?!?!?!?

Now i'm thinking of Viva Pinata, where the tutorial lady can and will just give you wrong information sometimes, on purpose, as a joke. Which considering it's a fairly complicated management sim, marketed to young children, is...Non-optimal.

Unicorn Overlord also struggles with the fact that RNG so heavily affects the Battle. Plus its often better to create fewer OP Squads that overpower the enemy rather than multiple teams that use class tactical advantage like mentioned. When I got Veronica, I ended up putting her in a squad in a with other Calvary and it quickly became my best squad, able to deal with anything, Magic, Ranged, Physical, Healing, etc. It felt unfair given how little thought I really put into the squad and how good it was compared to my other squads.

Baldur's Gate 1+2 for Switch. I had to consult a screenshot of the controls from the options (not accessible during the tutorial) because buttons necessary to progress weren't explained, NPCs will interrupt you while you're bringing up the X menu to tell you how to do X, it doesn't accurately check whether you've done the thing you're meant to do, and then finally my party died because a party member _stopped attacking in the middle of combat_ to explain something I'd already done. I get that a game that old has tech debt, but sheesh.

lol on Final Fantasy 13, the 10 chapter, 20 hour tutorial.

Retaining information from a tutorial in a fast-paced game is a problem I've ran into. I was a designer on a arcadey, hi-octane driving action game, and short on dev-time we had to shoehorn in a 'tutorial' in the first level. So we did the classic pop-up tutorials (where the game pauses with text pop-ups) to teach you the controls and basic mechanics. There were a couple of problems with this. First of all, the game constantly pausing in the middle of the action to teach you the latest thing was quite annoying when it's a game all about moving fast and cool actions. I watched players just skip right through the pop-ups because they were getting in the way of the fun and the pacing. Secondly, because there was so much going on in the game players simply wouldn't take in the information. They would do the correct action but then forget about it minutes later because it's such a frantic game. Thirdly, as the game was on handheld it was designed as a dip-in, dip-out game. We found that some players who took a break and came back would simply forget some of the controls for some of the gameplay sections. Aside from those initial pop-ups there was no way to re-teach them the info. To fix these issues in the sequel, we still used pop-ups but had them much more paced out over multiple levels so they wouldn't hurt the flow. In addition we had button prompts on-screen during gameplay at the appropriate times throughout the game. We also had the game detect if a player hadn't used a crucial ability for a while and would have a button prompt reminder (without pausing) they could use it. One of the most important abilities in both games was to spend a power gauge you built up for a special move or on healing, which requires a button press. So players wouldn't forget to use it, or the button for it, we incorporated the button prompt into the gauge's UI design and it would highlight when at max power when they could use the special move. With these fixes we largely eliminated all the tutorial problems the first game had. Even though the game had simple controls, you can still run into issues if a game is overloading a player. Some things to be aware of if you are making a fast-paced game!

I have a question for tackling a tutorial for a game I want to develop and sell one day. The game operates as (I believe that its called) a quasi-realtime RPG. Where instead of turns the game runs based on attack cooldowns. My aim for the long game is that players learn the importance of set-ups and combos for the endgame. But I can't just dump all of that on them at the beginning because they still need how to operate the game while using a single character. I would also love some tips on incorporating a tutorial into a system about timing and quick thinking.

I'll be real, i definitely skipped some of the tutorial sidequests in Totk because I didnt know where to find them. Didnt need them either, since i got through the game just fine by wandering around.

my favorite impossible boss is herobrine from minecraft, sad they removed him though

Nintendo games are almost always fashioned around pointless, miniature university sessions. Look at the Mario & Luigi rpg games. Whenever you are given a new game mechanic, it goes into an hour long unskippable plotline to show you in slow motion how the mechanic works, and even holds your hand while you are practicing it, only to find out that the moment the tutorial is over, you may never actually use this mechanic again.

It is tricky business, especially in longer linear games. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is an amazing game, but when you look at the bigger picture of tutorials and having the complete arsenal, the case can be made that the tutorial doesnt end until around the 3rd last chapter of the game. It is mostly hyperbolic, and the execution is generally done well, but the way the protagonist grows mechanically through the story turns them from an equal or slightly inferior choice for control to the most broken, up to the point that the player handicaps themselves a bit by playing as anyone else. And to make matters worse, the protagonist gets more powerful mechanically at the expense of another. Again, it is far from game breaking, but if you over-invest in the character who gets weaker (without knowing they will fall off in the endgame), the game has very little options to correct the mistake, and the options that exist are extremely resource intensive. And all of this is just the macro level. The game's initial tutorials are not perfect, either. Compared to how much control the player has at the end of the game, the early game is mostly a matter of drawing your weapon and waiting for the fight to end with no further player input. In the earliest parts of the tutorial, you have no one to share aggro with, so you just sit there. The tutorial for a secondary mechanic to speed up fights is poorly explained with one of the worst options in the game for the purpose it serves and has some contradictory elements like trying to preserve the consumables that work on a timer for the moments it would be most useful but the game auto refreshes the effect if there are more copies of the item sitting in your inventory, and there is no way to toggle how many you want to limit consumption to. Once an item is consumed, it will consume until your stock hits 0 or you overwrite the effect by wasting a different item and waiting for it to hit 0 instead. The game waits so long to let the player change the character they are controlling that many likely wont bother unless they want full control over the growth of a character tied to them. One character you can build requires a mechanic that is unlocked at the start of the 4th chapter, despite having the ability to unlock them before that point. Since the character in question cant grow before the mechanic is unlocked, they are likely starting to fall off in the gap between initially unlocking them and finally gaining the ability to let them grow. All that said, i would still recommend the game to anyone that might enjoy the genre, but the little hiccups are there.

Game Dev here. It took a long time to get the tutorials to its current stage in Super BAWK BAWK Chicken. It's amazing how many people approach things differently and how watching people play your tutorial is crucial to getting it working as intended. I only wish we had more videos of people playing it on KZfaq so I could continue to learn. For now I'll settle with the videos present + Design Doc videos + GDC talks such as the one tutorials from the creator of PvZ.

Top notch swords!

Yeah despite playing BOTW beforehand, I did struggle a bit in the beginning with TOTK after leaving the Great Sky Island. This was purely my fault, because I didn’t want to progress the main story “juust yet” and because of this, didn’t get the paraglider. Traversing was difficult, and I got stuck on a shrine for at least half an hour of frustration before I gave up and looked it up, only for it to *require* the paraglider to finish, no other way to do it.

I hate tutorials that don't let you pay the game. I quit moonlighter at the tutorial

This video is LoZ:TotK slander, and... I am TOTALLY onboard. As much as I'm happy for the people who are able to ignore or fail to recognize all of its flaws, and as much as it is a legitimate technological marvel, Tears of the Kingdom is completely the same as Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts in every single aspect and angle you can examine it from. Not just from a literal physics-based game mechanics standpoint, but also in how it handles the established lore and fantasy the series is supposed to be fulfilling.

Any tutorial that cannot be completely skipped is an automatic fail. Tutorials that make everything super simple are also really bad for the sheer fact that you're not actually being taught how to use your options, just what they are- and I can do that by looking at the controls menu. Good example is Dishonored 1 vs 2. Dishonored 2 has a skippable tutorial that's completely out of place and doesn't teach you how the game actually works. Dishonored 1 introduces basic movement and combat in a risk-free but in-context way, everything else is a tooltip pop-up and the game immediately goes "here's a controlled setting, figure it out." The tutorial is blended with actually playing the game. But it still gets a fail because the basic movement and combat intro is not skippable aside from the stealth portion.

Hehe, Other M's Power Bombs need no introduction!

Paper Mario. Not TTYD, the original (well, the switch port of it). I played it after playing TTYD on Gamecube, and was really wondering whether or not I should continue playing by the time I reached the game's first boss. It didn't matter that I could either hammer or jump on him, there was no interaction, both did minimal damage, and I was scraping by. The thing that made combat fun in TTYD was the action commands. It added a layer of skill to turn based combat. In Paper Mario, you don't get action commands until several fights and what feels like half an hour into the game. I know it's not actually that long, but it feels like it's that long because of how boring and scripted the combat is. In fact, it might be possible to soft lock yourself if you're careless with the few mushrooms the game gives you, because they're both extremely limited, and the only option you have in combat besides "do 1 damage". The problem I'm pointing out: don't lock key mechanics of your game behind a tutorial, unless that tutorial is available at the beginning of the game.

I'd like to nominate Warframe as being one of the most hostile video game experiences in existence for new players and especially for returning players. Had my fun with the game, muddled through with lots of help from friends, stopped playing for four years, came back and was completely bewildered to the point that I just uninstalled to go play something else.

It’s a similar concept but you should make an episode about video game demos!

I see no one is talking about this, so here I go. Sonic and the Secret Rings has one of the worst tutorials in gaming history. The Lost Prologue has obnoxious environmental noises as its "music," it is by far the most uninteresting looking location in the game, and is the bane of any completionist, or speedrunner's, existence. Instead of having one level that teaches you all the basic mechanics of this game already filled with unresponsive controls, it, like all the other areas in the game, is split into smaller missions. Unlike the other areas in this game, however, it tries to teach the player every single one of these mechanics one at a time, each separated by level complete jingles, long loading screens, and, sometimes, even having to change your loadout to a worse version, because that's the one they want to teach you. There are so many instances where they could have cut redundant levels and just made things quicker, like, for instance, there is a level that teaches the player how to jump, then a later level that teaches them how to jump again, so they can teach them how to homing attack. They could've also merged other levels into each other in some more interesting ways, like taking the one where the player dodges obstacles left and right, and putting it with the backwards walking tutorial, by having the player press a switch at the end of the path to open the path to the goal, then have to back out, because the switch is in an enclosed space. This would also cut the original walking backwards tutorial, which everyone who's played Sonic and the Secret Rings agrees is the most frustrating one by far. The current design of the Lost Prologue also makes another fatal mistake that tutorials should never make, being more technically demanding than the entire rest of the game, short of the final level. That aforementioned backwards walking tutorial gives the player a time limit to collect every single ring laid out on a winding path behind them before touching the goal (which is practically touching the last ring by the way), never seeming to realise that the left and right movements are even more janky when walking backwards in this game, and that the camera not properly showing the player where the rings, or the goal, are before the player touches them. This problem, among others, can cause players to spend hours on a f****** tutorial. To get to my next two points, I must first tell a quick story: When I was younger, I once got stupidly good at Sonic and the Secret Rings, to the point where I'd stacked more and more speed onto my build, and was trying to get as many of the game's gold medals as I could. Some areas, like Sand Oasis, I managed to 100%, while others, such as Pirate Storm, I'd managed to get around half of them. The stage I'd gotten the least gold medals in, by far, was Lost Prologue, where I'd gotten only 7... OUT OF MORE THAN 20!!! Five of the basic tutorials, and the later unlocked Speed/Time Break tutorials. All of which I could cheese with my faster loadout. The gold medals, and sometimes even the silver ones, require inhuman precision on overly handholdy tutorials that take forever to retry. A truly abysmal combination that I just gave up on a few minutes after trying. When I had already perfected most of the rest of this game, I was beaten utterly by its damn tutorial! The worst part about Lost Prologue is that, if you want to 100% the game, or even just complete every mission, you have to constantly return to this stupid area, for the game to teach you how to use every item you unlock for your loadout, including better versions of the exact same upgrade, with each one of them requiring the player to go into their loadout menu, equip the SPECIFIC item the level wants, then enter into the level proper, because why not! All I'm going to say to close this post off is that, when I see people ragequit Sonic and the Secret rings, 9 times out of 10 it's because of Lost Prologue, even if those people will tell you it's the game's bad controls. I may no longer be good at this game, and may have no reason, or motivation, to play it anymore, but that's entirely because I know that I probably no longer have my save data, and would have to trudge through Lost Prologue again. WORST. LEVEL. EVER.

Criticize me if you want, but I think Leon Kuwata is an excellent first boss on Danganronpa

Super metroid. Get lost, have a map, and tools to check every tile available. Make traversal fun and difficult to master but easy to approach, sprinkle in a bunch of neat bugs and exploits and glitches. Endless replayability trying to get a better time /different routes/playthroughs

xenoblade 2 is a game with poor tutorials. it often give half truths and lies to what its teaching, and even teaches you stuff in advanced that wont be useful. an example of a wrong tutorial is the field collection skills. the game says higher levels means higher rewards when it should be saying activation chance. the chain attack is also taught way to early as most fights at that point in the game are short and dont last long.

That used to be the norm in video games. Suffer through the hard part to get to a save point. It's really more of a problem of gamers so spoiled by autosaves every two steps that caution just isn't a factor for most. And if a half hour lost progress is enough to give up on a game forever that's not really the devs fault either.

Astral Chain is already convoluted to play, but any tutorial about counterattacks that require vague timing and have vague instructions? Forget 'em. Words from a holographic dog don't do nothin' to illustrate how it's done, and the unique controls aren't helping. I can't get back into it at all. Penny's Big Breakaway felt more natural, and I only played the demo for that.

As much as I love Persona 4 and its tutorial which doesn't tell you much, I feel like there's better ways to give the impression that your team of people with precisely zero prior combat experience are coming up with battle strategies on the fly while still giving the player a more solid idea of what they're doing. My personal favorite idea to cite is that you could have Yosuke, the guy who's supposed to be the brains of the Investigation Team, suggest that he and his totally-non-boyfriend could easily press the advantage they created through knocking down the enemies before them by rushing them before they get up, thereby explaining what an All-Out Attack is without needing to break immersion.

Tutorials...ugh. How about I tell my story with some, regarding one of my favourite series, Xenoblade Chronicles? XC: Definitive Edition largely keeps the tutorial system from the original game, in that any tutorials that interrupt gameplay aren't intrusive as they are informative for first-time players, yet also quickly mashed through for experienced players going through the game again. Additionally, there's a Tutorials menu, and the ones describing the differing gameplay styles of the characters are written as if the characters are talking amongst each other, providing a very welcome unique twist to them. XC: DE's tutorials are damn-near perfection, in my opinion, as they're done so masterfully well. XC2, meanwhile, has...rather infamously poor tutorials. A lot of things aren't covered by tutorials, and there's no Tutorials menu to review the ones that are described, making for a rather piss-poor first impression for new players. However, the tutorials that are present aren't intrusive, as they can be quickly mashed through, making replaying the game on a fresh save file very painless. XC3 has the ABSOLUTE WORST tutorials. Sure, they're way more informative than XC2's, and there is a Tips menu and a Training Drills system in case players don't know _how_ to do something, but the one *FATAL* flaw is how obnoxiously intrusive these tutorials are when playing through the game. Unlike the first two games, when you start XC3 you don't get access to Arts straightaway; the first two or so battles only allow auto-attacks. Slightly annoying, but fine. But every time a new character build aspect is unlocked (Arts, Accessories, Class changing, Master Arts, Gems, the Soul Tree, etc.) the game painfully holds your hands, slowly going through the menu to describe in detail what each aspect is. It doesn't give the player *any* freedom whatsoever - equip _this_ accessory, _this_ Gem, _this_ Art. Only switch to another character when I tell you to. Even when the tutorial's over, the menu is still stuck in the "Tutorial" state until it's fully closed - what do I mean? Once the game's finished talking about Gems, for example, you cannot view Quests or the Map or edit character builds until you fully close the menu, thus meaning you have to reopen the menu afterwards to do those things. Why‽ That's so needlessly redundant and backwards. I'm already of the opinion that Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a major disappointment and a step back compared to its Switch predecessors, and the obnoxiously intrusive and tedious tutorials don't help one bit.

A classic bad tutorial that comes to mind for me is Elebits. The Tutorial is actually outside the main game mode and completely optional, but it's SOOO Dang LONG. It's basically a teat of endurance to see how much of it you can tolerate getting through all the mechanisms you won't encounter for dozens of hours before just exiting and starting the game mode anyway. And then there's Dark Cloud. Its tutorial isn't _bad_ per se` so much as... seems to think it's a lot more self-explanatory than it is. The way you upgrade weapons is a fairly key mechanic in the game, but the tutorial tells you nothing about it, it just kind of expects you to intuit that the red numbers mean those stats are below quota to make the faded "build-up" button clickable. This isn't helped by the fact it never tells you how far short you are of the quota nor how close you are to the maximum cap. This also isn't helped by the fact that the game is really stingy with the items you need to build weapons' stats with. If you don't know what you're doing, it's way too easy to permanently screw up a weapon's stats and make it nearly unusable.

IIRC Xenoblade 2 has a sketchy tutorial. And by sketchy, I mean that sometimes it gives you information that is either bad or straight-up wrong.

You've really touched on something that made TotK less fun going into it. I spent ~20 hours without the camera, and had to resort to deliberately looking up information on how to get it. I preferred that BotW didn't let you wander off without all your tools.

A great game with subpar tutorials was Dreams on PS4, that game is so great but the lengthy, confusing tutorials and dumb tutorial system locking you off from learning how to use tools, is one of the major pitfalls of that game.

"...it's doubly bad when you can get through the test for the tutorial without using the lesson." I was just reminded of the ill-fated _Mighty No.9_ -- your backbone combat strategy is _supposed to be_ shooting enemies from a distance until they stun, then dash into them at melee range for the kill (and combos and points and whatnot). However, the opening level fails to enforce that you _actually do this_ when presented with your first wave of enemies. Oh, but remember how in _Super Mario RPG_ Toad will typically ask you if you want a tutorial about various mechanics early on? I'd love to be able to make a game with those kinds of choices -- and maybe with a bonus: you can give an especially snarky answer implying that you've played the game before and not only will the game skip the tutorial, it might even add additional objectives to the current situation.

So what would a high quality tutorial for a fighting game be like?

- “Sketchy tutorials” - “Oh, he’s definitely going to mention Driver” - 0:15 “And I like to talk about mistakes” 😂:KEKW:😂 To this day the memory of not finishing that tutorial as a kid haunt me, especially when the rumors (Internet wasn’t what it is now) were about how the rest of the game is no where near as demanding.

FFVII Remake does a pretty good job telling you how its mechanics work, but what it gets really wrong is how much you can practice those mechanics. Most of the regular enemies are waaaay too squishy, which means you don't really get to practice most of what you've learned. A lot of them die in a few successive hits, which means it's a cakewalk with nothing learned for a majority of fights. And then a boss hits you, and suddenly you're getting murdered. Now you finally have time to practice each character's fun mechanics, but you can't because the boss has its own mechanics and you're too busy trying to avoid them or desparately healing to avoid getting a KO. Not to mention the AWFUL boss transition that instantly kills all your hard work in breaking their gauge. I feel like this could have been easily fixed by having regular enemies in the early game be damage sponges that don't do too much damage against you. That way you get to practice smacking enemies with a ton of cool hits and dodging easily-telegraphed attacks. Then you'll be significantly more prepared when bosses with more complicated mechanics rolls in.

Giygas from earthbound... You can't beat him with simple attacks. He's EVIL itself. You have to pray him away with all of humanity to stop him.

Telling your audience to abuse prices being lower in a different country due to them having lower buying power with their currency feels very scummy since this can lead to them raising prices in the country that already has a major money problems

Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers is greatly written, has a LOT of in-universe explanations for mechanics, shows a bunch of the new mechanics for new players and people familiar with SRB2K, BUT THE PROBLEM is that its SLOW. So slow, kinda tedious, has awful text boxes, and in some cases the new mechanics might be kinda obtuse for players without first showing what they do before they try and complete the task at hand. As of May 31 the online manual is out, and it might give players a bit more info about how to play effectively and get around specific parts of the new tracks. Me and my friends had a somewhat hilarous first week playing since it felt a lot closer in some aspects to SRB2K and then we would get stomped with a new mechanic. After a couple of updates addressing some criticism I have to say that DRRR is shaping up to be the definitive kart fangame for everything SEGA and Sonic. I want to think I'm rough with it because I like the game so much.

Kecleons random ahh shops where i accidentally become murder case

I love games that give you an optional tutorial, either once the game starts or in the main menu.

I don't like randomness in general. Random encounters is irritating to me a lot of the time. With Pokemon it is even worse. If I want to catch a specific rare Pokemon, wading though the common ones is a nightmare. That is so terrible. The video shows footage from the old games and new games of the franchise. I see that the new version is far superior. I know Sword and Shield gets a lot of hate. However it is one of the first Pokemon games to get rid of at least some random encounters. That is an Arceus send right there. So good on Swird and Shield for doing that. I like these games just fine actually. They are fun and they got a decent playthrough. These games are so underrated. Dude! Dynamaxing is actually my favorite battle gimmick. It is awesome. I am okay with people liking certain other Pokemon games better than Sword and Shield. However these games get way too much hate. The critics are being spoiled, nitpicky and unreasonable. The mystery and susense of random encounters doesn't appeal to me at all. It isn't worth the annoyance and frustration. The only good argument this video does in favor of random encounters is that it worked within technology restrictions. Okay. I see. This mechanic is probably just a product of the time more than anything. The old Pokemon footage in here looks like it is from Red and Blue. Those games are already overstuffed as is due to having 151 creatures. It had the downside of being prone to glitches and crashes. So the random encounters in the first few generations are very understandable and forgivable. One thing I like about the first two generations is that character designs are simpler. That is good. Later generations tend to make Pokemon too overdesigned, especially legendaries. The first two generations look better. This was also done too work within technical limitations. I think of it as a blessing in disguise. In this video I learned that the detailed sprites are actually made up of many sprites. Wow. That has got to be intense on the hardware. I am not a fan of random encounters. However that isn't to say that I am entirely against tradition. I love DND. I admire it for being a classic game and being fun. However I admit the randomness can be annoying in that game. I don't even touch the random encounter tables. I think that even in DND or other TTRPG, this could be fixed so easily. The DM should just select creatures from the Monster Manual and manually place them in the environment. Easy peasy. World of Warcraft is a modern video game with strong resemblence to DND. That just has enemies visible in the environment. It gives a sense of suspence without being excessivly annoying. It is so much better than random encounters. Just do that. One clever thing is that enemies have a lower aggro range if they are lower level then the player. At a large level gap, enmies won't attack unless the player is right next to them. That is good to avoid irritation.

My biggest replayabilty is Final Fantasy V with the Four Job Fiesta challenge. You get four jobs, each unlocked at a crystal, use them to finish the game. And lately I've been trying the Ironman challenge in Fire Emblem

good points about unicorn overlord, but personally i loved not being given all the info, it made me feel like a genius coming up with busted synergies! like i'm sure i was just making the most basic combos the developers intended players to find easily, but it felt great getting there on my own!