Yeah, I have a mostly blank save of Twilight princess that's saved past the whole Ordon Village part just because I hate all those fetch quests and such. Whenever I want to replay it, I just copy that save.
Similar to that are the abundance of nearly identical mobile games that feel the need to hold your hand through an obscene amount of the experience without the ability to skip any of it (sometimes even throughout the games entirety). I know many people don’t bother with mobile games and I didn’t either but I recently started to when I found out I could make a decent amount of pocket money from a handful of apps that pay you to play them (not a scam as I once assumed btw). Anyway, the amount of times I’ve had to slog through match 3 or “merge” games that tutorialize literally *everything* has made me want to quit several times. The worst are the games that have endless amounts of mechanics, materials, points, currencies etc. just there to confuse people into spending money to progress. It’s sadistic.
I assume that TotK did that because they didn't want players to be overwhelmed... only to create a new problem of players being too confused, I suppose
Yeah, you're pretty much learning mechanics and tricks during the entire game. I really think it's only fault is not giving you the paraglider immediately after getting on the ground. If I recall correctly... I think you have to go to Lookout Landing, then Hyrule Castle, then back to Lookout Landing before you (can) get the paraglider. I had to add "can" there because I don't think it's even given to you then. iirc some quests open up and it's the tower quest and there's no hint that the paraglider will be got there until you do it. Personally, I think it would have been cooler to go into the Depths without a tutorial. It would really build tension and curiosity and, as soon as you stumble into your first lightroot, you'd pretty much know the dealio at that point.
Except that Nintendo already solved the best ways to easiy introduce combat system tutorials in other games. Wind Waker had the training with the grand master in the dojo before you could progress off of Outset Island and Twilight Princess did not even give you skills until you passed a tutorial with the Hero of Time. TotK was a step back in both the quality of the Zelda series and how cohesive the user experience was as they progressed. People are very quick to jump to defend the Big N but hestitant to not only look at what they do in comparison to the rest of the industry but even in relation to their own previous efforts that are demonstrating a steady decline in the quality of their games.
I received TotK as a Christmas present. I got through the tutorial island, reached Hyrule, immediately went for a tower I saw, and... nothing. You can't do anything there. I looked it up and turns out you need to follow the main plot first before you can go exploring, as opposed to BotW where you can explore immediately. Killed my interest in the game, honestly. Now that I know it's actually a linear zelda I guess I can go in again with corrected expectations, but how frigging frustrating. I put like 200+ hours into botw, I just wanted more of it, Nintendo.
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.
New Horizons being just wishy washy enough on the crafting vs "just fund it" issue while starving you of both without exploits, really makes me wonder if they just wanted to rush the game out so they could get back to making fans simp for Splatoon more.
There also are some games where the tutorial sets a certain expectation of the game but then everything after the first 20% or so is a completely different game from what the tutorial implies. Whether it's something like, "For story reasons you don't have a core mechanic during the tutorial stage but in every other level you need to use it a lot" or something like, "We teach you about stuff like crowd control using knockback/launchers but every enemy later on will have some form of superarmor."
with the first "Something Like", at least the Metroid Prime games, while crafting a reason for you to lose your abilites after stage 1, gives them back and more throughout the game
@@atrane365 I think that's distinctly different and it's actually not bad for a tutorial to give you endgame abilities then take them away, since it sets the expectation of where you "eventually" will be. I'm thinking something more like in Metal Gear Rising how in the intro stage Raiden's Blade Mode is significantly weaker than it is in the actual game and you don't have the Zandatsu. The Zandatsu is such a core mechanic to the game that it has its own dedicated spot in the combat rankings but it isn't something you have in the tutorial stage.
A specific example that comes to mind is the Ike ring in FE Engage. Almost every ring’s introduction acts as a sort of mini-tutorial to demonstrate the strength of each ring and for the most part they’re pretty decent. Ike’s ring However emphasizes it’s ability to instantly breakdown blockers and debris, which almost never shows up to a meaningful degree for the rest of the game outside of an optional mode, rather than it’s far more useful abilities to lure and tank large groups of enemies.
@@mattgroening8872I don't think that's what they mean. Just that the game can become something very different from what the tutorial teaches which kind of defeats its purpose. It can actually make the game easier with certain mechanics being introduced that make what you learned in the tutorial obsolete.
I was unaware of lookout landing for some 50-100 hrs as I tried to fly to the coolest sky Island first not knowing the wings had a time limit. From where I fell I just explored based on my own desires. I think it was the most magical and engaging time I had with the game. Without the paraglider I had to engage with all the new abilities more intimately, and without the throttled story there was more mystery to the world. I would have definitely had a worse experience if it forced me to LL first but I suppose that's only because the structure of the rest of the game
After I first got to the surface, I did a bit of exploring, before finding one of the holes to the depths. Couldn't work put a way to survive going down, so thought about where I could get the paragliding, and assumed following the main mission was the most likely way to get it. But if I hadn't already played botw and knew about the paraglider, I would have gone ages without finding it
I wandered trough hyrule for a while without the glider (and without the towers) and started thinking "wow there really isn't a paraglider in this game, that feels weird"
My partner did the same thing and I watched CallMeKevin do that, too. It seemed very obvious to me which direction the game wanted you to go but seeing as several people do AND the game doesn't really give you a way to easily do it is an issue. I feel like, if they really wanted to railroad you that much, they may as well blocked off the "wrong" way.
You reminded me that I got myself trapped on another sky island right after I left the tutorial zone because I had no paraglider and it's solid ground under me. I saw a rubble fall next to me and I immediately thought "Hey, maybe I can ride on it and rewind time." It hadn't occurred to me that I didn't have a paraglider, and any attempt to leave the island led to death by fall damage. Took me 2 hours trying to position a wing zonai device at the very edge of the island, which is trickier than you might think because you can't move the object you're standing on. Fun times.
Yeah, spent too long trying to do that too. Realized much later on the solution is to ultrahand it into the air for a few minutes, then put it down, get on, and then use recall to bring you back into the air
I feel like I HAVE to say this. I got the sword memory first. The one you say spoils what happens to Zelda. I did not see the twist coming a mile away. I was shocked when the cutscene happened. The sword memory didn’t spoil me. It made the twist more surprising because I didn’t remember everything said in that memory that was all foreshadowey. I think my experience was BETTER with the story because I saw that one first. Because if I saw it coming I wouldn’t have been so happy with the cutscene
Tutorialization and guide culture are at a very weird impasse because players want different things. Some players want to figure everything out for themselves, only being told concepts by the game that they couldn't otherwise intuit. Some players need a little direction to get going, but then are fine with wandering around. Some players want everything explained to them ahead of time, because the fear of not knowing something and making a bad move because of lack of knowledge is paralyzing for them. Some players are totally fine to read multiple pages of instruction to make sure they understand things. Some players freak out and hate on the game for even putting up more than one sentence of tutorial text. I honestly don't know what the best middle ground is, but you can pretty much guarantee that SOMEONE is going to hate your game purely for how you do or do not use your tutorials.
The trick really is to not make them intrusive. Hell, you could even make it a setting at the start of a new save: call it "tutorial style" that gives the option for auto tutorial pop-ups, tutorials on button prompt or no prompt at all, giving the player the option to look them up later if they get stuck.
I think the best solution is to make a tutorial that fits the game it’s being made for. A roguelike such as Enter the Gungeon requires you to complete a basic and explicit tutorial on the game’s mechanics before you can even do a run, since it would be annoying having to learn the game on the fly with the risk of permanent death constantly looming over a new player. Meanwhile, a more open-ended and vague game such as Super Metroid doesn’t really have a clear tutorial. It tests new mechanics immediately after they’re obtained for a room or two, but then lets the player figure out difficult or unique uses for those mechanics to find secrets. In a similar way to how no game genre can satisfy everyone, no tutorial will perfectly teach everyone. It just depends on a case-by-case basis on what’s best for the specific game being made, whether that be invisibly teaching the player through encouraged experimentation or explicitly guiding the player in the context of the game’s main story.
The best middle ground is actually putting instruction manuals in your game box which is kind of a problem now because a lot of people just buy their games digitally but if I can buy the deluxe edition and get an art book that I’m never going to use, then surely they can do the same thing with an instruction manual. Just have it be a separate downloadable file for whatever system you use. If you want to look at it you can, if you don’t that’s like an extra megabyte that you don’t have to install.
Guides and walkthroughs are weird for me now. As a kid I liked reading them casually for games I'd already completed or games I knew about but never had and I don't really remember specifically looking up guides outside of Harvest Moon 64 with my sister, but even then when an event happened that we didnt know about, we'd still be amazed. Now I just find weird how expected it is for a lot of people to just, read an entire guide, walkthrough or browse a wiki while playing a game or even before playing a game and just...constantly be spoiled on what happens or what appears. I'm not one to tell people how to play their games, but its weird how games are the only media where newcomers want to be told about things ahead of time (granted there's a difference between "is there a softlock I should be aware about" rather than "how do I optimize everything in this game in the shortest time frame?")
@@SirLightsOut99 That's not a middle ground, that makes the game accessible only to people who either already know the basics of similar games or are invested enough to willingly do a research project. The typical starting point for someone getting into a hobby is just casually curious. Such a person is likely to get overwhelmed in the face of too much information (i.e. an entire instruction manual) and discouraged in the face of too much failure (i.e. what happens when a beginner dives right in without a tutorial or anything). This is why gaming used to be such a niche hobby- it required an extraordinary amount of motivation and investment to get into it. In order for games to keep being accessible, they need to keep having tutorials that present information as it is being used- being able to skip it or turn it off is fine. I'm all in favor of including instruction manuals, but as an alternative to the online wiki not as a replacement for the tutorial.
Breath of the Wild had a tutorial problem too. I remember a video of a lady playing, and she entered the kakariko shrine. The shrine starts teaching her about dodging and perfect blocks, and she yelled "You can dodge in this game?!". Then: "Guys, I've done 3 divine beasts!" She was most of the way through the game and just happened upon this shrine. Sure the game loosely points you at the village as your first stop, but there's no reason to expect a player in an open world game to follow through (and not get immediately distracted off course). Personally I would have made them optional shrines in the tutorial plateau. They unlock when you finish the first four and can leave, so you at least know they're available and have an idea of what to expect.
I grew a dislike to BOTWs tutorial cause I spent 2 hours trying to find out how to get through the cold for that tutorial shrine. I had completely missed the hut that tells you about cold resistance and was trying so many different approaches until I eventually looked it up haha Im sure Im in the minority, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth for the game
@@thepokeflutistbotw definitely does a trial by fire type of tutorial but personally I think it works for this game specifically because of the way it handles its survival aspects. The game is telling you that you aren't doing something right because you aren't able to traverse the area safely. So that creates the 'puzzle' of "how do I get through this" which then pushes the player to engage with other aspects of the game like cooking. Which is further accented by things like the hut you mentioned or Boko camps near the cold area having spicy peppers and a cooking pot. all in an effort to at least increase awareness that food can be a solution to various problems. It isnt perfect as players can still miss all of this but that's the cost of having a truely open world sometimes players don't walk by the area you want them to. I do think there are some pacing issues as OP mentioned like the combat tutorial shrines should be more upfront because that is a big part of the game but overall I think botw handles the trial by fire teaching method very well because it gives you the small experimental space of the great plateau to test out mostly everything.
@@thepokeflutist I still learned something from missing the hut. 1) Save scumming (saving just before dying and respawning on that spot) is a viable tactic. I would use this to ascend mountains by saving on ledges that I had no business being on with my stamina level. 2) If you get to the top without a jacket he gives you one. Could still get that by cooking peppers first, but it's fun that they still give that option to players that somehow haven't found the cooking tutorial yet.
I think it's okay to have the more in-depth combat mechanics come in later, especially since it's right by a place the end of the tutorial tells you to go. I finished that tutorial and still never got the hang of Flurry Rush, but there was probably a single boss where that was a problem for me. I focused on non-combat methods of getting past enemies instead for the most part or used a lot of archery. Durians also made it easier for people that just aren't very good at combat but otherwise enjoy the game. In short, mastering the combat system isn't required to play the game. The big thing is that they probably could have had a couple more tutorial/test like shrines instead of combat trials with vague suggestions on how to beat the enemy if you were observant. If you put them on the Plateau players may skip them because they could be impatient to get out of the tutorial zone or get frustrated that they found a combat tutorial instead of the main quest shrine. A better option would be putting one near each town. Kakariko would set the precedent for that, but if the player chooses to wander off in another direction they're still going to run into at least some advanced combat instruction no matter where they go.
While I do agree they did the tutorial differently, a lot of the things you mentioned for TOTK are things that did occur similarly in BOTW. BOTW doesn't explain its memory system unless you go to Kakariko first to visit Impa, which is suggested in the same way that Lookout landing is. And I did actually appreciate the inclusion of the order, which I don't think was in BOTW (please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the pictures were out of order in the album). That's also where there's a similar combat tutorial shrine like the ones in TOTK (though I do think splitting them up was a mistake). Sheikah Slate abilities, like the camera, are things that get unlocked at Hateno village. The main issue is definitely the paraglider, which I wish had been given to you when you completed the sky. But I understand the game making decision behind it-if you want to get the player to the Skyview Tower and Regional Phenomena quests then restricting a mode of travel is a good way to do it. While I think overall BOTW had a better tutorial, I think they're more similar than they've been made out to be here. Great video overall, just some thoughts!
In fairness to TotK, you didn't get the Shrine Sensor, camera, or memory quest immediately on leaving the Great Plateau in BotW either - the basic sensor does unlock automatically when you activate your second tower (first after the Great Plateau) or progress the secondary quests far enough, but you need to go talk to Purah in Hateno to get the camera, and then check back in with Impa in Kakariko before you can start the memory quest in order to get the actual backstory. Delaying the glider and ability to activate map towers is a valid comparison to BotW, but that game also locked a lot of basic features behind following the main thread after leaving the Great Plateau, so the general comparison being made, implying that BotW's tutorial was entirely contained on the Great Plateau, doesn't hold up.
I wish people would look past their biases, the games have plenty of tutorial problems but are still so much fun and all of the problems dont really detract from the game as a whole but eh
But I think the difference is that the camera and Memory Quests are not essential to BOTW's main gameplay loop. Therefore, it's much easier for the player to explore and learn at their own pace, and by the time they hit a roadblock, pick up the trail on the main quest given they've probably figured out how the mechanics work by now. TOTK locks the most essential movement tool behind the main quest, which leaves people itching to explore right away handicapped until they get through the plot stuff that the game deems is absolutely necessary for the player to experience.
the shrine sensor, memory quest and camera are all unnescessary mechanics that if you miss won't fundamentally impact the gameplay. botw teaches you everything you'll _need_ on the great plateau, as well as where you need to go for the main quest. anything else you stumble upon is a bonus upgrade. tears of the kingdom holds off on the paraglider and towers, without which the sky and depths (aka a good third of the game's content) are functionally inaccessible. plus, if you don't go to lookout landing you'll have no clue what you're meant to do for the main quest. totk acts like you've done everything and that you're free to explore the world, but you really do have to visit hyrule castle to kick everything off.
@@dazcarrrTotK directly points you towards Lookout Landing after the tutorial and constantly has NPCs telling you to go there. The tutorial also does teach you everything you need to beat the game. You don’t actually need the paraglider because you have your abilities and zonai tech. I did all the regional main quests before ever going to Lookout Landing by choice.
I'm just happy you flashed the Flame Clock tutorial on screen from Xenoblade 3. It's the funniest thing ever. They make a big deal about this Flame Clock and how if it starts to run out your attack power will get weaker and everything... And it only matters for the first hour, if that, and then it's immediately gone for the rest of the game. Incredible work Monolith, 10/10
I like games like story of seasons as wonderful life, where the game just drops you in and let you figure stuff out on your own. “If you have any questions about farming just read the bookshelf” At least that was like that in the original GameCube version, it lets people who already play farming sims to get to work while newbies ask any questions they want. Sometimes no tutorial is a good tutorial! 😊
The problem is that nobody want to read especially when they're not force to. If it wasn't for UA-cam videos I probably would have never get into any of these game
That's not really what "no tutorial" means. You're just not railroaded through a learning segment that wasn't opt-in. Giving players a way to learn about the game in a more seamless way, is still tutorialising. A game with truly no tutorial would have most people quitting in time to refund on Steam.
I'm okay with this so long as the tutorial in question 1: Isn't inaccessible at a time when I realize I need to check it. It's pretty normal for games to just have reference sections in the menu. and 2: Doesn't omit critical details, hoping I'll just randomly 'figure it out'. I'd say that if the tutorial is kept out of the way to avoid being a nuisance, that's all the more reason to be extra-clear and informative. :)
Fighting game tutorials. They teach you the mechanic of the game in general, but often fall short of trying to teach you how to use the mechanics in a match.
I was thinking of Multiversus' new unskippable tutorial. There's more platforming than actual fighting there. What's worst, the character for the tutorial is Shaggy, but at no point is explained how his "super saiyan" (or whatever you want to call it) mechanic works, which is the most complicated thing to figure out about the character. They just tell you "do this to punch, do this to punch up, do this to make a stomp that breaks armor (armor you know nothing about), here you go, now fight". And if there's some sort of ingame guide of movesheet or something that explains the characters' gimmicks and mechanics, I have yet to find it. Update: found the moveset guide. When in the menu for selecting a character, you have to press a button that's not used pretty much anywhere else in the game (it's the *-* on the Switch controller). There's not a specific place to see the movesets of all characters on one go, you have to check each one manually.
fighting game tutorials are more or less a checklist of every input and mechanic without telling you when or where to apply it in practice. although in fairness, fighting games are extremely hard teach...
@@percher4824 Oh yeah not arguing. Fighting games are hard to teach, I just wish a few games tried to bridge the gap a bit better between, 'you understand buttons do a thing' and 'when and how to use the situational tool'
I would like to say that in Elden Ring, it was unbelievably rare for any player to read the tutorial message about Guard Counters and also attempt to use it in the boss fight with Soldier of Godrick. This is due to a number of factors. Players have already been inundated with tutorials, and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, they rush to get it over with. Some even skip the prompt about Guard counters all together. Additionally, this is there first boss health bar, which takes all focus and attention away from learning and redirects into observing the new potential threat. And the tutorial pops up at the worst possible time. The battle starts, the fight music plays, and boom, learn about guard counters right now!! No one even bothers. It pains me every single time I've seen it happen.
i remember skipping the tutorial on my first run and not knowing how to two hand my weapon so i had to go back and i do remember being jump scared by that prompt💀 it was sorta wired cus i was two handing my weapon (i found out) so i had to use jump attacks.(at least i read that one?)
@@ryancliff-singleton7347 I've been two-handing my shield a couple times now, still no idea why (or why that's even an option), still no idea how to two-hand a weapon other than a bow, or why I'd want to do that (at least if it's like in Dark Souls where somehow it makes your attacks even slower). Also no idea why I'd ever want to use the R2 attack, since it's slower and not even proportionally stronger.
@@gernottiefenbrunner172 Heavy attacks deal more poise damage, thus making it more likely you'll stun an enemy faster. Not that the game ever explains that...
Tutorials are good at telling you HOW to do things, but sometimes they're not good at telling you WHY you should do that thing. The tutorial holds your hand so much that it's less about learning game mechanics and more about memorizing steps. So when it releases you into the game world, you're completely lost because you were trained to follow prompts and not to think for yourself. I can't think of specific examples, probably because I put those games down on day 1, and completely forgot about them.
I'd argue most grand strategy and city builder type games have this issue. Lots of fighting games too, a lot of "do this, then do this" without explaining why to do it
@@TheWrathAboveOh God, fighting games. It gets really annoying to have a bunch of mechanics thrown my way and I don't even get the slightest hint on why it matters. Because there's A LOT of nuance with FGs in particular that wouldn't be clear to newcomers.
@@Spearra Tbf a big problem a lot of Fighting Games have is that they're so focused on their mechanics they don't even teach players fundemental stuff like footsies.
Mobile games are particularly bad about this. It's time to teach you something. Tap this, this, this, and this. Congratulations, a thing happened. What did you just do? In what situations will you need to do that? You'll have to figure that part out on your own.
Well One game I can think does show you why you should do it is Metal Gear Rising revengeance. One of the most important mechanics is parry . The Tutorial even sends actual in game enemies to practice parrying , it even has a tutorial for perfect parries and using them to get that sweet, sweet electrolytes and if you still didn't learn the game makes sure you do learn through Blade Wolf.
Zelda has always had some problems with over-tutorialization due to the sheer volume of different mechanics, and Tears adds a lot more to Breath's already massive arsenal. Seeing a lot of games make the mistake of front-loading tutorials for mechanics you won't unlock for a long while.
@@WhiteFangofWar Except Ocarina of Time has quite a fluid tutorial. Don't know what happened after that or why they thought it was a good idea to not introduce gameplay faster.
@N12015 Majora has a short one for basic Link, but also it's meant as a direct sequel so you should already know basic Link I do like the tutorials for the masks tho. Deku has the lead up to Clocktown and 1st cycle, Goron has the "get to the dungeon" bit, the dungeon itself, and then the race. Zora has the egg quests and then the dungeon. FD doesn't need a tutorial tbh
It's really just skyward sword and to an extent twilight princess. The issue is not the volume of mechanics but rather the slow, plodding, unskippable bullshit you have to endure. As a return player it's a nightmare but even as a new player its like, can't you just scroll this text at the bottom of the screen while I walk through the area? Do you have to stop me for 20 minutes of unrelated flavor text?
Xenoblade Chronicles X is a masterclasses in bad tutorials. It glosses over or completely neglects teaching several incredibly important mechanics, leading you to play the game very suboptimally without ever knowing it.
Factorio had a similar problem with the tutorial. It taught you how to play on a basic level but completely ignored a ton of very useful (and practically required) tricks such as having a dedicated area for machines to build more machines
Ever tried idk opening up the virtual manual that all wiiu games had? X tutorials were good and should have been the standard for the series going forward.
@@dave9515 X's digital manual was definitely better than the in-game tutorials, but still not perfect. The Overdrive section in particular has some unnecessarily vague wording.
xenoblade 2 has some pretty not good tutorials. its main issue is that you can't reread tutorials. the game has a pretty complex combat system, and the game already doesn't explain it super well. not to mention various other mechanics. if you missed anything, that mechanic may as well be lost to the void. the most baffling part is, the game was receiving updates that fixed bugs and added content, but they never added the ability to reread tutorials. the game's DLC (which is effectively a separate game) let you reread tutorials, but they just never added it to the main game.
oh yeah the blade combo confused me so much at first, once you get used to it it makes more sence but the game does a pretty poor job at explaining it especially since it was such a jump in complexity from Xenoblade 1, another thing i didnt like was it having a mandatory gatcha system in a game that really didnt need it makes being a completionist far more tedious i still havnt got all the ng+ blades because farming cores just doesnt seem fun, xenoblade 3 version of finding the heros and doing quests to gain them as allys for them was much better imo
minecraft is interesting in that it doesn't have any tutorial, unless you go looking for one, which makes sense, you can't really tutorialize a sandbox game beyond the basic controls unless you wanna bore the player. but there's a huge community of people who make their own guides on how to do certain redstone machines or how to do different builds, or even how to defeat the end dragon the fastest. the tutorialization lies more in the community's hands, and you the player can choose how much or little of it you want to seek out. which is kinda cool ngl.
Funnily enough, Legacy Console Edition had built in tutorial worlds. They were actually really fascinating and filled with secrets. Anyways, I do agree that tutorialization is up to the community. I'm going to be playing a custom mod pack with some friends next month, and I've decided to write a few guides for some of the more complex mods. Even mods aren't immune to this, for the most part.
i'd say if unicorn overlord can be beaten on normal *and hard* without fully absorbing the tutorials, then it's fine. the game expects you to read stuff anyway, and if you're on the hardest difficulty you should either be on a second playthrough or expecting to do a lot of the heavy lifting. it's not like a whole playthrough of being exposed to units won't give you an idea of what they're good and bad at.
The concept of wanting to play and easily succeed on the hardest difficulty of a game, without knowing the game previously, or having to think,test and learn for yourself, feels such an entitlement.... It really shouldn't even be considered, really.
@@Drjhordan It depends on how difficult normal and "hard" actually are and how many modes there are. If Normal is basically easy mode designed to experience the story with little chance of loss then Hard is when you actually want to start properly learning more than the basic mechanics. Then you'd have a difficulty level or two beyond that for a real challenge. Granted that those settings are usually listed Easy/Story and Normal. Putting the label Hard on a lower difficulty level does skew expectation. I'm speaking generally, I haven't played this particular game yet.
Tbh, I played on hard, only vaguely remembering character descriptions Nothing really got difficult until nearly the final mission of the game imo. That, and the one side quest where you pick which army to side with, and you pick the option of fighting both of them simultaneously to bring them to equitable peace talks, but that one was only hard because I tried it too early
Nothing better than a game that drops a tutorial of a mechanic 30h in for something that you have been complaining about the whole game. "Oh, so NOW I can teleport?!"
@@Lampent12 I remember of early days JRPGs like Tales of Symphonia where you would backtrack ON FOOT to trigger sidequests because there was no way to fast travel... It was horrible.
@@altairkyeonu : Good luck remembering you have to go through Ozette to get to Altessa's house... oh,and that's after remembering your way through Gaoracchia Forest. XD
I had a tutorial experience so hilariously bad that it became a legend among my friend group. The first time I played Final Fantasy Tactics, I did what the tutorial suggested and walked up to smack an enemy. Then I got a game over because my NPC teammate decide to cast magic and oneshotted me with the splash damage. It was incredibly frustrating, and nobody would have believed it happened if there hadn't been witnesses. It did teach me something important though: DON'T TRUST AGRIAS.
I think the more interesting tutorial question has less to do with the initial tutorial, but in whether the game reinforces whatever it was trying to teach. I remember being amazingly frustrated by Rise of the Tomb Raider for that where they introduce shrapnel grenades in the middle of the game... but doesn't reinforce using them at all until the final boss, where they are required to complete the fight, at the same time disabling nearly all your other skills. As a result you are not only punished for not learning one particular skill, but also for investing time in learning all the other ones you'd picked up.
I almost uninstalled and asked for a refund after dying to that first boss and found out I had to do the entire prologue again. I’m so glad I didn’t though because I absolutely loved the game in the end
That was so frustrating. I got stunlocked in the final boss and almost gave up on the game after that. The worst part is how many people in the community just completely dismiss any complaints about the tutorial because "its easy and you can just spam the dodge button for invincibility". Like yeah you can but how tf was I supposed to know that when Ive never played the game before.
Agreed. NieR Automata has definitely got some issues with a tutorial that is brutal - it might have been fine if the enemies only knocked off like 5-10% of your health per hit, giving you some breathing room.
Pokemon Sun and Moon had a problem of the first like, hour+ of gameplay being basically a tutorial section. It never felt like the game stopped holding your hand at any point during that (and frankly afterwards too). In general I tend to get frustrated in those games that seem like they're trying to say "Now go off and play the game!" but then they continue to patter you with tutorials all over the place and it's like please just let me play the game at this point.
@boshwa20 it seems more to me like this pokemon game follows the trend of Nintendo games like BotW and TotK by being open-world than being done because of complaints about linearity. In general the core issue with how bad pokemon games are lately comes from tight deadlines and limited financial resources forcing them to have to produce poor games. Basically, they only put out Pokemon games at this point to be able to sell more merch. It keeps the title relevant and Pokemon merch is like literally the top selling videogame merch in the entire world
I'm not sure whether it counts as a tutorial problem, but when I tried to play Genshin Impact for the first time, I immediately decided that I wanted to climb the walls out of the starting canyon--which caused me to completely miss the mandatory questline trigger. I ended up wandering through the world, finding waypoints and people and systems that were all deactivated, with (as I remember it) no arrow leading me back to the starting point that I missed. Because I hadn't begun anything, I couldn't recruit characters, start quests, or do anything but smack down normal baddies, even though I had found plenty of things that should have been interesting and activated. Suffice it to say, it didn't leave me with a great impression of the game. Granted, I ended up not liking it anyway mostly on account of the omnipresent monetization and overbearing numbers-go-up systems, but it wasn't a great start.
That is incredibly impressive divergent exploring. Genshin has one of the most direct tutorials possible for using the map and it's cliffs to naturally guide you where you needed to go. I think people are more likely to trigger a client craving tutorial bug then replicate your experience.
As much as people complain about them, this is the benefit of inescapable tutorial islands. I absolutely would've done the same thing because my first instinct upon discovering a climbing mechanic is to see how high I can go.
@@BonaparteBardithion Genshin does tutorial island though. You can't leave the opening nation, which is the smallest zone on the map, until you fight the dragon through the story. They just diverged from the main path like immediately after the opening cutscene. Like "player walk 30 ft ahead" and he turned 90° at the 15 ft mark then got lost. Actually going that full 30 ft would've triggered the sequence for the 4 quest markers that take you into the city for the glider and give you the first new character. If he did, then he could've looked up the quests and locations on the map.
@@amandaslough125 If the player needs to be railroaded through a small part of the tutorial you could still make an island within an island. Roofed caverns or making part of the canyon wall out of an unclimbable material are common solutions. You could also opt to disable certain features, like climbing or dashing, until later in the tutorial but that gets tedious on replays.
In TOTK, I missed Lookout Landing because I went in the opposite direction and didn’t find it until like 30 hours in, maybe? I got through a surprising amount of the game by sheer force including the hot air balloon quest
When I landed, I did a few shrines before I got my paraglider. I wanted to explore before I did main quest stuff. I didn’t realize the flier would be so easy to get. Though, I came across one shrine that was pretty much impossible without the glider. You used springs to launch yourself and it works at the start but halfway through, I had so few hearts that I would die from fall-damage… _most of the time._ Sometimes I lived so I thought I was just doing something wrong. So I looked it up and saw I was doing everything right but I needed to use the glider so I didn’t die.
Almost the exact same same thing happened to me, I found a shrine that assumed you could glide from platform to platform to solve a ball puzzle, and I just couldn't make the jumps.
Omg the same thing happened to me I remember very very stubbornly trying to brute force my way through haha, but I don't think it worked I was doing some wild things though, pulling out campfires and bullet time, it was crazy
You and I found the exact same shrine, but I managed to do it without the paraglider, though only barely thanks to maxHP up foods... lol I also managed to get down into the depths by using a bunch of wings all the way out in the lanayru region, and going in there that woefully unprepared may have been a bad thing to let me do from a game design standpoint, but god damn did it make it memorable. Coming back there with a better understanding of the game after struggling in the dark for so long was incredibly satisfying.
To add your comment about tutorials: 1. Find the comment section under the video (I guess you already found it, huh?) 2. Type in the “Add a comment...” box. 3. Enter your comment and click “Comment”. 4. If people like your comment, you’ll get likes. If not, they may start a battle using an insult, sarcasm or antagonize using a very specific exception.
Hey! I tried to do this once, and my internet went out and my comment didn't get posted! Obviously, this is a problem that you specifically caused and not bad luck or user error, so I'm going to get mad at you about it, you jerk!
I think an entire genre of games belongs in this video: roguelikes (and to a lesser extent, roguelites). These games often force you to experiment to learn how the world reacts to your actions, rather than giving you explicit information (the first example that comes to my mind is Spelunky), BUT, by the nature of the genre, it punishes you incredibly heavily for failed experiments, resulting in your death and the loss of all progress (for roguelikes) or most of your progress (for roguelites) I enjoy some roguelites, but roguelikes are mostly intolerable to me for this reason; they feel like they're just trying to frustrate me and waste as much of my time as possible
I had an idea for my game's tutorial where your character is a kid watching some adventurer trainees. You still control the trainees, but you're allowed to mess around and screw up if you want to (resulting in funny lines from the trainer).
One of the worst games with tutorials (and not like it's a good game in general either) was Tales of Zestiria. I remember calling it Tales of Tutoriala for so long, because it just kept giving you tutorial info CONSTANTLY for a significant portion of the game. And I don't mean different tutorials - no, it keeps giving the same ones over and over as if you hadn't seen that one 10 times already.
Not only that, it also drip feeds you combat-related tutorials outside of combat (the monoliths), often with zero context to the area you're in, and even sometimes splits those into multiple missable parts. I replayed it recently and I was aghast at just how badly they got tutorials wrong.
@@DarrenFerrie You seriously made yourself go through that water temple twice? Wow, can't imagine doing that. Even if the rest of the game was good (it isn't) that alone would stop me from replaying it. Yeah, like I said. I wasn't just talking about the in-combat stuff, I was including those too.
@@dondashall I actually enjoyed the combat and gameplay of Tales of Zestiria(so far) I just need to actually beat it(which won't be soon) However, I respect your opinion
...and then finally, after months of forcing myself through nightly torturous attempts & the additional purchase of a steering wheel controller, I completed the tutorial section. I was ecstatic! The highly rated game I'd purchased months ago was now ready to play! I devoured every morsel of gameplay within and the reviews had been right to praise it. Still, the more I played, the more my feeling of unexplainable discomfort grew within. The full cosmic horror of the situation chose to descend to smother my everythings at precisely the moment I gained control of my character for the final mission. It had suddenly dawned on me that every single item from the lengthy list of tightly-time-checked, technically-complex, order-enforced, unskippable, perfection-requiring "tutorial" that had locked me from enjoying the real game... HAD NEVER EVER EVER BEEN NEEDED TO BE KNOWN BY OR USED BY PLAYERS AT ANY POINT AFTER THE TUTORIAL ENDED!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ... Yes, I *am* still angry about one of my first experiences of gaming on a console rather than a desktop having been with Driver on PSX. The only other game I'd bought at the same time as the PSX hardware itself had been one I'd never heard of at the time but that came in a big cardboard boxed collector's edition with a t-shirt etc and had been marked down to half price. "If they made a special additional release for collectors, it's probably good" I reasoned without any real reason yet, thankfully, correctly. tl;dr Driver on PSX almost killed my console-gaming career before it had begun. Metal Gear Solid blew my mind, managed to repair the damage Driver had caused to my initial PSX experience 1000x over and forcefully compelled my path into the career in game development specifically that has been so wonderful to and fulfilling within my life ever since.
TOTK isn't the only game with this issue. A lot of open-world games also struggle with this, imo. In Skyrim, once you're out of Helgen, you're prompted to head towards Riverwood. But... you could also go anywhere else. But by not going to Riverwood, you miss the instruction to go to Whiterun, which turns fetch the Dragonstone for the court wizard (and the claw for the Riverwood trader), which turns into "oh god there's a Dragon", only after which Dragons will spawn into the world. And you can't really use your dragonborn powers you get from slaying Dragons until you do the main quest a bit further and talk to the Greybeards. And I think *that* is where the "tutorial" ends. Which is a huge problem. I can become the archmage of Winterhold, the speaker or whatever of the Dark Brotherhood, leader of the Thieves Guild, and probably leader of the Companions (don't quote me on that) before Dragons even show up.
I don’t fundamentally see an issue with that. It’s an open world game, you are supposed to be able to forge your own path where each playthrough doesn’t have to be the same beats in the same order. Even in BotW you could defeat Ganon without ever freeing the Divine Beasts, meeting Impa or remembering who Zelda is. I saved all the main regions before ever going to Lookout Landing. My playthrough was so different from my friends because I had to engage with the zonai mechanics far more without the paraglider and it made for a fun and unique playthrough. When I eventually did meet Purah, she was dumbstruck that I had already resolved all the problems she was about to ask me to fix. It was actually pretty fun to see that I could direct the game in that way. I don’t really see this as an issue for an open world game unless you want the game to be less open.
Well now you're just talking about wanting the game to walk you through the entire story. Back in the day we had to go down to the store and buy things called "walkthroughs" if we wanted someone to hold our hand.
I definitely get this being a problem depending on the mechanic you're having to wait for. Only reason I don't criticize Elder Scrolls for it is because clearing this section of the opening would necessitate you being the Dragonborn, and ES does want to give you the option to just... not be the special dude. It's pretty okay with your refusing the main quest entirely. Oblivion lets you do this too. No heroics at Kvatch = no gates opening. They are more closed than Morrowind though, in the sense that the only thing exclusively waiting for you in Morrowind's main quest line is... well, a crippling disease. XD (As opposed to more prominent gameplay elements.)
I think the comparison presented between BotW and ToTK in this video leaves out some important things about BotW. Saying this as someone who wasn't a fan of the Great Sky Island and thought the Great Plateau was better, BotW does the exact same thing as ToTK with witholding mechanics after leaving the Great Plateau. Instead of Lookout Landing, the entire Hateno region more or less function as the second tutorial area there. You only learn how memories work from Impa in Kakariko Village, and only receive the Camera and Sheikah Sensor (+ if you don't activate a Sheikah Tower outside the Great Plateau beforehand). Kakariko Village also has a shrine purely dedicated to being a tutorial in Breath of the Wild. TotK does have problems, but BotW shares them, even if to a lesser extent.
I like how Tunic tutorialises things. It's unique because not knowing how anything works is part of the experience they're aiming for and it uses the drip feeding of game manual pages to teach new things as players go. This often leads to teaching secret mechanics, which Tunics core thing to teach is arguably getting players invested in hunting for secrets. It starts simple. A hidden chest, a hidden path there. Then leaves symbols in the manual for things investigate before escalating into code breaking and translating. The wonky part is the introduction of d-pad codes. Outside of players figuring it out themselves there's a manual page players are basically guaranteed to find that explains how symbols can use dots and lines to say what buttons to input to open certain doors, which is great. 1 problem. There's a bunch of secrets, specifically for fairy collecting, that require noticing dots in random places like flowers on the ground. These are very easy to miss and while some camera work helps emphasise something is there I often failed to figure it out until a guide exposed me to the concept. Fortunately you don't need all the fairies but it's still a minor blemish on what is otherwise an immaculately designed treasure box of secrets in game form.
Honestly, I don't think the story is interesting enough for the out-of-order memories to end up being much of an issue. The specific cutscenes are also directly tied to the shape of the geoglyph they're in, and that was probably more important to the designers
That would make no sense. Why would you get the sword memory at the tablet glyph? I also wonder if the people who complain about the order were really spoiled by it. Or whether they just think people _can_ be spoiled by it.
@@Dharengo Yes, was "spoiled" by finding "Zelda is just Ganon's puppet" before doing any side-quests. And everyone kept going on about how Zelda is doing suspicious stuff. It's incredibly frustrating to not have any dialogue options to tell people. Same with "Zelda learns about dragonification" after randomly stumbling over the white dragon. Renders the scene of her swallowing her stone pretty meaningless, since I already knew she would do it. Now, being spoiled isn't the big issue for me here, it just feels like they didn't give a crap about their own story. Just throw some videos into the world haphazardly, who cares if the players watch them, let alone in order, or if they clash with just about all of our quests?
@@Umbra_NocturnusThat first part is kind of awkward, but Zelda eating the stone chronologically happens after learning about it. The real question is where's the harm in knowing about that?
Funny you mention the second tutorial zone, because I headed there at first, talked to prunia once and said "well, okay, let's see the world". The mission to check the tower was overwritten with another one right when I got it and missed it completely. At some point I even ASSUMED they wouldn't give me the paraglider and that it was replaced with those cooler abilities and zonai devices to emphasise creativity. And about the towers... I also assumed I would unlock it later. I thought it was designed like that until I found the first quest about geoglyph and a friend told me "did you actually missed the paraglider?"
I disagree about Unicorn Overlord. The units are placed near the spots which lets you hire mercenaries of the same class. As such they act less to tell you how to beat up the bad guys and more to tell you how to use the units you now have more access to. And this is a way more relevant lesson. Even on the hardest difficulty it is not too difficult to construct squads which simply steamroll any enemy squad that isn't a boss, but to do so you need to understand the units you yourself employ. This way the game also gives you something to think. If a particular enemy unit is troublesome for you then you can go look at their stats and abilities and decide for yourself how you want to counter them. This is way more rewarding then being told the solution to the enemy unit straight up and requires strategy which is the entire point of a strategy game.
Yup! I've been greatly enjoying my time in Unicorn Overlord. I've spent hours just tweaking my unit comps so each one can stand on its own and have a decent chance of handling most threats. And when I look at the time I go "Gosh, I've wasted 2 hours just fiddling with menus!" But when I actually deploy the units and they perform mostly how I want them to, it feels rewarding that my forethought is paying dividends. And even the parts where they are not performing quite right is a learning experience. Realizing I have the wrong skill rule set or that cavalry are indeed very vulnerable to fliers means yet more optimizations to make. It's been a bit like Dark Souls in that there's a lot to learn just thru experience, and as much as my anime bobbleheads are leveling up, I am also leveling up as a player.
That's a valid point -- in a game with symmetric combat, an NPC describing how their class works isn't necessarily a lesson on how to _defeat_ them but also how to _use them yourself._ Compare that back in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, every time you chatted with a wild Palico out on a map (one that you could potentially hire), they'd drop a random tip about what their class does. And being MH, these are allies you fight alongside, not foes you fight against.
@@Stratelier I feel like the misstep here is perhaps that they are trying to teach you how to *use* the class, but then they're testing you on how to *beat* the class.
@@AdmiralTails They do teach you how to beat the class! After concluding a fight with tutorial squads they will often tell you to watch out for one of the class's shortcomings or classes that counter them. You can smash up all of the yellow tutorial units even at the beginning of the game before you open up all the basic classes. Even the Thieves and Hoplites can be destroyed before you get Hunters/Swordfighters and Warriors/Magic users thanks to the Unwavering Spear and Runic Blade existing in the first shop. At the end of the day some people will still struggle regardless of how you set up your tutorials or their lengths.
I’d been wanting to ask someone else who played UO…. Did hiring units feel kinda unnecessary? Like…. I tried to get all the named characters and was almost always overflowing with units. And it felt like a waste to NOT build affinity…
I actually like Xenobalde 3's "fake" flame clock tutorial, it tempts you into being more desperate to kill things due to the stat boosts and threat of losing the flame, and it helps you identify with the cast when the supposed gameplay "rule" is uprooted so quickly.
I watched this video immediately after Karl Jobst's most recent update on his upcoming court trial, so the "I hear Australia is nice this time of year" line was way funnier than it was supposed to be.
I wish digital instruction manuals had taken off. I know the 3DS had them, but I don't know of any other console that uses them. They were great and you could never lose them. My issue with Tears isn't the tutorials though since I felt everything was pretty straightforward since I played BoTW. My issue is that they gatekeep abilities behind tutorials. I didn't get the auto build feature until like 50 hours into the game because I explored the depths randomly and didn't follow the storyline down there until like 50 hours in. I didn't know the autobuild feature existed since I went into Tears blind. I got it and I was like "huh this would have been really useful and encouraged me to build more if I had known I could save my builds earlier..." Like in an open world game you should start out with all your tools. The ultra hand ability brcame much more usable and convenient once I got the autobuild, so I can't believe they hid away the thing that made the big new gimmick more user friendly behind a sidequest you can ignore for 50 freaking hours.
I always have to think of Europa Universalis IV when people talk about bad tutorials. The game basically tells you it's controls and then leaves you alone. EU IV is one of the most complex games there is and you get a lot of people that have over 100 hours of this game and say that they are a beginner and don't really know what they are doing. But honestly. I wouldn't even know where to start making an actual tutorial for that game. The systems are so intermingled that it is very hard to teach players individual mechanics and systems.
Victoria 3 attempts to have a more traditional tutorial instead of the popup advice older paradox games used. It actually works significantly worse because it can't acount for the game's unpredicatble outcomes. You can quite easily find yourself unable to complete objectives for decades, essentially halting the tutorial completely and ensuring that if you do manage to get there the subsequent lessons will be irrelevant.
It's at least good Monolith itself basically admits its tutorials sucked, with Xeno 3 going so far as to have one of the tutorials happen TWICE. People complain about over tutorializing more than lack of it. But I'd rather too much than not enough/wrong tutorials.
@@austincrook5304TBF I don't think Xenoblade Chronicle 2's tutotials could have ever been great, because the game is at it's best when exploited to hell and back. Auto-attacks suck without stutter step and the only pouch items ever worth using are the ones that speed up cooldowns. And exploiting those are like esential to the core gameplay being fun imo. That said wow they're still super bad, there's a very real reason I heavily reccomend anyone playing to watch Chuggaaconroy's tutorial video.
@@WeskAlber With X it’s more about how many important things it fails to mention. Elemental resistances, the importance of potential, morale, how worthless the defense stat is-all of these are critical combat mechanics, and none of them are even mentioned, much less explained.
I think probably one of the most infamous tutorials is Post Shift 2. It's a FNAF fangame and an incredibly dense one at that, so there's a lot of complex mechanics that the game needs you to learn. The launch version, unfortunately, has all of the issues discussed in the video, frontloading all of its mechanics immediately as a massive multi-page wall of text, with some of them not being relevant right away because the animatronic they apply to doesn't show up for a few more nights. The launch version is also extremely difficult due to the developer being the main playtester, so the tutorial being a massive document just adds another layer of difficulty that the player doesn't need.
If it’s such a big multi paged wall of text, it would’ve been cool to frame it as an “employee guide book” that could be opened, and looked at any time. If structured right, it would even add another layer of immersion
And despite all that information it slams in your face it still doesn’t tell you things you need to know like the existence of the second mini panel in night 5
One of the best tutorials I've ever experience and still hold up in high regard to this day is Banjo-Kazooie. Bottles (your tutorial and new move teacher) teaches you how your moves work and in the first 10 mins or so you can learn how your basic moves work and as a new player that's great but if you're a repeat player you can say No to him when he asks if you want to learn your basic moves and you can continue onwards to the main game which is also great!
One of my biggest complains on Ruina, I don't mind reading but slapping me with six screens of text on a complex mechanic is NOT a way to understand things. Didn't know you can clash a single non-ranged dice against multiple ranged dice until the Queen of Hatred. It's a bad part and can (and will) easily drive people away from a fun game...
it doesn't help how incorrect the Limbus tutorial is getting the further we get into the game, it didn't even teach me how to offset I had to learn that from more experienced people
Guys, hear me out. We can solve the tutorial problem by replacing it with something -- maybe like a pamphlet we could ship with the game, or a menu option in the pause screen. Yeah, it could have pictures and explanations about how to do stuff, and you could access it whenever you wanted to instead of having it shoved down your throat all at once or holding back useful information until later on. I just need to come up with a name for it...
One of the most gratoutous instances of this I have ever come across was in Phoenotopia Awakening where basic info and tutorials were not only hidden, but you also needed to pay i game money to get. This in a game where money is a very scarce resource and needed for more important stuff.
Usually I’d get mad for friends telling me things about the game ahead of time but boy am I glad a friend of mine pointed out that I could get the paraglider in TotK right away. With it being located in Hyrule Castle I was assuming I’m not ready to go there yet expecting a huge challenge as Hyrule Castle was a dangerous area in BotW but no I could’ve gotten the paraglider the second I was told to go there and if my friend didn’t tell me I would’ve probably played through half of the game without it.
I missed the paraglider at first specifically because I assumed Hyrule Castle = Danger. It doesn't look any more welcoming than it did in BotW from a distance.
Why? The game tell me to go to the (not) castle, Look out Landing, Link and Zelda were under the castle in the intro, so I go back to the castle to tell the soldiers what actually happened and that Zelda is missing. Why would you make a decision based on the information of the last game when they gave you new information at the beginning of the game and we were the person who get rid of everything dangerous in the castle in the first place?
@@blueboytube King Rhoam told you straight away that you need to prepared well for the battle of Hyrule castle and then tell you to head to Kakariko. Did you not go to Kakariko?
I think the greatest tutorial I've ever played was the intro to NieR:Replicant. It's pretty simple: fight a bunch of enemies as the game hands you abilities every minute or so, but the gripping opener, countless unanswered questions it brings up, and outstanding soundtrack make it the only tutorial I look forward to every single time.
I'd say Terraria has a decent enough tutorial, but I remember in my first playthrough I basically relied on the wiki because otherwise I didn't know much of what to do besides explore the surface for loot and maybe search underground for life crystals because the Guide NPC said so
Terraria is definitely a wiki game. Sure, you could blunder your way through it with what advice the guide can give you, but you'll be missing out on a whole lot.
Terraria is very much a game that you have to read up on, either before or while playing. Relogic has added so much to open up the game for infinite replayability... if you know what to look for. If you don't, you could go multiple playthroughs without knowing a chunk of the game's mechanics or content even exists. The only major hurdles for most people are the exact specifications for valid housing, boss progression/summoning, and class-building knowhow, but those are arguably the most important things in the game. I love terraria to death, but sometimes I lean back in my chair, just exhausted over the thought of "what if someone tried doing all this the hard way? it's taking me all this effort and I have a cheat sheet."
"Decent enough"? Beyond the cryptic hints the guide gives you and the overload of information you get giving him crafting materials it tells you almost nothing. I love the game to death but I feel like it's probably one of the worst games ever when it comes to player training.
I started playing Terraria blind and I got pretty far with just making basic shelters out of outer walls and platforms because I somehow missed the fact that I could make a workbench and start making more complicated stuff like doors. (I still had fun though.)
Now i can get through Terraria like the back of my head, but before it was a confusing runaround trying *not to die* at 100 HP, no defense, barely knowing what i'm supposed to do.
Shout out to every fighting game released in the last 15 years for giving us the most worthless tutorials ever. Read text box, do input against a training mode dummy, and move on to the next. Rinse, repeat, and learn nothing. Except for Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator and Rev 2 for actually putting effort into trying to teach things that are useful for play.
My brother said my lack of skill in Dragon Ball Fighterz was me skipping the tutorials. Then I showed him that I in fact cleared every single tutorial for every single character
I feel like fighting games tutorials lack a good half of what it should teach you. they give you the input, and some subtility, neat, but they never bother to try and giving some practical exemple of that input strenghs/weakness. so you learn a bunch of shit, and it's only through getting your ass kicked by others that you learn the applications. and then there some fightings games that don't teach you basics concepts such as superarmor, priorities, Okies and more general fighting games mecanics, as if the players where veteran of that genre already.
I think my brother and I had a copy of... maybe BlazBlue2 (?) that actually came with a separate tutorial-DVD, with little videos on how to play the characters. I still find that really funny, but it did kinda help a little.
With TotK, I feel the problem isn’t that the tutorial area ends too soon but rather that the rest of the game is structured in a way that makes it difficult to ensure players will find the additional tutorials when they need them. There are a ton of objectives in the game. Some are best done early because they are easier and help you prepare for the harder and more complex challenges. However, the game doesn’t give you enough information about which is which. As a result, I had a pretty lopsided experience where I only learned some things after I had used brute force to get through most of the difficult content. Near the end of my play time I was coasting through not only because I had tons of resources but also because I had finally learned everything and was applying those lessons to early game content!
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.
Pikmin 2. You start by killing a Dwarf Bulborb, switching to Louie, and building your squad. The bad part starts once you start carrying stuff. You have to carry the Dwarf Bulborb from the base to the onion and the battery halfway from the onion to the base. The problem is you have nothing to do from that point on and it takes a while to get both objects to the required location and the only enemy is already dead.
I also missed the paraglider for quite a while. Not too long but I did explore hyrule castle without it. It tired using the wing zonai device but they didn't work super well in the way I tried them. I think playing the game without the paraglider is an interesting challenge though. As you have to think about reaching an area or how you'll get down instead of just falling back on the paraglider to solve all your problems.
Can I suggest the topic of NPC dialogue? In some games you don’t want to speak to any NPC but in some other games you feel like you want to speak to all of them. It would be interesting to analyse what makes the difference.
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 UA-cam 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.
Robotnik Ring Racer funniest tutorial of all time. 40 mins and several segments of forced tutorials. Then you start a grand prix and immediately get bombarded with completely unexplained and unintuitive mechanics before the race even starts ⚰️
I really don’t get a lot of the complaints about TotKs tutorial, personally. I agree with the paraglider thing and the linearity being weird, but when the hell is anyone gonna *need* the camera or shrine sensors? The camera is only actually useful for sidequests, and the shrine sensor is literally just the dowsing ability from Skyward Sword. You don’t need it, you can find shrines yourself. I also get the complaints about the geoglyph quests and the backstory storytelling, I just don’t see how they’re related to the tutorial of the game at all. It’s clearly meant to be an optional main quest, just like the backstory of the last game. Same thing with the depths questline. You can decide not to do either of them. You can also decide which one you wanna do first, you start them in completely different parts of Hyrule. So it’s also not *as* linear as you’re making it out to be. And I especially don’t get the complaints about the secret combat moves. I fail to see why it’s a bad thing that some advanced combat moves aren’t immediately taught or required. They’re really no different from the hidden skills in Twilight Princess, only they’re arguably better because the game will still let you execute them even if the game didn’t teach you how yet. I definitely feel like the paraglider should have been important enough to give it to the player earlier too, but besides that, the expectations you’re putting on TotK’s tutorial feel kind of unreasonable to me. Just because the game doesn’t teach you every little thing about it at the very start doesn’t mean the entire game is suddenly a tutorial. By that logic, every Zelda game ever is just an extended tutorial because you don’t have or know how to use every single dungeon item until the last or second to last dungeon.
TotK honestly would have been better if the Great Sky Island's Temple of Time had an optional dungeon inside it that consisted of a combat tutorial gauntlet. That way, people can ignore it if they want to figure it out themselves, but for those that want to learn everything can do so before they jump off and head to Lookout Landing. Combine some together to reduce repetitiveness and then make a boss fight at the end against Rauru's ghost that rewards a piece of heart to make up the difference. Then those shrines where they are all found normally can still be there, they just won't reward a orb of light since you already got it in the optional tutorial dungeon at the beginning of the game. Can even give the player a pop up saying, "Hey, you already learned the things this shrine has to teach you and will not gain an orb of light if you complete it again. Do you want to redo the tutorial for ____?" Might feel video gamey, but I think it'd be appreciated by people.
I'm not sure merging every fighting tutorial into one big tutorial would have made the learning easier. Curious new players would just get stuffed with plenty of new mechanics at once and wouldn't assimilate them immediatly Moreover it would hold back many players who doesn't want to miss anything from jumping on the land by teasing them this whole area to discover, creating a tension between going forward in the game and staying on the Great Sky Island, while they already spent a lot of time there already. Finally, leaving empty shrines all over the map would feel disapointing once you stumble on them. Despite having a little boss fight at the end of the tutorial area sounds cool, I think that in the end, this optional dungeon wouldn't satisfy many people.
Or maybe you make the combat tutorials in lookout landing with Link helping to "instruct" the rookie soldiers on drills... and completely forgo the waste of shrine space and repetitive loading screens for way too many locations around the map...
@@coloquintedetoux6899 I kind of like the idea of Rauru testing you with one last gauntlet, but keep the reward at the later shrines (because no one wants to do a challenge for nothing) and let them be a test to see if you retained or need a refresher on the all-in-one tutorial.
@@amandaslough125 This. This is the way to do it. A lot of optional tutorial stuff could have been put at Lookout Landing. Pretty much all the troops there were window dressing as it is now.
@@BonaparteBardithion I agree too ! The lookout landing would be the perfect place for that since you often come back here throughout your journey ! The soldiers here could ask a new lesson about one technique every time you come back wich would fit the overall design the place, giving you new missions each when you stop by. This way it would avoid having to be teached all the techniques all at once and would give extra relevance to Lookout Landing on the while playtrough. On top of that, if you already knew or found out the techniques on your own the soldiers could still give you a little reward for your teaching, so it would remain a nice and fun thing to do.
Ok, but I spent my first 72 hours of Totk not knowing that the paraglider still existed, going all the way to terry town and back, and being totally oblivious to the fact that the main objective was literally three feet forward from where I landed, and it was one of the best experiences I've had in a game, it would be horrible if it was intended, but it was an awesome accident.
Just started playing Persona 5 Strikers for the first time yesterday and I got kinda overwhelmed with the tutorials. I'm not very familiar with the genre of the game, so learning everything the game is currently throwing at me is a bit difficult. It feels like I get shown two new mechanics per battle, all of them just explained through text boxes and pictures, and when I start the battle, ready to use everything I just read, my cpu companions often beat up the enemy before I managed to aim or press the right buttons or a different attack suggestion pops up on screen that turned out to be so effective that I accidently beat them up without using the new moves. This had the consequence that I completely forgot with what button (combo) I fire my gun (when I remembered I could do that at all), when I accidently got into a battle with a stronger enemy with a gun weakness and it killed almost my entire team. I am not the biggest fan of this tutorial, so it's funny to see a video on the topic shortly after.
@@evanseifert8858 That, while true, doesn't really help imo since whenever you're in battle, the UI only shows the icons and you can expect to see numerous status effects even in the early game. I would have liked to see a more gradual introduction of status effects to ease the player into it. DD1, I didn't mind so much as stuff like bleed, blight, and stun were very simple in concept and easy to grasp. And there weren't a bajillion of them. Not so much in DD2
Never really had a problem with the TotK tutorial. I’m sure some people have grievances, but I never really stumbled upon a moment that made me think “Does this really need to be happening?” Or “Why didn’t it tell me to do that?”
When I was little it took me three evenings to figure out that in Sonic Unleashed on the wii you were supposed to tap 2 times the direction to start running in the night stages, the game's control scheme just told me to use the nunchuk stick without specifing the tapping necssary so i was just stuck there wondering how cool the rest of the stage would be.
I really love the detail that with the “lesson 2” transition, there was a pause that was noticeably just a little too long before you said “timing is everything”. I assume that’s intentional, 10/10
I do find it a bit unfair to TotK to call out these "tutorial shrines", "camera/scanner", and "tear spots" for it, but not BotW which did the same exact thing ("tutorial shrines", "camera/scanner" in Hateno, and the memory pictures instead of tear spots). I do agree that you do feel like you need the paraglider and access to the new towers before you can be really done with the tutorial, unlike in BotW where you were good to go once you got off the plateau. I simply don't agree with you calling out those things when BotW did as well.
I think my main issue was the linearity of the whole thing combined with not clearly delineating the tutorial. In BOTW it’s very clear that the great plateau is the “tutorial”, and you aren’t missing any key items when you leave it. I realized watching this a potential reason why I felt so frustrated with TOTK in a way I didn’t with BOTW. With BOTW I never felt like I was being forced in a certain direction once I left the plateau. There was a very clear point where the tutorial was over and you had everything you needed to explore basically anywhere you wanted. TOTK blurring that line by putting one of its key items outside of the tutorial space made all the other mini tutorials and such much more frustrating because, for me at least, it wasn’t clear whether I was missing something important by ignoring the NPCs “encouragements” for a long while past the tutorial. While I did get annoyed with battle shrines in BOTW, I never felt obligated to seek them or any of the other mini tutorials out because I felt reasonably confident that I wouldn’t need them until I stumbled across them. With TOTK I worried more that by ignoring character promptings I’d be setting myself up for a worse playthrough of the game, so I was more hesitant to go explore the open world freely in the same way I did the first game. TLDR: I guess what I’m saying is that while I agree that lots of the problems DD talked about with TOTK’s tutorial exist in BOTW, I don’t think they’re as big of a problem in BOTW as they were in TOTK because the main tutorial in BOTW resolved clearly. For me at least, I never felt free of the tutorial stage in TOTK because there wasn’t a clear endpoint like there was in BOTW
@@justtired2050 I can see that. For me at least, getting the Paraglider and access to the towers on the ground definitely felt like the end of the tutorial. I do wonder how they could have better defined when it was "general tutorial done" in TotK for someone such as yourself who felt they didn't have all the tools they needed. BotW was fairly obvious that when you left the plateau you were done. I know personally, I had explored a decent bit of the depths before I ever got the camera and got the basics on it. That was fine for me.
@@linkmastr001 That’s fair. I think it might’ve been partly how DD explained it at the end of the section when he said that TOTK took off the leash too early or something like that. In BOTW you physically can’t go anywhere outside the plateau until you have the paraglider and access to the towers, but in TOTK you technically don’t have to get the paraglider or access to the towers to start exploring anywhere else. When I got to Hyrule I didn’t go to the castle because it was the most interesting place for me; I went because it felt like the game wanted me to go there and I figured it must be because there was either more tutorial or the paraglider. In BOTW freedom from the great plateau is the biggest part of what made the tutorial feel finished, and getting the paraglider mostly serves to give you that freedom, so when that wasn’t the case for TOTK it felt… anticlimactic? I think I would have preferred the Hyrule section to somehow lock me in until I got the paraglider, like maybe with cutscenes at the castle and walling off the base next to it so you can’t leave until you get everything? I don’t think that would have been the best solution but I think it would have made a big difference for me to have gotten the paraglider and the freedom to explore the map at the same time. As it was the game felt like it was making me choose to go to the castle first, when in the beginning I was more curious about the holes to the depths and the sky island remnants. Idk; I think there were a lot of factors and I ended up loving the game, but I remember being skeptical and a bit disappointed in the beginning because I felt like I was being funneled into a more linear play style than I had preferred in BOTW
@@justtired2050First thing I did after the Great Sky Island was try to fly to other islands because at the time those were the most interesting landmarks for me to explore. The first time i actually touched down on Hyrule’s Surface was the Kara Kara Bazaar in Gerudo Desert lol I actually loved the fact that you can just not get the paraglider and towers and explore. It gave me the option to have a different type of playthrough where I used zonai tech and other methods to get by and I couldn’t simply teleport to the nearest tower, shoot into the sky and glide to any location. I don’t know why the game should lock you in once you have everything you truly need.
I think the tear spots are a lot worse than the memory pictures. You learn much more significant information in them, but the game never acknowledges it and Link doesn't tell anything to anyone when he obviously should.
It did indeed. You could also upgrade it so it would look for just about anything you have taken a photo of. Like vegetables, weapons or treasure chests.
There are two tutorials I'll always remember: Pokemon Sun/Moon for how aweful it was (and even worse, half of the game afterwards still feels like a tutorial somehow) and then there's Far Cry Blood Dragon which is making fun of you at your expense. Very entertaining - the first time.
My co-worker somehow spent 34 hours on the tutorial island and later failed to push the button that lets you enter the water temple for at least three hours inside the cave. Going backwards and still winning seems like the better accomplishment.
Honestly, I enjoyed TotK's continual learning. It was cool to find something and be like "There's still more I don't know yet?!" I found it exciting how the devs made a familiar game so new. But everyone has their own opinions, which is fine. It depends on your perspective and preferences.
Not even a specific game, I feel an entire genre that struggles with tutorialization is the fighting game genre. More often than not, they just have you play through a ton of mini-trials back-to-back for each specific mechanic, and while I'm sure this style has clicked with some, I find that it's far too much information dumped onto the player with not nearly enough chance to put it into practice (not helped by the fact that these mini-trials will usually just be against training dummies, so you don't really feel like you're applying this knowledge in a way that'll help in regular gameplay). I usually find that by the time I'm actually playing the game and I'm in the heat of battle, several of those mechanics have already slipped my mind. There have been some more recent attempts in the genre to try and tutorialize better, with a particularly notable example being Street Fighter 6, whose World Tour is basically a tutorial in the form of a massive campaign mode. It paces mechanic-teaching a lot better, with plenty of NPCs to fight to give you a chance to actually put those mechanics to use. World Tour does still have its problems, but in regards to teaching the game's mechanics, it's a step in the right direction in my opinion.
0:55 Tutorials, easy! Just make the player wake up in an ancient shrine that has hieroglyphics on the wall talking about some godlike creature pressing A to jump.
I think ToTK is fine personally as it suits both types of players fine. Experienced players who played BoTW will already know all the combat specifics and probably use them a lot, so it just being a pop-up at the start is fine. For casual players however who aren't as combat focused, they probably wouldn't use all the fancy combat tricks anyway, and trying to team them all at the start would just confuse them, so having them spread throughout the game stops them feeling overwhelmed and makes the combat more of a gentle curve. TLDR: It suits casuals and pros alike.
Can confirm. I'm watching someone play TotK who never played BotW and they're still pretty new-ish to games in general, and despite having beaten the 4 region bosses I don't think they've done a single flurry, parry, or anything like that. They're too busy just trying to stay alive to execute the fancy stuff.
that was an intentional choice by the devs bc otherwise players wouldn't experiment--they'd just keep doing what the tutorial told them to do still wish there was a bit of something but i also understand why they chose to not include one
One of my favorite games, Oxygen Not Included, unfortunately has a pretty rough tutorial (or really just lacks much of one to begin with). It's a colony builder/simulator sort of game with some vaguely realistic albeit quirky temperature and gas pressure physics. In terms of actual tutorials, the game only gives you a handful of short, wordless instructional videos that only really serve to outline some very basic mechanics you need to be aware of. Since you not only need to feed and oxygenate your colony, but also keep it from overheating while balancing resource and power consumption, the barebones tutorials leave new players totally unprepared such that their first handful of colonies almost always fail. Now it could be argued that this is just the developer's style of teaching, since it is the same company that made Don't Starve, aka Klei, but this very trial and error style of learning still results in a lot of players quickly bouncing off the game unless they seek outside guidance. The game is already pretty niche within a genre that has stiff competition from the likes of Rimworld, so lowering the barrier to entry wouldn't hurt.
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.
I feel like the movement abilities in Superstar Saga and Bowser's Inside Story were used really well, and don't really remember anything particularly egregious in Dream Team / Paper Jam? I didn't play Partners in Time, though. They certainly make sure to Explain the mechanic, but an hour long unskippable plotline is something I must have missed. Do you have a specific example?
@@hedwyn8803 I'm thinking that my Spanish to English misworded some details. In multiple of those titles there are multiple tutorial battles and overworld mechanics that in fact surpass an hour of game time, if you address them the same way this video does. You are looking at them as individual isolated moments, and not the chapter long experiences that they actually are. Just because they seem broken up with dialogue in between, doesn't negate them being chapter long tutorials, especially in their early game. As I've said. Nintendo built the tutorials directly into the plot to justify not making them skipable, because if they were indeed skipable, it would shave hours off the play time. It comes down to preference. I've plaid dozens of RPGs from other studios where the tutorials are added to the menu and do not intrude on the game itself making, or have game play intuitive enough to learn them on-the-fly. Nintendo pads their games by manufacturing the tutorials directly into the plot.
@@leegaul2161 For example, the entire ocean chapter in Superstar Saga. You learn the final move, and then get guided though a slump of absolute nothing, yet made to repeat the same steps over and over.
I picked up a game to try (free demo) that dropped me straight away into a sequence where I was on one ship attempting to attack and board another ship, with absolutely zero tutorial whatsoever. All the game would tell me was "board the enemy ship." I quickly figured out how to walk around and jump, but that was the extent of it. No button prompts, no pop-up tutorial tips, nothing in the menu that would help me out even. It was a hot mess, and I didn't do anything other than jump around ineffectually before closing the game down again.
And it kinda failed by doing so. Botw set a standard of what a tutorial should be and Totk just ignored what made it all so great. Like seriously the great sky island is such a downgrade. The shrine tutorials are located at places where the player has likey discovered how to play the game....
Some games don't even have a tutorial and just expect you to guess what you're supposed to do, like Ark ( and most survival games actually ). First time I played ( I didn't play Minecraft before ), no idea what to do, I had to check the internet to discover I was supposed to punch rocks and trees to get resources... and that's a big issue when the devs just assume that people are going to learn and try by themselves, when the solution makes ZERO sense because I would never have the idea to punch rocks and trees IRL... or maybe they assumed people would play with other people teaching them, as it's a multiplayer game, and forgot about solo players. Then some games have absolutely overbloated tutorials, like a lot of JRPGs or RTS/4X games that keep introducing new mechanics 30 hours in. I often give up these at the tutorial. Like in some fighting games where the tutorials has you perform a bunch of ultra-precise moves and just throws at you soooo many mechanics like anim cancel, overthrows, combos, super moves, hyper moves, chain attacks, frame skipping, overdrive, gadgets, environmental damage, or whatnot I'm just making stuff up here. Or recently I started Lords of the Fallen, the tutorial is really intrusive and throws so many button combinations and mechanics at you for what feels like 2 hours. Meanwhile the Souls/Elden Ring games have short tutorials and then they let you discover things by yourself. Not sure it's a better approach though, since some people might play the whole game ithout understanding its mechanics.
I never played Unicorn Overlord below expert and I didn't start checking outside resources until I beat it. While having scaling tutorial fights would be nice and not all skill descriptions matched the skill effects before a patch or 2, I never hit a wall. The majority of the information is in skill/unit descriptions, and you can check out the entirety of enemy squads as well as your own.
@@ThePaulineu Unicorn Overlord is apparently much closer to a series called Ogre Battle than Fire Emblem, though it definitely has some resemblance to the latter. Its story is serviceable and the characters are fine, but the amazing presentation and challenging yet dynamic combat system are the real draws for this game. I'd say it's definitely worth considering at least!
Have you not done a no paraglider playthrough? Its legitimately a blast and I think the paraglider not being given to you right off the GSI is because of that. Lots of people wanted a way to play BotW without the paraglider for challenge runs. I think the game does a good job at guiding the player to where you need to go next, it's our wonderment with getting back down to Hyrule and wanting to explore that may have thrown some off (I don't think that's a fault of the player or the game either, TotK having so many options on how to tackle things...I really appreciated that) As far as the GSI being more linear, I don't know if I agree without outside of how you get the recall shrine. I've replayed this game a lot and there's a lot of freedom on how you can tackle those first 3 shrines
the original tutorial for limbus company was pretty bad, super focused on the ultimately not that important resonence mechanic while completely neglecting to explain how clashing (basically the focus of all combat) works at all. thankfully it has gotten significantly better over time.
The worst is when you're doing a second playthrough of the game, but it has a long, slow and unskippable tutorial.
Yeah, I have a mostly blank save of Twilight princess that's saved past the whole Ordon Village part just because I hate all those fetch quests and such. Whenever I want to replay it, I just copy that save.
Similar to that are the abundance of nearly identical mobile games that feel the need to hold your hand through an obscene amount of the experience without the ability to skip any of it (sometimes even throughout the games entirety).
I know many people don’t bother with mobile games and I didn’t either but I recently started to when I found out I could make a decent amount of pocket money from a handful of apps that pay you to play them (not a scam as I once assumed btw). Anyway, the amount of times I’ve had to slog through match 3 or “merge” games that tutorialize literally *everything* has made me want to quit several times. The worst are the games that have endless amounts of mechanics, materials, points, currencies etc. just there to confuse people into spending money to progress. It’s sadistic.
@@avereynakama9854 I do the same, but right after the carriage escort sequence.
**Cough, Cough** Pokemon
Persona 5 is even worse, almost ten hours long.
I assume that TotK did that because they didn't want players to be overwhelmed... only to create a new problem of players being too confused, I suppose
I skipped the darkness tutorial until after I did the fire temple, in the darkness
Yeah, you're pretty much learning mechanics and tricks during the entire game. I really think it's only fault is not giving you the paraglider immediately after getting on the ground. If I recall correctly... I think you have to go to Lookout Landing, then Hyrule Castle, then back to Lookout Landing before you (can) get the paraglider. I had to add "can" there because I don't think it's even given to you then. iirc some quests open up and it's the tower quest and there's no hint that the paraglider will be got there until you do it.
Personally, I think it would have been cooler to go into the Depths without a tutorial. It would really build tension and curiosity and, as soon as you stumble into your first lightroot, you'd pretty much know the dealio at that point.
Except that Nintendo already solved the best ways to easiy introduce combat system tutorials in other games. Wind Waker had the training with the grand master in the dojo before you could progress off of Outset Island and Twilight Princess did not even give you skills until you passed a tutorial with the Hero of Time.
TotK was a step back in both the quality of the Zelda series and how cohesive the user experience was as they progressed.
People are very quick to jump to defend the Big N but hestitant to not only look at what they do in comparison to the rest of the industry but even in relation to their own previous efforts that are demonstrating a steady decline in the quality of their games.
I received TotK as a Christmas present. I got through the tutorial island, reached Hyrule, immediately went for a tower I saw, and... nothing. You can't do anything there. I looked it up and turns out you need to follow the main plot first before you can go exploring, as opposed to BotW where you can explore immediately. Killed my interest in the game, honestly. Now that I know it's actually a linear zelda I guess I can go in again with corrected expectations, but how frigging frustrating. I put like 200+ hours into botw, I just wanted more of it, Nintendo.
I mean they might’ve leaned on botw having alot of those mechanics
But theres no excuse for the throwing items mechanic
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.
Oh yeah!! That was so damn weird!
all the bridges you can choose from are made of bricks, wood and stone too, so you'd think you could just craft them, but no
Smell like a fucked up scrapped mechanich, how the devs failed to remove that tutorial is beyond me.
I know I wasn't the only one who got enough materials for three bridges thinking I was going to put a few down, only to be very disappointed.
New Horizons being just wishy washy enough on the crafting vs "just fund it" issue while starving you of both without exploits, really makes me wonder if they just wanted to rush the game out so they could get back to making fans simp for Splatoon more.
There also are some games where the tutorial sets a certain expectation of the game but then everything after the first 20% or so is a completely different game from what the tutorial implies. Whether it's something like, "For story reasons you don't have a core mechanic during the tutorial stage but in every other level you need to use it a lot" or something like, "We teach you about stuff like crowd control using knockback/launchers but every enemy later on will have some form of superarmor."
with the first "Something Like", at least the Metroid Prime games, while crafting a reason for you to lose your abilites after stage 1, gives them back and more throughout the game
@@atrane365 I think that's distinctly different and it's actually not bad for a tutorial to give you endgame abilities then take them away, since it sets the expectation of where you "eventually" will be.
I'm thinking something more like in Metal Gear Rising how in the intro stage Raiden's Blade Mode is significantly weaker than it is in the actual game and you don't have the Zandatsu. The Zandatsu is such a core mechanic to the game that it has its own dedicated spot in the combat rankings but it isn't something you have in the tutorial stage.
A specific example that comes to mind is the Ike ring in FE Engage. Almost every ring’s introduction acts as a sort of mini-tutorial to demonstrate the strength of each ring and for the most part they’re pretty decent.
Ike’s ring However emphasizes it’s ability to instantly breakdown blockers and debris, which almost never shows up to a meaningful degree for the rest of the game outside of an optional mode, rather than it’s far more useful abilities to lure and tank large groups of enemies.
So you’re complaining about…*checks notes* games getting harder?
@@mattgroening8872I don't think that's what they mean. Just that the game can become something very different from what the tutorial teaches which kind of defeats its purpose. It can actually make the game easier with certain mechanics being introduced that make what you learned in the tutorial obsolete.
For tears of the Kingdom I completely missed the paraglider for like, way too long. and it let me do the hot balloon thing without it...
The lack of certain direction to the paraglider was the only problem I really had with the tutorial. Even else felt pretty good for me.
I was unaware of lookout landing for some 50-100 hrs as I tried to fly to the coolest sky Island first not knowing the wings had a time limit. From where I fell I just explored based on my own desires. I think it was the most magical and engaging time I had with the game. Without the paraglider I had to engage with all the new abilities more intimately, and without the throttled story there was more mystery to the world. I would have definitely had a worse experience if it forced me to LL first but I suppose that's only because the structure of the rest of the game
I thought it just wasn’t in the game for a while
After I first got to the surface, I did a bit of exploring, before finding one of the holes to the depths. Couldn't work put a way to survive going down, so thought about where I could get the paragliding, and assumed following the main mission was the most likely way to get it. But if I hadn't already played botw and knew about the paraglider, I would have gone ages without finding it
I wandered trough hyrule for a while without the glider (and without the towers) and started thinking "wow there really isn't a paraglider in this game, that feels weird"
In sky island I went clockwise through the shrines with out a second thought. It was very frustrating getting through everything backwards
My partner did the same thing and I watched CallMeKevin do that, too. It seemed very obvious to me which direction the game wanted you to go but seeing as several people do AND the game doesn't really give you a way to easily do it is an issue. I feel like, if they really wanted to railroad you that much, they may as well blocked off the "wrong" way.
Same
Ended up doing the same thing unknowingly, brute-forcing my way through the cold and up the mountain and wondering why this was so hard
@@Delta-lu5kf it didn’t point good enough lol
@@Delta-lu5kf they underestimated my ability to not pay attention
You reminded me that I got myself trapped on another sky island right after I left the tutorial zone because I had no paraglider and it's solid ground under me. I saw a rubble fall next to me and I immediately thought "Hey, maybe I can ride on it and rewind time." It hadn't occurred to me that I didn't have a paraglider, and any attempt to leave the island led to death by fall damage.
Took me 2 hours trying to position a wing zonai device at the very edge of the island, which is trickier than you might think because you can't move the object you're standing on.
Fun times.
Yeah, spent too long trying to do that too. Realized much later on the solution is to ultrahand it into the air for a few minutes, then put it down, get on, and then use recall to bring you back into the air
@@loganwoodbury4050
Came to mention this. Ultrahand+Recall is an absolute game changer.
@@loganwoodbury4050 i cant believe i havent thought of that, you just improved my experience a lot lol
But why not just fast travel back up to the great sky island so that you can jump and land in water?
Why didn't you just... teleport back to the tutorial area and jump down?
I feel like I HAVE to say this.
I got the sword memory first. The one you say spoils what happens to Zelda.
I did not see the twist coming a mile away. I was shocked when the cutscene happened. The sword memory didn’t spoil me. It made the twist more surprising because I didn’t remember everything said in that memory that was all foreshadowey.
I think my experience was BETTER with the story because I saw that one first. Because if I saw it coming I wouldn’t have been so happy with the cutscene
Tutorialization and guide culture are at a very weird impasse because players want different things. Some players want to figure everything out for themselves, only being told concepts by the game that they couldn't otherwise intuit. Some players need a little direction to get going, but then are fine with wandering around. Some players want everything explained to them ahead of time, because the fear of not knowing something and making a bad move because of lack of knowledge is paralyzing for them.
Some players are totally fine to read multiple pages of instruction to make sure they understand things. Some players freak out and hate on the game for even putting up more than one sentence of tutorial text.
I honestly don't know what the best middle ground is, but you can pretty much guarantee that SOMEONE is going to hate your game purely for how you do or do not use your tutorials.
The trick really is to not make them intrusive. Hell, you could even make it a setting at the start of a new save: call it "tutorial style" that gives the option for auto tutorial pop-ups, tutorials on button prompt or no prompt at all, giving the player the option to look them up later if they get stuck.
I think the best solution is to make a tutorial that fits the game it’s being made for. A roguelike such as Enter the Gungeon requires you to complete a basic and explicit tutorial on the game’s mechanics before you can even do a run, since it would be annoying having to learn the game on the fly with the risk of permanent death constantly looming over a new player. Meanwhile, a more open-ended and vague game such as Super Metroid doesn’t really have a clear tutorial. It tests new mechanics immediately after they’re obtained for a room or two, but then lets the player figure out difficult or unique uses for those mechanics to find secrets.
In a similar way to how no game genre can satisfy everyone, no tutorial will perfectly teach everyone. It just depends on a case-by-case basis on what’s best for the specific game being made, whether that be invisibly teaching the player through encouraged experimentation or explicitly guiding the player in the context of the game’s main story.
The best middle ground is actually putting instruction manuals in your game box which is kind of a problem now because a lot of people just buy their games digitally but if I can buy the deluxe edition and get an art book that I’m never going to use, then surely they can do the same thing with an instruction manual. Just have it be a separate downloadable file for whatever system you use. If you want to look at it you can, if you don’t that’s like an extra megabyte that you don’t have to install.
Guides and walkthroughs are weird for me now. As a kid I liked reading them casually for games I'd already completed or games I knew about but never had and I don't really remember specifically looking up guides outside of Harvest Moon 64 with my sister, but even then when an event happened that we didnt know about, we'd still be amazed.
Now I just find weird how expected it is for a lot of people to just, read an entire guide, walkthrough or browse a wiki while playing a game or even before playing a game and just...constantly be spoiled on what happens or what appears. I'm not one to tell people how to play their games, but its weird how games are the only media where newcomers want to be told about things ahead of time (granted there's a difference between "is there a softlock I should be aware about" rather than "how do I optimize everything in this game in the shortest time frame?")
@@SirLightsOut99 That's not a middle ground, that makes the game accessible only to people who either already know the basics of similar games or are invested enough to willingly do a research project. The typical starting point for someone getting into a hobby is just casually curious. Such a person is likely to get overwhelmed in the face of too much information (i.e. an entire instruction manual) and discouraged in the face of too much failure (i.e. what happens when a beginner dives right in without a tutorial or anything). This is why gaming used to be such a niche hobby- it required an extraordinary amount of motivation and investment to get into it. In order for games to keep being accessible, they need to keep having tutorials that present information as it is being used- being able to skip it or turn it off is fine. I'm all in favor of including instruction manuals, but as an alternative to the online wiki not as a replacement for the tutorial.
Breath of the Wild had a tutorial problem too. I remember a video of a lady playing, and she entered the kakariko shrine. The shrine starts teaching her about dodging and perfect blocks, and she yelled "You can dodge in this game?!". Then: "Guys, I've done 3 divine beasts!" She was most of the way through the game and just happened upon this shrine. Sure the game loosely points you at the village as your first stop, but there's no reason to expect a player in an open world game to follow through (and not get immediately distracted off course). Personally I would have made them optional shrines in the tutorial plateau. They unlock when you finish the first four and can leave, so you at least know they're available and have an idea of what to expect.
I grew a dislike to BOTWs tutorial cause I spent 2 hours trying to find out how to get through the cold for that tutorial shrine. I had completely missed the hut that tells you about cold resistance and was trying so many different approaches until I eventually looked it up haha Im sure Im in the minority, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth for the game
@@thepokeflutistbotw definitely does a trial by fire type of tutorial but personally I think it works for this game specifically because of the way it handles its survival aspects. The game is telling you that you aren't doing something right because you aren't able to traverse the area safely. So that creates the 'puzzle' of "how do I get through this" which then pushes the player to engage with other aspects of the game like cooking. Which is further accented by things like the hut you mentioned or Boko camps near the cold area having spicy peppers and a cooking pot. all in an effort to at least increase awareness that food can be a solution to various problems. It isnt perfect as players can still miss all of this but that's the cost of having a truely open world sometimes players don't walk by the area you want them to. I do think there are some pacing issues as OP mentioned like the combat tutorial shrines should be more upfront because that is a big part of the game but overall I think botw handles the trial by fire teaching method very well because it gives you the small experimental space of the great plateau to test out mostly everything.
@@raysay1818 It's not a tutorial, it's "you bought the game, you're playing the game, this is the game. Have at it." Sink or swim.
@@thepokeflutist
I still learned something from missing the hut.
1) Save scumming (saving just before dying and respawning on that spot) is a viable tactic. I would use this to ascend mountains by saving on ledges that I had no business being on with my stamina level.
2) If you get to the top without a jacket he gives you one. Could still get that by cooking peppers first, but it's fun that they still give that option to players that somehow haven't found the cooking tutorial yet.
I think it's okay to have the more in-depth combat mechanics come in later, especially since it's right by a place the end of the tutorial tells you to go. I finished that tutorial and still never got the hang of Flurry Rush, but there was probably a single boss where that was a problem for me.
I focused on non-combat methods of getting past enemies instead for the most part or used a lot of archery. Durians also made it easier for people that just aren't very good at combat but otherwise enjoy the game. In short, mastering the combat system isn't required to play the game.
The big thing is that they probably could have had a couple more tutorial/test like shrines instead of combat trials with vague suggestions on how to beat the enemy if you were observant.
If you put them on the Plateau players may skip them because they could be impatient to get out of the tutorial zone or get frustrated that they found a combat tutorial instead of the main quest shrine.
A better option would be putting one near each town. Kakariko would set the precedent for that, but if the player chooses to wander off in another direction they're still going to run into at least some advanced combat instruction no matter where they go.
While I do agree they did the tutorial differently, a lot of the things you mentioned for TOTK are things that did occur similarly in BOTW. BOTW doesn't explain its memory system unless you go to Kakariko first to visit Impa, which is suggested in the same way that Lookout landing is. And I did actually appreciate the inclusion of the order, which I don't think was in BOTW (please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the pictures were out of order in the album). That's also where there's a similar combat tutorial shrine like the ones in TOTK (though I do think splitting them up was a mistake). Sheikah Slate abilities, like the camera, are things that get unlocked at Hateno village. The main issue is definitely the paraglider, which I wish had been given to you when you completed the sky. But I understand the game making decision behind it-if you want to get the player to the Skyview Tower and Regional Phenomena quests then restricting a mode of travel is a good way to do it. While I think overall BOTW had a better tutorial, I think they're more similar than they've been made out to be here. Great video overall, just some thoughts!
In fairness to TotK, you didn't get the Shrine Sensor, camera, or memory quest immediately on leaving the Great Plateau in BotW either - the basic sensor does unlock automatically when you activate your second tower (first after the Great Plateau) or progress the secondary quests far enough, but you need to go talk to Purah in Hateno to get the camera, and then check back in with Impa in Kakariko before you can start the memory quest in order to get the actual backstory.
Delaying the glider and ability to activate map towers is a valid comparison to BotW, but that game also locked a lot of basic features behind following the main thread after leaving the Great Plateau, so the general comparison being made, implying that BotW's tutorial was entirely contained on the Great Plateau, doesn't hold up.
Those are great points I hadn't considered, I think you're right
I wish people would look past their biases, the games have plenty of tutorial problems but are still so much fun and all of the problems dont really detract from the game as a whole but eh
But I think the difference is that the camera and Memory Quests are not essential to BOTW's main gameplay loop. Therefore, it's much easier for the player to explore and learn at their own pace, and by the time they hit a roadblock, pick up the trail on the main quest given they've probably figured out how the mechanics work by now. TOTK locks the most essential movement tool behind the main quest, which leaves people itching to explore right away handicapped until they get through the plot stuff that the game deems is absolutely necessary for the player to experience.
the shrine sensor, memory quest and camera are all unnescessary mechanics that if you miss won't fundamentally impact the gameplay.
botw teaches you everything you'll _need_ on the great plateau, as well as where you need to go for the main quest. anything else you stumble upon is a bonus upgrade.
tears of the kingdom holds off on the paraglider and towers, without which the sky and depths (aka a good third of the game's content) are functionally inaccessible. plus, if you don't go to lookout landing you'll have no clue what you're meant to do for the main quest.
totk acts like you've done everything and that you're free to explore the world, but you really do have to visit hyrule castle to kick everything off.
@@dazcarrrTotK directly points you towards Lookout Landing after the tutorial and constantly has NPCs telling you to go there.
The tutorial also does teach you everything you need to beat the game. You don’t actually need the paraglider because you have your abilities and zonai tech. I did all the regional main quests before ever going to Lookout Landing by choice.
I'm just happy you flashed the Flame Clock tutorial on screen from Xenoblade 3. It's the funniest thing ever. They make a big deal about this Flame Clock and how if it starts to run out your attack power will get weaker and everything... And it only matters for the first hour, if that, and then it's immediately gone for the rest of the game. Incredible work Monolith, 10/10
I can't tell if that was an egregious oversight or some sort of developer inside joke 😅
@@Lampent12it’s intentional narrative fluff-the flame clock doesn’t actually do anything internally, it’s just for the story
I like games like story of seasons as wonderful life, where the game just drops you in and let you figure stuff out on your own. “If you have any questions about farming just read the bookshelf” At least that was like that in the original GameCube version, it lets people who already play farming sims to get to work while newbies ask any questions they want. Sometimes no tutorial is a good tutorial! 😊
Stardew Valley also did this as well with the library in the museum, and a certain channel on TV giving you tips.
I think thats what people like about BotW. But the truth is the game design does most of the heavy lifting in those games.
The problem is that nobody want to read especially when they're not force to. If it wasn't for UA-cam videos I probably would have never get into any of these game
That's not really what "no tutorial" means. You're just not railroaded through a learning segment that wasn't opt-in. Giving players a way to learn about the game in a more seamless way, is still tutorialising. A game with truly no tutorial would have most people quitting in time to refund on Steam.
I'm okay with this so long as the tutorial in question 1: Isn't inaccessible at a time when I realize I need to check it. It's pretty normal for games to just have reference sections in the menu. and 2: Doesn't omit critical details, hoping I'll just randomly 'figure it out'. I'd say that if the tutorial is kept out of the way to avoid being a nuisance, that's all the more reason to be extra-clear and informative. :)
9:06 This titlecard did not go unappreciated
Fighting game tutorials. They teach you the mechanic of the game in general, but often fall short of trying to teach you how to use the mechanics in a match.
I was thinking of Multiversus' new unskippable tutorial. There's more platforming than actual fighting there. What's worst, the character for the tutorial is Shaggy, but at no point is explained how his "super saiyan" (or whatever you want to call it) mechanic works, which is the most complicated thing to figure out about the character. They just tell you "do this to punch, do this to punch up, do this to make a stomp that breaks armor (armor you know nothing about), here you go, now fight".
And if there's some sort of ingame guide of movesheet or something that explains the characters' gimmicks and mechanics, I have yet to find it.
Update: found the moveset guide. When in the menu for selecting a character, you have to press a button that's not used pretty much anywhere else in the game (it's the *-* on the Switch controller). There's not a specific place to see the movesets of all characters on one go, you have to check each one manually.
fighting game tutorials are more or less a checklist of every input and mechanic without telling you when or where to apply it in practice. although in fairness, fighting games are extremely hard teach...
@@percher4824 Oh yeah not arguing. Fighting games are hard to teach, I just wish a few games tried to bridge the gap a bit better between, 'you understand buttons do a thing' and 'when and how to use the situational tool'
I would like to say that in Elden Ring, it was unbelievably rare for any player to read the tutorial message about Guard Counters and also attempt to use it in the boss fight with Soldier of Godrick. This is due to a number of factors. Players have already been inundated with tutorials, and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, they rush to get it over with. Some even skip the prompt about Guard counters all together. Additionally, this is there first boss health bar, which takes all focus and attention away from learning and redirects into observing the new potential threat. And the tutorial pops up at the worst possible time. The battle starts, the fight music plays, and boom, learn about guard counters right now!! No one even bothers. It pains me every single time I've seen it happen.
i remember skipping the tutorial on my first run and not knowing how to two hand my weapon so i had to go back and i do remember being jump scared by that prompt💀
it was sorta wired cus i was two handing my weapon (i found out) so i had to use jump attacks.(at least i read that one?)
ps.their is a menu in the game with all the tutorials
@@ryancliff-singleton7347 I've been two-handing my shield a couple times now, still no idea why (or why that's even an option), still no idea how to two-hand a weapon other than a bow, or why I'd want to do that (at least if it's like in Dark Souls where somehow it makes your attacks even slower).
Also no idea why I'd ever want to use the R2 attack, since it's slower and not even proportionally stronger.
@@gernottiefenbrunner172 Heavy attacks deal more poise damage, thus making it more likely you'll stun an enemy faster. Not that the game ever explains that...
@@gernottiefenbrunner172 You probably want to fully charge the R2 to really see a difference, especially on heavier weapons
Tutorials are good at telling you HOW to do things, but sometimes they're not good at telling you WHY you should do that thing. The tutorial holds your hand so much that it's less about learning game mechanics and more about memorizing steps. So when it releases you into the game world, you're completely lost because you were trained to follow prompts and not to think for yourself.
I can't think of specific examples, probably because I put those games down on day 1, and completely forgot about them.
I'd argue most grand strategy and city builder type games have this issue. Lots of fighting games too, a lot of "do this, then do this" without explaining why to do it
@@TheWrathAboveOh God, fighting games. It gets really annoying to have a bunch of mechanics thrown my way and I don't even get the slightest hint on why it matters.
Because there's A LOT of nuance with FGs in particular that wouldn't be clear to newcomers.
@@Spearra Tbf a big problem a lot of Fighting Games have is that they're so focused on their mechanics they don't even teach players fundemental stuff like footsies.
Mobile games are particularly bad about this. It's time to teach you something. Tap this, this, this, and this. Congratulations, a thing happened. What did you just do? In what situations will you need to do that? You'll have to figure that part out on your own.
Well One game I can think does show you why you should do it is Metal Gear Rising revengeance. One of the most important mechanics is parry . The Tutorial even sends actual in game enemies to practice parrying , it even has a tutorial for perfect parries and using them to get that sweet, sweet electrolytes and if you still didn't learn the game makes sure you do learn through Blade Wolf.
Zelda has always had some problems with over-tutorialization due to the sheer volume of different mechanics, and Tears adds a lot more to Breath's already massive arsenal.
Seeing a lot of games make the mistake of front-loading tutorials for mechanics you won't unlock for a long while.
"Zelda has always had some problems with over-tutorialization"
I'm guessing you never played any of the pre-3D games?
@@RootVegetabIe Sorry, I should have said '3D Zeldas'.
@@WhiteFangofWar Except Ocarina of Time has quite a fluid tutorial. Don't know what happened after that or why they thought it was a good idea to not introduce gameplay faster.
@N12015 Majora has a short one for basic Link, but also it's meant as a direct sequel so you should already know basic Link
I do like the tutorials for the masks tho. Deku has the lead up to Clocktown and 1st cycle, Goron has the "get to the dungeon" bit, the dungeon itself, and then the race. Zora has the egg quests and then the dungeon. FD doesn't need a tutorial tbh
It's really just skyward sword and to an extent twilight princess. The issue is not the volume of mechanics but rather the slow, plodding, unskippable bullshit you have to endure. As a return player it's a nightmare but even as a new player its like, can't you just scroll this text at the bottom of the screen while I walk through the area? Do you have to stop me for 20 minutes of unrelated flavor text?
Xenoblade Chronicles X is a masterclasses in bad tutorials. It glosses over or completely neglects teaching several incredibly important mechanics, leading you to play the game very suboptimally without ever knowing it.
Factorio had a similar problem with the tutorial. It taught you how to play on a basic level but completely ignored a ton of very useful (and practically required) tricks such as having a dedicated area for machines to build more machines
Ever tried idk opening up the virtual manual that all wiiu games had? X tutorials were good and should have been the standard for the series going forward.
@@dave9515 X's digital manual was definitely better than the in-game tutorials, but still not perfect. The Overdrive section in particular has some unnecessarily vague wording.
"I hate tutorials"
>Game gives you a manual that has everything in it and no tutorials
"Where's the tutorials?"
@@austincrook5304"Different colors have different effects, color combos exist, don't combo the same color, experiment."
xenoblade 2 has some pretty not good tutorials. its main issue is that you can't reread tutorials. the game has a pretty complex combat system, and the game already doesn't explain it super well. not to mention various other mechanics. if you missed anything, that mechanic may as well be lost to the void.
the most baffling part is, the game was receiving updates that fixed bugs and added content, but they never added the ability to reread tutorials. the game's DLC (which is effectively a separate game) let you reread tutorials, but they just never added it to the main game.
Xenoblade 2s tutorial system is having a friend that's already played the game
yup, the tutorial is chuggaconroy, that's it
maybe also the picture button on the switch
oh yeah the blade combo confused me so much at first, once you get used to it it makes more sence but the game does a pretty poor job at explaining it especially since it was such a jump in complexity from Xenoblade 1, another thing i didnt like was it having a mandatory gatcha system in a game that really didnt need it makes being a completionist far more tedious i still havnt got all the ng+ blades because farming cores just doesnt seem fun, xenoblade 3 version of finding the heros and doing quests to gain them as allys for them was much better imo
minecraft is interesting in that it doesn't have any tutorial, unless you go looking for one, which makes sense, you can't really tutorialize a sandbox game beyond the basic controls unless you wanna bore the player. but there's a huge community of people who make their own guides on how to do certain redstone machines or how to do different builds, or even how to defeat the end dragon the fastest. the tutorialization lies more in the community's hands, and you the player can choose how much or little of it you want to seek out. which is kinda cool ngl.
Funnily enough, Legacy Console Edition had built in tutorial worlds. They were actually really fascinating and filled with secrets.
Anyways, I do agree that tutorialization is up to the community. I'm going to be playing a custom mod pack with some friends next month, and I've decided to write a few guides for some of the more complex mods. Even mods aren't immune to this, for the most part.
Love that Hypnotorious is the poster child of bad tutorials lol
also THANK YOU SO MUCH for the video card, you have no idea how much that means to me
i'd say if unicorn overlord can be beaten on normal *and hard* without fully absorbing the tutorials, then it's fine. the game expects you to read stuff anyway, and if you're on the hardest difficulty you should either be on a second playthrough or expecting to do a lot of the heavy lifting. it's not like a whole playthrough of being exposed to units won't give you an idea of what they're good and bad at.
The concept of wanting to play and easily succeed on the hardest difficulty of a game, without knowing the game previously, or having to think,test and learn for yourself, feels such an entitlement.... It really shouldn't even be considered, really.
It's not an entitlement, it's a delusion. And as you said is beneath consideration.
@@Drjhordan
It depends on how difficult normal and "hard" actually are and how many modes there are. If Normal is basically easy mode designed to experience the story with little chance of loss then Hard is when you actually want to start properly learning more than the basic mechanics. Then you'd have a difficulty level or two beyond that for a real challenge.
Granted that those settings are usually listed Easy/Story and Normal. Putting the label Hard on a lower difficulty level does skew expectation.
I'm speaking generally, I haven't played this particular game yet.
Tbh, I played on hard, only vaguely remembering character descriptions
Nothing really got difficult until nearly the final mission of the game imo. That, and the one side quest where you pick which army to side with, and you pick the option of fighting both of them simultaneously to bring them to equitable peace talks, but that one was only hard because I tried it too early
Nothing better than a game that drops a tutorial of a mechanic 30h in for something that you have been complaining about the whole game. "Oh, so NOW I can teleport?!"
You talking about Eiuden Chronicles?
@@Lampent12 I wasn't, but good to know about it. I'll keep that in mind when begin playing.
@@altairkyeonu Cool. It's a pretty fun game, but the lack of early game quick travel is definitely felt.
@@Lampent12 I remember of early days JRPGs like Tales of Symphonia where you would backtrack ON FOOT to trigger sidequests because there was no way to fast travel... It was horrible.
@@altairkyeonu : Good luck remembering you have to go through Ozette to get to Altessa's house... oh,and that's after remembering your way through Gaoracchia Forest. XD
I had a tutorial experience so hilariously bad that it became a legend among my friend group. The first time I played Final Fantasy Tactics, I did what the tutorial suggested and walked up to smack an enemy. Then I got a game over because my NPC teammate decide to cast magic and oneshotted me with the splash damage. It was incredibly frustrating, and nobody would have believed it happened if there hadn't been witnesses. It did teach me something important though: DON'T TRUST AGRIAS.
I think the more interesting tutorial question has less to do with the initial tutorial, but in whether the game reinforces whatever it was trying to teach. I remember being amazingly frustrated by Rise of the Tomb Raider for that where they introduce shrapnel grenades in the middle of the game... but doesn't reinforce using them at all until the final boss, where they are required to complete the fight, at the same time disabling nearly all your other skills. As a result you are not only punished for not learning one particular skill, but also for investing time in learning all the other ones you'd picked up.
What about nier automata who has a 30 minute level with no checkpoints, a boss and if you die go back to title screen😊
I almost uninstalled and asked for a refund after dying to that first boss and found out I had to do the entire prologue again. I’m so glad I didn’t though because I absolutely loved the game in the end
That was so frustrating. I got stunlocked in the final boss and almost gave up on the game after that. The worst part is how many people in the community just completely dismiss any complaints about the tutorial because "its easy and you can just spam the dodge button for invincibility". Like yeah you can but how tf was I supposed to know that when Ive never played the game before.
Yeah this was an extreme case
Agreed. NieR Automata has definitely got some issues with a tutorial that is brutal - it might have been fine if the enemies only knocked off like 5-10% of your health per hit, giving you some breathing room.
@@reissyboi7527 Should've refunded it. That kind of opening should earn the devs nothing but a spit in the face.
Pokemon Sun and Moon had a problem of the first like, hour+ of gameplay being basically a tutorial section. It never felt like the game stopped holding your hand at any point during that (and frankly afterwards too).
In general I tend to get frustrated in those games that seem like they're trying to say "Now go off and play the game!" but then they continue to patter you with tutorials all over the place and it's like please just let me play the game at this point.
Yeah, Pokémon got excessive in that regard sadly. USUM are great games except for that.
And now look where we're at now! Excessive bitching about linearity has led to the worst pokemon games ever
@boshwa20 it seems more to me like this pokemon game follows the trend of Nintendo games like BotW and TotK by being open-world than being done because of complaints about linearity. In general the core issue with how bad pokemon games are lately comes from tight deadlines and limited financial resources forcing them to have to produce poor games. Basically, they only put out Pokemon games at this point to be able to sell more merch. It keeps the title relevant and Pokemon merch is like literally the top selling videogame merch in the entire world
I'm not sure whether it counts as a tutorial problem, but when I tried to play Genshin Impact for the first time, I immediately decided that I wanted to climb the walls out of the starting canyon--which caused me to completely miss the mandatory questline trigger. I ended up wandering through the world, finding waypoints and people and systems that were all deactivated, with (as I remember it) no arrow leading me back to the starting point that I missed. Because I hadn't begun anything, I couldn't recruit characters, start quests, or do anything but smack down normal baddies, even though I had found plenty of things that should have been interesting and activated.
Suffice it to say, it didn't leave me with a great impression of the game. Granted, I ended up not liking it anyway mostly on account of the omnipresent monetization and overbearing numbers-go-up systems, but it wasn't a great start.
That is incredibly impressive divergent exploring. Genshin has one of the most direct tutorials possible for using the map and it's cliffs to naturally guide you where you needed to go. I think people are more likely to trigger a client craving tutorial bug then replicate your experience.
As much as people complain about them, this is the benefit of inescapable tutorial islands. I absolutely would've done the same thing because my first instinct upon discovering a climbing mechanic is to see how high I can go.
@@BonaparteBardithion Genshin does tutorial island though. You can't leave the opening nation, which is the smallest zone on the map, until you fight the dragon through the story. They just diverged from the main path like immediately after the opening cutscene.
Like "player walk 30 ft ahead" and he turned 90° at the 15 ft mark then got lost. Actually going that full 30 ft would've triggered the sequence for the 4 quest markers that take you into the city for the glider and give you the first new character. If he did, then he could've looked up the quests and locations on the map.
@@amandaslough125
If the player needs to be railroaded through a small part of the tutorial you could still make an island within an island. Roofed caverns or making part of the canyon wall out of an unclimbable material are common solutions. You could also opt to disable certain features, like climbing or dashing, until later in the tutorial but that gets tedious on replays.
In TOTK, I missed Lookout Landing because I went in the opposite direction and didn’t find it until like 30 hours in, maybe? I got through a surprising amount of the game by sheer force including the hot air balloon quest
When I landed, I did a few shrines before I got my paraglider. I wanted to explore before I did main quest stuff. I didn’t realize the flier would be so easy to get.
Though, I came across one shrine that was pretty much impossible without the glider. You used springs to launch yourself and it works at the start but halfway through, I had so few hearts that I would die from fall-damage… _most of the time._
Sometimes I lived so I thought I was just doing something wrong. So I looked it up and saw I was doing everything right but I needed to use the glider so I didn’t die.
Almost the exact same same thing happened to me, I found a shrine that assumed you could glide from platform to platform to solve a ball puzzle, and I just couldn't make the jumps.
Omg the same thing happened to me
I remember very very stubbornly trying to brute force my way through haha, but I don't think it worked
I was doing some wild things though, pulling out campfires and bullet time, it was crazy
You and I found the exact same shrine, but I managed to do it without the paraglider, though only barely thanks to maxHP up foods... lol
I also managed to get down into the depths by using a bunch of wings all the way out in the lanayru region, and going in there that woefully unprepared may have been a bad thing to let me do from a game design standpoint, but god damn did it make it memorable. Coming back there with a better understanding of the game after struggling in the dark for so long was incredibly satisfying.
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I think an entire genre of games belongs in this video: roguelikes (and to a lesser extent, roguelites). These games often force you to experiment to learn how the world reacts to your actions, rather than giving you explicit information (the first example that comes to my mind is Spelunky), BUT, by the nature of the genre, it punishes you incredibly heavily for failed experiments, resulting in your death and the loss of all progress (for roguelikes) or most of your progress (for roguelites)
I enjoy some roguelites, but roguelikes are mostly intolerable to me for this reason; they feel like they're just trying to frustrate me and waste as much of my time as possible
I had an idea for my game's tutorial where your character is a kid watching some adventurer trainees. You still control the trainees, but you're allowed to mess around and screw up if you want to (resulting in funny lines from the trainer).
One of the worst games with tutorials (and not like it's a good game in general either) was Tales of Zestiria. I remember calling it Tales of Tutoriala for so long, because it just kept giving you tutorial info CONSTANTLY for a significant portion of the game. And I don't mean different tutorials - no, it keeps giving the same ones over and over as if you hadn't seen that one 10 times already.
Not only that, it also drip feeds you combat-related tutorials outside of combat (the monoliths), often with zero context to the area you're in, and even sometimes splits those into multiple missable parts. I replayed it recently and I was aghast at just how badly they got tutorials wrong.
I vaguely remember that game being crap so I liked your comment.
@@DarrenFerrie You seriously made yourself go through that water temple twice? Wow, can't imagine doing that. Even if the rest of the game was good (it isn't) that alone would stop me from replaying it.
Yeah, like I said. I wasn't just talking about the in-combat stuff, I was including those too.
Sounds like Tales of Zestiria would reply to your comment with a tutorial on how to post comments.
@@dondashall I actually enjoyed the combat and gameplay of Tales of Zestiria(so far) I just need to actually beat it(which won't be soon)
However, I respect your opinion
...and then finally, after months of forcing myself through nightly torturous attempts & the additional purchase of a steering wheel controller, I completed the tutorial section.
I was ecstatic! The highly rated game I'd purchased months ago was now ready to play!
I devoured every morsel of gameplay within and the reviews had been right to praise it.
Still, the more I played, the more my feeling of unexplainable discomfort grew within.
The full cosmic horror of the situation chose to descend to smother my everythings at precisely the moment I gained control of my character for the final mission.
It had suddenly dawned on me that every single item from the lengthy list of tightly-time-checked, technically-complex, order-enforced, unskippable, perfection-requiring "tutorial" that had locked me from enjoying the real game... HAD NEVER EVER EVER BEEN NEEDED TO BE KNOWN BY OR USED BY PLAYERS AT ANY POINT AFTER THE TUTORIAL ENDED!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
...
Yes, I *am* still angry about one of my first experiences of gaming on a console rather than a desktop having been with Driver on PSX.
The only other game I'd bought at the same time as the PSX hardware itself had been one I'd never heard of at the time but that came in a big cardboard boxed collector's edition with a t-shirt etc and had been marked down to half price. "If they made a special additional release for collectors, it's probably good" I reasoned without any real reason yet, thankfully, correctly.
tl;dr
Driver on PSX almost killed my console-gaming career before it had begun.
Metal Gear Solid blew my mind, managed to repair the damage Driver had caused to my initial PSX experience 1000x over and forcefully compelled my path into the career in game development specifically that has been so wonderful to and fulfilling within my life ever since.
TOTK isn't the only game with this issue. A lot of open-world games also struggle with this, imo. In Skyrim, once you're out of Helgen, you're prompted to head towards Riverwood. But... you could also go anywhere else. But by not going to Riverwood, you miss the instruction to go to Whiterun, which turns fetch the Dragonstone for the court wizard (and the claw for the Riverwood trader), which turns into "oh god there's a Dragon", only after which Dragons will spawn into the world. And you can't really use your dragonborn powers you get from slaying Dragons until you do the main quest a bit further and talk to the Greybeards. And I think *that* is where the "tutorial" ends.
Which is a huge problem. I can become the archmage of Winterhold, the speaker or whatever of the Dark Brotherhood, leader of the Thieves Guild, and probably leader of the Companions (don't quote me on that) before Dragons even show up.
I don’t fundamentally see an issue with that. It’s an open world game, you are supposed to be able to forge your own path where each playthrough doesn’t have to be the same beats in the same order. Even in BotW you could defeat Ganon without ever freeing the Divine Beasts, meeting Impa or remembering who Zelda is.
I saved all the main regions before ever going to Lookout Landing. My playthrough was so different from my friends because I had to engage with the zonai mechanics far more without the paraglider and it made for a fun and unique playthrough. When I eventually did meet Purah, she was dumbstruck that I had already resolved all the problems she was about to ask me to fix. It was actually pretty fun to see that I could direct the game in that way. I don’t really see this as an issue for an open world game unless you want the game to be less open.
Well now you're just talking about wanting the game to walk you through the entire story. Back in the day we had to go down to the store and buy things called "walkthroughs" if we wanted someone to hold our hand.
I definitely get this being a problem depending on the mechanic you're having to wait for. Only reason I don't criticize Elder Scrolls for it is because clearing this section of the opening would necessitate you being the Dragonborn, and ES does want to give you the option to just... not be the special dude. It's pretty okay with your refusing the main quest entirely.
Oblivion lets you do this too. No heroics at Kvatch = no gates opening. They are more closed than Morrowind though, in the sense that the only thing exclusively waiting for you in Morrowind's main quest line is... well, a crippling disease. XD (As opposed to more prominent gameplay elements.)
I think the comparison presented between BotW and ToTK in this video leaves out some important things about BotW. Saying this as someone who wasn't a fan of the Great Sky Island and thought the Great Plateau was better, BotW does the exact same thing as ToTK with witholding mechanics after leaving the Great Plateau. Instead of Lookout Landing, the entire Hateno region more or less function as the second tutorial area there. You only learn how memories work from Impa in Kakariko Village, and only receive the Camera and Sheikah Sensor (+ if you don't activate a Sheikah Tower outside the Great Plateau beforehand). Kakariko Village also has a shrine purely dedicated to being a tutorial in Breath of the Wild. TotK does have problems, but BotW shares them, even if to a lesser extent.
I like how Tunic tutorialises things. It's unique because not knowing how anything works is part of the experience they're aiming for and it uses the drip feeding of game manual pages to teach new things as players go. This often leads to teaching secret mechanics, which Tunics core thing to teach is arguably getting players invested in hunting for secrets.
It starts simple. A hidden chest, a hidden path there. Then leaves symbols in the manual for things investigate before escalating into code breaking and translating.
The wonky part is the introduction of d-pad codes. Outside of players figuring it out themselves there's a manual page players are basically guaranteed to find that explains how symbols can use dots and lines to say what buttons to input to open certain doors, which is great. 1 problem. There's a bunch of secrets, specifically for fairy collecting, that require noticing dots in random places like flowers on the ground. These are very easy to miss and while some camera work helps emphasise something is there I often failed to figure it out until a guide exposed me to the concept. Fortunately you don't need all the fairies but it's still a minor blemish on what is otherwise an immaculately designed treasure box of secrets in game form.
I appreciate that Driver is still to this day used as an example of a baaad tutorial.
It's so strange that totk didn't just reveal the story in the right order, no matter how you viewed the tears. Such an obvious solution
Honestly, I don't think the story is interesting enough for the out-of-order memories to end up being much of an issue. The specific cutscenes are also directly tied to the shape of the geoglyph they're in, and that was probably more important to the designers
or make it so that you can know there is a tear in a certain place when you find it, but cannot access them out of order
That would make no sense. Why would you get the sword memory at the tablet glyph? I also wonder if the people who complain about the order were really spoiled by it. Or whether they just think people _can_ be spoiled by it.
@@Dharengo Yes, was "spoiled" by finding "Zelda is just Ganon's puppet" before doing any side-quests. And everyone kept going on about how Zelda is doing suspicious stuff. It's incredibly frustrating to not have any dialogue options to tell people. Same with "Zelda learns about dragonification" after randomly stumbling over the white dragon. Renders the scene of her swallowing her stone pretty meaningless, since I already knew she would do it.
Now, being spoiled isn't the big issue for me here, it just feels like they didn't give a crap about their own story. Just throw some videos into the world haphazardly, who cares if the players watch them, let alone in order, or if they clash with just about all of our quests?
@@Umbra_NocturnusThat first part is kind of awkward, but Zelda eating the stone chronologically happens after learning about it.
The real question is where's the harm in knowing about that?
Funny you mention the second tutorial zone, because I headed there at first, talked to prunia once and said "well, okay, let's see the world". The mission to check the tower was overwritten with another one right when I got it and missed it completely.
At some point I even ASSUMED they wouldn't give me the paraglider and that it was replaced with those cooler abilities and zonai devices to emphasise creativity. And about the towers... I also assumed I would unlock it later. I thought it was designed like that until I found the first quest about geoglyph and a friend told me "did you actually missed the paraglider?"
"prunia"? Is that supposed to Purah? If it is, that's a hilarious typo :D
Nah, I just intuitively used her name in spanish, I'm not used to called her Purah
I disagree about Unicorn Overlord. The units are placed near the spots which lets you hire mercenaries of the same class. As such they act less to tell you how to beat up the bad guys and more to tell you how to use the units you now have more access to. And this is a way more relevant lesson. Even on the hardest difficulty it is not too difficult to construct squads which simply steamroll any enemy squad that isn't a boss, but to do so you need to understand the units you yourself employ.
This way the game also gives you something to think. If a particular enemy unit is troublesome for you then you can go look at their stats and abilities and decide for yourself how you want to counter them. This is way more rewarding then being told the solution to the enemy unit straight up and requires strategy which is the entire point of a strategy game.
Yup! I've been greatly enjoying my time in Unicorn Overlord. I've spent hours just tweaking my unit comps so each one can stand on its own and have a decent chance of handling most threats. And when I look at the time I go "Gosh, I've wasted 2 hours just fiddling with menus!" But when I actually deploy the units and they perform mostly how I want them to, it feels rewarding that my forethought is paying dividends. And even the parts where they are not performing quite right is a learning experience. Realizing I have the wrong skill rule set or that cavalry are indeed very vulnerable to fliers means yet more optimizations to make. It's been a bit like Dark Souls in that there's a lot to learn just thru experience, and as much as my anime bobbleheads are leveling up, I am also leveling up as a player.
That's a valid point -- in a game with symmetric combat, an NPC describing how their class works isn't necessarily a lesson on how to _defeat_ them but also how to _use them yourself._
Compare that back in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, every time you chatted with a wild Palico out on a map (one that you could potentially hire), they'd drop a random tip about what their class does. And being MH, these are allies you fight alongside, not foes you fight against.
@@Stratelier I feel like the misstep here is perhaps that they are trying to teach you how to *use* the class, but then they're testing you on how to *beat* the class.
@@AdmiralTails They do teach you how to beat the class! After concluding a fight with tutorial squads they will often tell you to watch out for one of the class's shortcomings or classes that counter them.
You can smash up all of the yellow tutorial units even at the beginning of the game before you open up all the basic classes. Even the Thieves and Hoplites can be destroyed before you get Hunters/Swordfighters and Warriors/Magic users thanks to the Unwavering Spear and Runic Blade existing in the first shop.
At the end of the day some people will still struggle regardless of how you set up your tutorials or their lengths.
I’d been wanting to ask someone else who played UO….
Did hiring units feel kinda unnecessary? Like…. I tried to get all the named characters and was almost always overflowing with units. And it felt like a waste to NOT build affinity…
I actually like Xenobalde 3's "fake" flame clock tutorial, it tempts you into being more desperate to kill things due to the stat boosts and threat of losing the flame, and it helps you identify with the cast when the supposed gameplay "rule" is uprooted so quickly.
that flame clock thing was so useless... XD im like so its just a glorified fetch quest to collect job classes and world building.
I watched this video immediately after Karl Jobst's most recent update on his upcoming court trial, so the "I hear Australia is nice this time of year" line was way funnier than it was supposed to be.
MAN, SAME
Same, the timing was just too perfect
I wish digital instruction manuals had taken off. I know the 3DS had them, but I don't know of any other console that uses them. They were great and you could never lose them. My issue with Tears isn't the tutorials though since I felt everything was pretty straightforward since I played BoTW. My issue is that they gatekeep abilities behind tutorials. I didn't get the auto build feature until like 50 hours into the game because I explored the depths randomly and didn't follow the storyline down there until like 50 hours in. I didn't know the autobuild feature existed since I went into Tears blind. I got it and I was like "huh this would have been really useful and encouraged me to build more if I had known I could save my builds earlier..." Like in an open world game you should start out with all your tools. The ultra hand ability brcame much more usable and convenient once I got the autobuild, so I can't believe they hid away the thing that made the big new gimmick more user friendly behind a sidequest you can ignore for 50 freaking hours.
I always have to think of Europa Universalis IV when people talk about bad tutorials.
The game basically tells you it's controls and then leaves you alone.
EU IV is one of the most complex games there is and you get a lot of people that have over 100 hours of this game and say that they are a beginner and don't really know what they are doing.
But honestly. I wouldn't even know where to start making an actual tutorial for that game. The systems are so intermingled that it is very hard to teach players individual mechanics and systems.
Victoria 3 attempts to have a more traditional tutorial instead of the popup advice older paradox games used. It actually works significantly worse because it can't acount for the game's unpredicatble outcomes. You can quite easily find yourself unable to complete objectives for decades, essentially halting the tutorial completely and ensuring that if you do manage to get there the subsequent lessons will be irrelevant.
It's at least good Monolith itself basically admits its tutorials sucked, with Xeno 3 going so far as to have one of the tutorials happen TWICE.
People complain about over tutorializing more than lack of it. But I'd rather too much than not enough/wrong tutorials.
And the funny thing is, 3’s are SO much better than 2’s and X’s. You can do an entire playthrough of X and have no idea how to properly play the game
@@austincrook5304 X was fine besides Overdrive. Overdrive made no sense.
@@austincrook5304TBF I don't think Xenoblade Chronicle 2's tutotials could have ever been great, because the game is at it's best when exploited to hell and back. Auto-attacks suck without stutter step and the only pouch items ever worth using are the ones that speed up cooldowns. And exploiting those are like esential to the core gameplay being fun imo.
That said wow they're still super bad, there's a very real reason I heavily reccomend anyone playing to watch Chuggaaconroy's tutorial video.
@@WeskAlber With X it’s more about how many important things it fails to mention. Elemental resistances, the importance of potential, morale, how worthless the defense stat is-all of these are critical combat mechanics, and none of them are even mentioned, much less explained.
@@TheWrathAbove Chugga’s a lifesaver for sure. I crack up every time he points out a tutorial popup that’s just straight up not true.
I think probably one of the most infamous tutorials is Post Shift 2. It's a FNAF fangame and an incredibly dense one at that, so there's a lot of complex mechanics that the game needs you to learn. The launch version, unfortunately, has all of the issues discussed in the video, frontloading all of its mechanics immediately as a massive multi-page wall of text, with some of them not being relevant right away because the animatronic they apply to doesn't show up for a few more nights. The launch version is also extremely difficult due to the developer being the main playtester, so the tutorial being a massive document just adds another layer of difficulty that the player doesn't need.
If it’s such a big multi paged wall of text, it would’ve been cool to frame it as an “employee guide book” that could be opened, and looked at any time. If structured right, it would even add another layer of immersion
@@cosmicspacething3474 Honestly, as a FNAF fangame, the developer definitely could have done that.
And despite all that information it slams in your face it still doesn’t tell you things you need to know like the existence of the second mini panel in night 5
One of the best tutorials I've ever experience and still hold up in high regard to this day is Banjo-Kazooie. Bottles (your tutorial and new move teacher) teaches you how your moves work and in the first 10 mins or so you can learn how your basic moves work and as a new player that's great but if you're a repeat player you can say No to him when he asks if you want to learn your basic moves and you can continue onwards to the main game which is also great!
Every ProjectMoon game : You want a tutorial? Here's an alternative. FREAKING, READ.
We trained the Manager wrong, as a joke
One of my biggest complains on Ruina, I don't mind reading but slapping me with six screens of text on a complex mechanic is NOT a way to understand things.
Didn't know you can clash a single non-ranged dice against multiple ranged dice until the Queen of Hatred. It's a bad part and can (and will) easily drive people away from a fun game...
Aaaaaaand now here the rest of us are. I was looking for this comment.
@@penitente3337skill issue ngl
it doesn't help how incorrect the Limbus tutorial is getting the further we get into the game, it didn't even teach me how to offset I had to learn that from more experienced people
Guys, hear me out. We can solve the tutorial problem by replacing it with something -- maybe like a pamphlet we could ship with the game, or a menu option in the pause screen. Yeah, it could have pictures and explanations about how to do stuff, and you could access it whenever you wanted to instead of having it shoved down your throat all at once or holding back useful information until later on. I just need to come up with a name for it...
Wait, I know! A "Launam!"
The digital age killed the manual
We've got digital only consoles now
A takeout menu?
You say that but large, overly dense manuals are not read. The wording does not really transfer over to something more complex.
kudos to Final Fantasy's longest tradition: the Tutorial Boss teaching you a mechanic that no other boss in the game ever uses
One of the most gratoutous instances of this I have ever come across was in Phoenotopia Awakening where basic info and tutorials were not only hidden, but you also needed to pay i game money to get. This in a game where money is a very scarce resource and needed for more important stuff.
Usually I’d get mad for friends telling me things about the game ahead of time but boy am I glad a friend of mine pointed out that I could get the paraglider in TotK right away. With it being located in Hyrule Castle I was assuming I’m not ready to go there yet expecting a huge challenge as Hyrule Castle was a dangerous area in BotW but no I could’ve gotten the paraglider the second I was told to go there and if my friend didn’t tell me I would’ve probably played through half of the game without it.
I missed the paraglider at first specifically because I assumed Hyrule Castle = Danger. It doesn't look any more welcoming than it did in BotW from a distance.
Why? The game tell me to go to the (not) castle, Look out Landing, Link and Zelda were under the castle in the intro, so I go back to the castle to tell the soldiers what actually happened and that Zelda is missing. Why would you make a decision based on the information of the last game when they gave you new information at the beginning of the game and we were the person who get rid of everything dangerous in the castle in the first place?
@@EarthWingedDragon well I thought it was like a “Oh you could go now but you’ll probably find out you’re not ready to go there yet anyway” thing
@@blueboytube King Rhoam told you straight away that you need to prepared well for the battle of Hyrule castle and then tell you to head to Kakariko. Did you not go to Kakariko?
I think the greatest tutorial I've ever played was the intro to NieR:Replicant. It's pretty simple: fight a bunch of enemies as the game hands you abilities every minute or so, but the gripping opener, countless unanswered questions it brings up, and outstanding soundtrack make it the only tutorial I look forward to every single time.
For the record, the combat training shrine was the very last shrine I did in the game. I had no idea that flurry rush existed until the end
I'd say Terraria has a decent enough tutorial, but I remember in my first playthrough I basically relied on the wiki because otherwise I didn't know much of what to do besides explore the surface for loot and maybe search underground for life crystals because the Guide NPC said so
Terraria is definitely a wiki game. Sure, you could blunder your way through it with what advice the guide can give you, but you'll be missing out on a whole lot.
Terraria is very much a game that you have to read up on, either before or while playing. Relogic has added so much to open up the game for infinite replayability... if you know what to look for. If you don't, you could go multiple playthroughs without knowing a chunk of the game's mechanics or content even exists.
The only major hurdles for most people are the exact specifications for valid housing, boss progression/summoning, and class-building knowhow, but those are arguably the most important things in the game.
I love terraria to death, but sometimes I lean back in my chair, just exhausted over the thought of "what if someone tried doing all this the hard way? it's taking me all this effort and I have a cheat sheet."
"Decent enough"? Beyond the cryptic hints the guide gives you and the overload of information you get giving him crafting materials it tells you almost nothing.
I love the game to death but I feel like it's probably one of the worst games ever when it comes to player training.
I started playing Terraria blind and I got pretty far with just making basic shelters out of outer walls and platforms because I somehow missed the fact that I could make a workbench and start making more complicated stuff like doors. (I still had fun though.)
Now i can get through Terraria like the back of my head, but before it was a confusing runaround trying *not to die* at 100 HP, no defense, barely knowing what i'm supposed to do.
Shout out to every fighting game released in the last 15 years for giving us the most worthless tutorials ever. Read text box, do input against a training mode dummy, and move on to the next. Rinse, repeat, and learn nothing.
Except for Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator and Rev 2 for actually putting effort into trying to teach things that are useful for play.
My brother said my lack of skill in Dragon Ball Fighterz was me skipping the tutorials. Then I showed him that I in fact cleared every single tutorial for every single character
I feel like fighting games tutorials lack a good half of what it should teach you.
they give you the input, and some subtility, neat, but they never bother to try and giving some practical exemple of that input strenghs/weakness.
so you learn a bunch of shit, and it's only through getting your ass kicked by others that you learn the applications.
and then there some fightings games that don't teach you basics concepts such as superarmor, priorities, Okies and more general fighting games mecanics, as if the players where veteran of that genre already.
I think my brother and I had a copy of... maybe BlazBlue2 (?) that actually came with a separate tutorial-DVD, with little videos on how to play the characters. I still find that really funny, but it did kinda help a little.
With TotK, I feel the problem isn’t that the tutorial area ends too soon but rather that the rest of the game is structured in a way that makes it difficult to ensure players will find the additional tutorials when they need them.
There are a ton of objectives in the game. Some are best done early because they are easier and help you prepare for the harder and more complex challenges. However, the game doesn’t give you enough information about which is which. As a result, I had a pretty lopsided experience where I only learned some things after I had used brute force to get through most of the difficult content. Near the end of my play time I was coasting through not only because I had tons of resources but also because I had finally learned everything and was applying those lessons to early game content!
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.
Pikmin 2. You start by killing a Dwarf Bulborb, switching to Louie, and building your squad. The bad part starts once you start carrying stuff. You have to carry the Dwarf Bulborb from the base to the onion and the battery halfway from the onion to the base. The problem is you have nothing to do from that point on and it takes a while to get both objects to the required location and the only enemy is already dead.
I also missed the paraglider for quite a while. Not too long but I did explore hyrule castle without it. It tired using the wing zonai device but they didn't work super well in the way I tried them. I think playing the game without the paraglider is an interesting challenge though. As you have to think about reaching an area or how you'll get down instead of just falling back on the paraglider to solve all your problems.
Can I suggest the topic of NPC dialogue?
In some games you don’t want to speak to any NPC but in some other games you feel like you want to speak to all of them. It would be interesting to analyse what makes the difference.
Pokemon Red & Blue never tell you there's a Mew under the truck! Massive tutorial fail
My friend beat the four temples before getting the camera rune
As God intended
same here
extra amusing that you can't take a picture of the goron city miniboss after beating it, you need to buy a picture iirc
There's a camera rune?
@@scoopskicat well at least it's an improvement from botw, where you get a single chance for EVERY boss enemy (excluding dlc, and even then...)
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 UA-cam 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.
Ship your game with a manual. That is all.
Robotnik Ring Racer funniest tutorial of all time.
40 mins and several segments of forced tutorials. Then you start a grand prix and immediately get bombarded with completely unexplained and unintuitive mechanics before the race even starts ⚰️
I really don’t get a lot of the complaints about TotKs tutorial, personally. I agree with the paraglider thing and the linearity being weird, but when the hell is anyone gonna *need* the camera or shrine sensors? The camera is only actually useful for sidequests, and the shrine sensor is literally just the dowsing ability from Skyward Sword. You don’t need it, you can find shrines yourself.
I also get the complaints about the geoglyph quests and the backstory storytelling, I just don’t see how they’re related to the tutorial of the game at all. It’s clearly meant to be an optional main quest, just like the backstory of the last game. Same thing with the depths questline. You can decide not to do either of them. You can also decide which one you wanna do first, you start them in completely different parts of Hyrule. So it’s also not *as* linear as you’re making it out to be.
And I especially don’t get the complaints about the secret combat moves. I fail to see why it’s a bad thing that some advanced combat moves aren’t immediately taught or required. They’re really no different from the hidden skills in Twilight Princess, only they’re arguably better because the game will still let you execute them even if the game didn’t teach you how yet.
I definitely feel like the paraglider should have been important enough to give it to the player earlier too, but besides that, the expectations you’re putting on TotK’s tutorial feel kind of unreasonable to me. Just because the game doesn’t teach you every little thing about it at the very start doesn’t mean the entire game is suddenly a tutorial. By that logic, every Zelda game ever is just an extended tutorial because you don’t have or know how to use every single dungeon item until the last or second to last dungeon.
TotK honestly would have been better if the Great Sky Island's Temple of Time had an optional dungeon inside it that consisted of a combat tutorial gauntlet. That way, people can ignore it if they want to figure it out themselves, but for those that want to learn everything can do so before they jump off and head to Lookout Landing. Combine some together to reduce repetitiveness and then make a boss fight at the end against Rauru's ghost that rewards a piece of heart to make up the difference.
Then those shrines where they are all found normally can still be there, they just won't reward a orb of light since you already got it in the optional tutorial dungeon at the beginning of the game. Can even give the player a pop up saying, "Hey, you already learned the things this shrine has to teach you and will not gain an orb of light if you complete it again. Do you want to redo the tutorial for ____?" Might feel video gamey, but I think it'd be appreciated by people.
I'm not sure merging every fighting tutorial into one big tutorial would have made the learning easier. Curious new players would just get stuffed with plenty of new mechanics at once and wouldn't assimilate them immediatly
Moreover it would hold back many players who doesn't want to miss anything from jumping on the land by teasing them this whole area to discover, creating a tension between going forward in the game and staying on the Great Sky Island, while they already spent a lot of time there already.
Finally, leaving empty shrines all over the map would feel disapointing once you stumble on them.
Despite having a little boss fight at the end of the tutorial area sounds cool, I think that in the end, this optional dungeon wouldn't satisfy many people.
Or maybe you make the combat tutorials in lookout landing with Link helping to "instruct" the rookie soldiers on drills... and completely forgo the waste of shrine space and repetitive loading screens for way too many locations around the map...
@@coloquintedetoux6899
I kind of like the idea of Rauru testing you with one last gauntlet, but keep the reward at the later shrines (because no one wants to do a challenge for nothing) and let them be a test to see if you retained or need a refresher on the all-in-one tutorial.
@@amandaslough125
This. This is the way to do it. A lot of optional tutorial stuff could have been put at Lookout Landing. Pretty much all the troops there were window dressing as it is now.
@@BonaparteBardithion I agree too ! The lookout landing would be the perfect place for that since you often come back here throughout your journey ! The soldiers here could ask a new lesson about one technique every
time you come back wich would fit the overall design the place, giving you new missions each when you stop by.
This way it would avoid having to be teached all the techniques all at once and would give extra relevance to Lookout Landing on the while playtrough. On top of that, if you already knew or found out the techniques on your own the soldiers could still give you a little reward for your teaching, so it would remain a nice and fun thing to do.
Ok, but I spent my first 72 hours of Totk not knowing that the paraglider still existed, going all the way to terry town and back, and being totally oblivious to the fact that the main objective was literally three feet forward from where I landed, and it was one of the best experiences I've had in a game, it would be horrible if it was intended, but it was an awesome accident.
Just started playing Persona 5 Strikers for the first time yesterday and I got kinda overwhelmed with the tutorials. I'm not very familiar with the genre of the game, so learning everything the game is currently throwing at me is a bit difficult. It feels like I get shown two new mechanics per battle, all of them just explained through text boxes and pictures, and when I start the battle, ready to use everything I just read, my cpu companions often beat up the enemy before I managed to aim or press the right buttons or a different attack suggestion pops up on screen that turned out to be so effective that I accidently beat them up without using the new moves. This had the consequence that I completely forgot with what button (combo) I fire my gun (when I remembered I could do that at all), when I accidently got into a battle with a stronger enemy with a gun weakness and it killed almost my entire team. I am not the biggest fan of this tutorial, so it's funny to see a video on the topic shortly after.
I love games that give you an optional tutorial, either once the game starts or in the main menu.
I hope RPG’s bring back the diegetic explanation of tutorials happening in adventurer schools. Feels like a natural way to do it.
Granite. Pumice. Limestone. Slate. Marble.
How's that for a rocky first impression?
I personally like onyx, even though it's the black sheep of the family :P
Shout-out to Darkest Dungeon 2, which decides to throw an entire page of status effects to you in the tutorial and expects you to learn them all
You can pull that page up whenever you want; you don't have to memorize it all right away.
@@evanseifert8858 That, while true, doesn't really help imo since whenever you're in battle, the UI only shows the icons and you can expect to see numerous status effects even in the early game. I would have liked to see a more gradual introduction of status effects to ease the player into it. DD1, I didn't mind so much as stuff like bleed, blight, and stun were very simple in concept and easy to grasp. And there weren't a bajillion of them. Not so much in DD2
Never really had a problem with the TotK tutorial. I’m sure some people have grievances, but I never really stumbled upon a moment that made me think “Does this really need to be happening?” Or “Why didn’t it tell me to do that?”
When I was little it took me three evenings to figure out that in Sonic Unleashed on the wii you were supposed to tap 2 times the direction to start running in the night stages, the game's control scheme just told me to use the nunchuk stick without specifing the tapping necssary so i was just stuck there wondering how cool the rest of the stage would be.
I really love the detail that with the “lesson 2” transition, there was a pause that was noticeably just a little too long before you said “timing is everything”. I assume that’s intentional, 10/10
I do find it a bit unfair to TotK to call out these "tutorial shrines", "camera/scanner", and "tear spots" for it, but not BotW which did the same exact thing ("tutorial shrines", "camera/scanner" in Hateno, and the memory pictures instead of tear spots). I do agree that you do feel like you need the paraglider and access to the new towers before you can be really done with the tutorial, unlike in BotW where you were good to go once you got off the plateau. I simply don't agree with you calling out those things when BotW did as well.
I think my main issue was the linearity of the whole thing combined with not clearly delineating the tutorial. In BOTW it’s very clear that the great plateau is the “tutorial”, and you aren’t missing any key items when you leave it. I realized watching this a potential reason why I felt so frustrated with TOTK in a way I didn’t with BOTW. With BOTW I never felt like I was being forced in a certain direction once I left the plateau. There was a very clear point where the tutorial was over and you had everything you needed to explore basically anywhere you wanted. TOTK blurring that line by putting one of its key items outside of the tutorial space made all the other mini tutorials and such much more frustrating because, for me at least, it wasn’t clear whether I was missing something important by ignoring the NPCs “encouragements” for a long while past the tutorial. While I did get annoyed with battle shrines in BOTW, I never felt obligated to seek them or any of the other mini tutorials out because I felt reasonably confident that I wouldn’t need them until I stumbled across them. With TOTK I worried more that by ignoring character promptings I’d be setting myself up for a worse playthrough of the game, so I was more hesitant to go explore the open world freely in the same way I did the first game.
TLDR: I guess what I’m saying is that while I agree that lots of the problems DD talked about with TOTK’s tutorial exist in BOTW, I don’t think they’re as big of a problem in BOTW as they were in TOTK because the main tutorial in BOTW resolved clearly. For me at least, I never felt free of the tutorial stage in TOTK because there wasn’t a clear endpoint like there was in BOTW
@@justtired2050 I can see that. For me at least, getting the Paraglider and access to the towers on the ground definitely felt like the end of the tutorial. I do wonder how they could have better defined when it was "general tutorial done" in TotK for someone such as yourself who felt they didn't have all the tools they needed. BotW was fairly obvious that when you left the plateau you were done.
I know personally, I had explored a decent bit of the depths before I ever got the camera and got the basics on it. That was fine for me.
@@linkmastr001 That’s fair. I think it might’ve been partly how DD explained it at the end of the section when he said that TOTK took off the leash too early or something like that. In BOTW you physically can’t go anywhere outside the plateau until you have the paraglider and access to the towers, but in TOTK you technically don’t have to get the paraglider or access to the towers to start exploring anywhere else. When I got to Hyrule I didn’t go to the castle because it was the most interesting place for me; I went because it felt like the game wanted me to go there and I figured it must be because there was either more tutorial or the paraglider. In BOTW freedom from the great plateau is the biggest part of what made the tutorial feel finished, and getting the paraglider mostly serves to give you that freedom, so when that wasn’t the case for TOTK it felt… anticlimactic? I think I would have preferred the Hyrule section to somehow lock me in until I got the paraglider, like maybe with cutscenes at the castle and walling off the base next to it so you can’t leave until you get everything? I don’t think that would have been the best solution but I think it would have made a big difference for me to have gotten the paraglider and the freedom to explore the map at the same time. As it was the game felt like it was making me choose to go to the castle first, when in the beginning I was more curious about the holes to the depths and the sky island remnants. Idk; I think there were a lot of factors and I ended up loving the game, but I remember being skeptical and a bit disappointed in the beginning because I felt like I was being funneled into a more linear play style than I had preferred in BOTW
@@justtired2050First thing I did after the Great Sky Island was try to fly to other islands because at the time those were the most interesting landmarks for me to explore. The first time i actually touched down on Hyrule’s Surface was the Kara Kara Bazaar in Gerudo Desert lol
I actually loved the fact that you can just not get the paraglider and towers and explore. It gave me the option to have a different type of playthrough where I used zonai tech and other methods to get by and I couldn’t simply teleport to the nearest tower, shoot into the sky and glide to any location. I don’t know why the game should lock you in once you have everything you truly need.
I think the tear spots are a lot worse than the memory pictures. You learn much more significant information in them, but the game never acknowledges it and Link doesn't tell anything to anyone when he obviously should.
How did Xenoblade 2 avoid a full on artillery strike in this video? Love the game, but those tutorials, man....
I need to actually play more than 5 hours of 2.
TEARS OF THE KINGDOM HAD A SHRINE SENSOR!??!?!?!?!?!?
It did indeed. You could also upgrade it so it would look for just about anything you have taken a photo of. Like vegetables, weapons or treasure chests.
There are two tutorials I'll always remember: Pokemon Sun/Moon for how aweful it was (and even worse, half of the game afterwards still feels like a tutorial somehow) and then there's Far Cry Blood Dragon which is making fun of you at your expense. Very entertaining - the first time.
Him: Heroes don't do drugs!
Her: ...ok.
@@WoobertAIO"Unless they're steroids, in which case, use lots of drugs."
I don’t know what TOTK did differently than I was expecting, but I seem to have gone backwards, so that little island took HOURS too long
My co-worker somehow spent 34 hours on the tutorial island and later failed to push the button that lets you enter the water temple for at least three hours inside the cave. Going backwards and still winning seems like the better accomplishment.
Honestly, I enjoyed TotK's continual learning. It was cool to find something and be like "There's still more I don't know yet?!" I found it exciting how the devs made a familiar game so new. But everyone has their own opinions, which is fine. It depends on your perspective and preferences.
Not even a specific game, I feel an entire genre that struggles with tutorialization is the fighting game genre. More often than not, they just have you play through a ton of mini-trials back-to-back for each specific mechanic, and while I'm sure this style has clicked with some, I find that it's far too much information dumped onto the player with not nearly enough chance to put it into practice (not helped by the fact that these mini-trials will usually just be against training dummies, so you don't really feel like you're applying this knowledge in a way that'll help in regular gameplay). I usually find that by the time I'm actually playing the game and I'm in the heat of battle, several of those mechanics have already slipped my mind.
There have been some more recent attempts in the genre to try and tutorialize better, with a particularly notable example being Street Fighter 6, whose World Tour is basically a tutorial in the form of a massive campaign mode. It paces mechanic-teaching a lot better, with plenty of NPCs to fight to give you a chance to actually put those mechanics to use. World Tour does still have its problems, but in regards to teaching the game's mechanics, it's a step in the right direction in my opinion.
0:55 Tutorials, easy! Just make the player wake up in an ancient shrine that has hieroglyphics on the wall talking about some godlike creature pressing A to jump.
I think ToTK is fine personally as it suits both types of players fine. Experienced players who played BoTW will already know all the combat specifics and probably use them a lot, so it just being a pop-up at the start is fine. For casual players however who aren't as combat focused, they probably wouldn't use all the fancy combat tricks anyway, and trying to team them all at the start would just confuse them, so having them spread throughout the game stops them feeling overwhelmed and makes the combat more of a gentle curve. TLDR: It suits casuals and pros alike.
Can confirm. I'm watching someone play TotK who never played BotW and they're still pretty new-ish to games in general, and despite having beaten the 4 region bosses I don't think they've done a single flurry, parry, or anything like that. They're too busy just trying to stay alive to execute the fancy stuff.
I think "You can make your own rocky first impression" is my new favorite segue you've done.
Don't Starve Together: Tutorial? what's a Tutorial?
The beauty of open world survival: if at first you die, then die, and die again.
To be fair you are kinda expected to have played the OG Don't Starve beforehand
that was an intentional choice by the devs bc otherwise players wouldn't experiment--they'd just keep doing what the tutorial told them to do
still wish there was a bit of something but i also understand why they chose to not include one
@@johnathancactus Also known as "the basics of game development." It's just a shame so many devs have forgotten about them.
The tutorial is in the title : DON'T STARVE. It's all you need to know.
One of my favorite games, Oxygen Not Included, unfortunately has a pretty rough tutorial (or really just lacks much of one to begin with). It's a colony builder/simulator sort of game with some vaguely realistic albeit quirky temperature and gas pressure physics. In terms of actual tutorials, the game only gives you a handful of short, wordless instructional videos that only really serve to outline some very basic mechanics you need to be aware of.
Since you not only need to feed and oxygenate your colony, but also keep it from overheating while balancing resource and power consumption, the barebones tutorials leave new players totally unprepared such that their first handful of colonies almost always fail. Now it could be argued that this is just the developer's style of teaching, since it is the same company that made Don't Starve, aka Klei, but this very trial and error style of learning still results in a lot of players quickly bouncing off the game unless they seek outside guidance. The game is already pretty niche within a genre that has stiff competition from the likes of Rimworld, so lowering the barrier to entry wouldn't hurt.
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.
I feel like the movement abilities in Superstar Saga and Bowser's Inside Story were used really well, and don't really remember anything particularly egregious in Dream Team / Paper Jam? I didn't play Partners in Time, though. They certainly make sure to Explain the mechanic, but an hour long unskippable plotline is something I must have missed. Do you have a specific example?
@@hedwyn8803 I'm thinking that my Spanish to English misworded some details. In multiple of those titles there are multiple tutorial battles and overworld mechanics that in fact surpass an hour of game time, if you address them the same way this video does. You are looking at them as individual isolated moments, and not the chapter long experiences that they actually are. Just because they seem broken up with dialogue in between, doesn't negate them being chapter long tutorials, especially in their early game. As I've said. Nintendo built the tutorials directly into the plot to justify not making them skipable, because if they were indeed skipable, it would shave hours off the play time. It comes down to preference. I've plaid dozens of RPGs from other studios where the tutorials are added to the menu and do not intrude on the game itself making, or have game play intuitive enough to learn them on-the-fly. Nintendo pads their games by manufacturing the tutorials directly into the plot.
@@leegaul2161 For example, the entire ocean chapter in Superstar Saga. You learn the final move, and then get guided though a slump of absolute nothing, yet made to repeat the same steps over and over.
I picked up a game to try (free demo) that dropped me straight away into a sequence where I was on one ship attempting to attack and board another ship, with absolutely zero tutorial whatsoever. All the game would tell me was "board the enemy ship." I quickly figured out how to walk around and jump, but that was the extent of it. No button prompts, no pop-up tutorial tips, nothing in the menu that would help me out even. It was a hot mess, and I didn't do anything other than jump around ineffectually before closing the game down again.
I think TOTK is trying to spread out its tutorialization throughout more of the game rather than putting it all at the beginning.
And it kinda failed by doing so. Botw set a standard of what a tutorial should be and Totk just ignored what made it all so great. Like seriously the great sky island is such a downgrade. The shrine tutorials are located at places where the player has likey discovered how to play the game....
Some games don't even have a tutorial and just expect you to guess what you're supposed to do, like Ark ( and most survival games actually ). First time I played ( I didn't play Minecraft before ), no idea what to do, I had to check the internet to discover I was supposed to punch rocks and trees to get resources... and that's a big issue when the devs just assume that people are going to learn and try by themselves, when the solution makes ZERO sense because I would never have the idea to punch rocks and trees IRL... or maybe they assumed people would play with other people teaching them, as it's a multiplayer game, and forgot about solo players.
Then some games have absolutely overbloated tutorials, like a lot of JRPGs or RTS/4X games that keep introducing new mechanics 30 hours in. I often give up these at the tutorial. Like in some fighting games where the tutorials has you perform a bunch of ultra-precise moves and just throws at you soooo many mechanics like anim cancel, overthrows, combos, super moves, hyper moves, chain attacks, frame skipping, overdrive, gadgets, environmental damage, or whatnot I'm just making stuff up here.
Or recently I started Lords of the Fallen, the tutorial is really intrusive and throws so many button combinations and mechanics at you for what feels like 2 hours. Meanwhile the Souls/Elden Ring games have short tutorials and then they let you discover things by yourself. Not sure it's a better approach though, since some people might play the whole game ithout understanding its mechanics.
I never played Unicorn Overlord below expert and I didn't start checking outside resources until I beat it. While having scaling tutorial fights would be nice and not all skill descriptions matched the skill effects before a patch or 2, I never hit a wall. The majority of the information is in skill/unit descriptions, and you can check out the entirety of enemy squads as well as your own.
I'm thinking of getting that game, is it good? I like fire emblem but never branched out
@@ThePaulineu Unicorn Overlord is apparently much closer to a series called Ogre Battle than Fire Emblem, though it definitely has some resemblance to the latter.
Its story is serviceable and the characters are fine, but the amazing presentation and challenging yet dynamic combat system are the real draws for this game. I'd say it's definitely worth considering at least!
Have you not done a no paraglider playthrough? Its legitimately a blast and I think the paraglider not being given to you right off the GSI is because of that. Lots of people wanted a way to play BotW without the paraglider for challenge runs. I think the game does a good job at guiding the player to where you need to go next, it's our wonderment with getting back down to Hyrule and wanting to explore that may have thrown some off (I don't think that's a fault of the player or the game either, TotK having so many options on how to tackle things...I really appreciated that)
As far as the GSI being more linear, I don't know if I agree without outside of how you get the recall shrine. I've replayed this game a lot and there's a lot of freedom on how you can tackle those first 3 shrines
It’s a similar concept but you should make an episode about video game demos!
the original tutorial for limbus company was pretty bad, super focused on the ultimately not that important resonence mechanic while completely neglecting to explain how clashing (basically the focus of all combat) works at all. thankfully it has gotten significantly better over time.