The Evolution of the Video Game Tutorial

Our own Talune Silius writes:

The video game tutorial.  Almost every game has one and they have always held a place of controversy amongst video gamers.  There seems to be an art to it.  How do you teach your players how to play the game without feeling like you are talking down to your player base or making the tutorial feel tacked on.  You’d think after decades of games, we’d be masters of creating tutorials.  But surprisingly, everyone has a different take on how to implement them and not all have been successful.  I want to look at the video game tutorial and see what makes some good and some bad.

A Long History

                Tutorials have been around since the birth of video games, though not in the same way as we think of them today.  Those of us who are older may remember getting a game from the store that came with a manual.  It always felt like a gift inside the box.  We could hardly wait to get home to finally play our game.  So, we’d eagerly flip through the provided manual trying to imagine what it was going to be like playing those games.  Often the manual was your tutorial.  It would let you know everything from the controls, to what to expect, to even what the powerups in the game did.  Even as far back as the Atari, we could always be excited to get our manual.

                But games were simpler back then.  There weren’t as many buttons or combos that you could do with your character.  When you booted up something like Contra, just pressing buttons on the controller would allow you to figure out most of what you could do.  It was usually up to the first level of a game to teach you everything else.  Mario was a good example of this, and many breakdowns have looked at the genius of how the first level taught you everything you needed to know about the game without actually being a true tutorial.  The placement of the enemies, the first blocks, even the secret warp pipe.  World 1-1 still stands to this day as a testament to a great tutorial.

Modernization of Tutorials

As games became more complicated, developers needed to find a better way to teach their players how to play their games.  Starting in the late 90’s and into the early 2000’s, many games (like Half Life) would include tutorial levels, which could be chosen from the main menu.  These would give new players a chance to learn how to play their game, while not forcing the veterans to sit through a long winded how-to to teach them how to jump.

Other games would experiment with combining the tutorial into the opening narrative.  A good example of this would be Halo: Combat Evolved.  Before you can ever step out of the escape pod, you must go through a diagnostic.  This was an obvious tutorial, teaching you the controls in a safe environment.  While this is commonly seen today, at the time, this was a very creative way to teach your player base.

Even at this time, the idea of forcing these tutorials was controversial.  Gaming was still a very niche market and your veteran gamers didn’t like the idea of having to do simple tasks to play their game.  This can be a problem on subsequent playthroughs, where you will have to sit through the same tutorial each time.  But for new gamers, this was a great way to teach them the rules of the game.

Games Become More Complicated

                The in-game tutorial started becoming the standard for many games going forward.  More and more genres started becoming popular, the manual was getting phased out, and the entire gaming landscape was expanding to bring in more casual gamers.  But this brings us to where we are today.  With gaming as popular as it is and with so many people being familiar with games, is it really necessary to force people to press crouch and jump every single time they start a new game?

                This seems like a minor nitpick. But as games introduce more mechanics and get longer, so too do the tutorials.  This is where we get to the initial crutch of the modern tutorials.  Let’s take a game like Kingdom Hearts 2, for example.  The tutorial of the game can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on how much you talk with the NPC’s.  This game that’s best element is taking Sora, Donald, and Goofy to different Disney planets to relive the best movies spend the first section of the game stuck as Roxas in Twilight Town as you do mundane things like participate in delivering letters or trying to keep a ball in the air.  The tutorial has a lot of good story beats for players who are coming from older games.  But it really does boil down into an extremely long tutorial.

Twilight Princess is another example of the long winded tutorial.  A game that has some of the best storytelling in the Legend of Zelda series is one of the hardest to get in to because the tutorial of the game can be 3-4 hours of herding animals and fighting a combat dummy.  The tutorial in this game is often brought up when people talk about Zelda games as it makes it hard to sit down and play a new game.

Ubisoft is known immensely for stretching their tutorials out across the span of nearly half their game.  Their newish Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will have you completing tutorials disguised as story telling for up to 10 hours in the game.  There are so many mechanics that this was the best way to teach you everything.  But at times, it feels like the game is talking down to you.  How does it feel to be 10 hours into the campaign only to get a quest about how to craft food (something you’ve probably done 50+ times up to this point.)  Or maybe you enjoy having a pop-up reminding you to press X to heal 30 hours into the game.

I want to state that I don’t think that having tutorials being woven into the narrative is necessarily a bad thing.  Games like Horizon: Zero Dawn or a Plague Tale have masterfully pulled off the Narrative Tutorial.  Both games have you learning what to do organically within the first chapter, disguised as part of the story.  When executed correctly, this can be the superior way of doing a tutorial.  The problem is that many games, like the Ubisoft example, do not disguise this.  They will straight up give you a basic hunting quest then give you 20 pop ups along the way to make sure you never mess up.  This hand-holdy nature can be fine on an initial playthrough.  But remember that any time you ever want to return to the game, you will be sitting through these tutorials.

But… then we have stuff like this…

                This is the tutorial for a brand-new game called Enotria: The Last Song.  It is an okay-decent new souls-like that tries something new with the formula.  The tutorial is completely optional when you start a new game.  However, skipping the tutorial will also skip the intro cutscene as well as rob you of some starting upgrade material.  So, it is recommended to play the tutorial.  Especially since this game has a few mechanics that are not seen in any other souls-like.

                The problem is that everything you see (and more) is given to you within your first 5-10 minutes of playing.  Enotria does spread things out at all.  Instead, it decides the best course of action is to spam you with multiple pop-ups back-to-back to back.  It starts off harmlessly enough until you sit at the first rest site.  From there you will learn about leveling stats, the skill tree, parry gems, loadouts, masks, how to equip skills, how to equip weapons, how to equip mask perks, each of the 4 elements and what they do when applied, how to equip spells, how to buff your weapon with elements mid combat, and the primal elements… among many others.  All of this is done via a pop-up montage.

                This is one of the only games I have had to replay the tutorial just to soak in every mechanic the game had to offer.  Now, as a veteran souls-player, many of these mechanics were close enough to other souls-likes that I was at least a bit understanding.  But imagine being a new player in the genre.  You are excited to start a new game.  But then in 5 minutes you are thrown this much information in a very lazy quick tutorial.  Even after finishing the game and learning all the mechanics, I still despise this tutorial.

A Tutorial Done Right

                Let us take a look at another famous Souls game as an example of dynamic tutorials.  Elden Ring has been a landmark for FROM Software and is the entry point for many new players.  The company has become masters of guiding their players without even the players realizing it.  There are entire articles breaking down their masterful dynamic guiding, so I won’t go into full detail.  But I do want to look at their method.  Elden Ring uses both the in your face tutorial and narrative tutorial to great effect.

                Let’s start with the obvious in your face tutorial.  After getting faceplanted by the grafted scion you will awake in the cave and have the option to do a normal tutorial.  This will give you basic controls as well as allow you to fight some basic enemies before stepping out into the world.  The tutorial is short and uses pop-ups to guide you but is also completely optional for players who don’t want to bother with it.          

                But this tutorial is secretly only half of it.  This is the in your face tutorial designed for newcomers.  It is when you step out into the world that the rest of the tutorial presents itself to you.  You see, Elden Ring uses the environment to subtly tell you where to go.  The first thing you see when you step out onto the cliff is the nearby fort.  This place is where you can get your first crafting recipe as well as learn how to upgrade your weapon.

                Further down the road, you will get the bonfire where Melina offers an accord and teaches you how to level as well as how to use Torrent (your horse).  Further on down the road, you may get your first spirit ash and gain access to the summoning bell.  Finally, when you are ready, you will get to go to the round table.  This hub is where you learn to use the stores and get the true blacksmith. 

                Elden Ring is subtly always guiding the player.  Even the design of the world seems to push you towards Stormveil Castle.  It uses the roads and erdtree as beacons for the player.  It is always giving you small nuggets of new items instead of throwing it all on you at the beginning.

                Imagine if Elden Ring had done what Enotria did.  Imagine if after creating your character, the game then said, “Okay… now here is the controls, and here is your horse, and here is a spirit summoning bell, and here is your flask for healing, and here is the crimson flask.  It is different from a healing flask.  And don’t forget to upgrade your weapons.  Here is a smithing stone.  And also, don’t forget to upgrade your spirit summons.  You use this item called the glovewort.  And here is your crafting toolkit.  We are also going to walk you step by step on how to craft stuff.  So here is also a tutorial on how to find stuff….”

                You get the picture.  Elden Ring uses the standard tutorial popups for the simple stuff, then uses the narrative style for the more important things.  This is why it is such a great entry into the souls-like genre.  It allows the player to learn on their own while spreading out the tutorials on a need to know basis.  And it isn’t even the best example of how to masterfully give out tutorials.

                There are many different ways to do tutorials, and it seems that no developer has the perfect answer.  But there are some tutorials that have turned players off from playing a game.  For some people, the tutorial is nothing.  It’s just a small speedbump before getting into the true game.  But a quick look into forums can show the impact a tutorial has on a game.  But what is your experience?  What are some of the best… and worst examples of a tutorial you’ve seen?