Tutorials

I recently purchased and finished The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition and loved the game.  The entire thing was just a masterpiece in my mind.  Yes, the graphics were not PC quality, but I just feel like the game, and even it's predecessor, were designed to be played using a controller.  There were some menu sorting things that were unnecessarily hard with a controller, but that's nothing that ruins a game.  The one thing that made me balk at the title right from the beginning was the tutorial, and that's what I want to address today.

I can barely recall when this was complex.

Remember back in the NES era?  To learn how to play the game, your only resource was the manual or a friend.  Going into a game like Final Fantasy I without reading the manual was basically video game suicide.  You'd spend quite a lot of time trying to figure it out, and even then you'd oftentimes be stuck at certain points in the game.  Nowadays we don't have problems with games like this, but back in the days without Internet and with the video game industry really starting to get back on it's feet after the crash this game would have seemed entirely new and different.  A tutorial would have been helpful for those gamers new to the market and to RPGs.

This was such a brilliant game.

Advancing forward a few years to the SNES, game developers must have realized the need for tutorials as games became more and more complex.  Two of the tutorials that stuck with me, as the games are both two of my favorites from that system, are from Super Mario RPG and Final Fantasy III.  In the former, the tutorial tries to integrate itself into the story as Toad tries to run ahead of Mario to the Mushroom Kingdom and ends up walking into some enemies that he needs help with.  The game essentially uses this as an excuse to have Toad explain to Mario how to attack and use items.  It seems primitive, but it works.  For Final Fantasy III, the developers left the entire tutorial as optional.  In the first town, Narshe, you can enter the house at the very entrance and talk to a bunch of wizened old men who tell you how to play.  The idea is that it's a learning center of sorts and there are some items and experience to be had inside.  If you don't enter the building you aren't penalized in any way and can just move on with the game.  I like that setup since the developers really tried to integrate the tutorial into the game, not slap it on like some post-it note afterthought or with a window that just says, "DO THIS."

Love the game, not the tutorial.

So finally, let's end with a much more recently developed game: The Witcher 2.  As I said, I didn't like the tutorial.  My biggest problem with the tutorial is that it makes you feel like you're going somewhere with the game, like it's the start, and then it just abruptly cuts out after you finish it.  You save some guy with a potion and fight in an arena, all the while thinking that you get all of the abilities you have and keep the items you earned, but that's just wishful thinking.  I don't like this style of tutorial.  I need the tutorial to do one of two things, either be seamless to the story, as in FFIII, or be part of thes story with pop-up windows if need be, like in Kingdoms of Amalur.

I didn't know that I was going to be awarding a winner at the end of this, but I decided that it sounded like a good idea.  I'm giving the Tutorial Award to FFIII.  It's seamlessly integrated into the game, gives you items and experience, and even allows you to skip it entirely without painstakingly forcing you to play along.  That's the best kind of tutorial.  Now only if developers could remember how to do things like that...