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gaming Information or no Information in Games


Kyoshi Frost Wolf

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Something that has been a topic in gaming over the past several years is over-tutorialization in gaming. There many gamers in the community of gaming that feel that many games nowadays are just far too tutorialized, giving the players far too much information and leaving little room to figure things out for themselves. It is not a topic  I see often in terms of discussion, but boy do I see people expressing opinions about this a lot, particularly in the camp of "Games give us too much info!" So we have games like Dark Souls and such that rely on 'give as little info as possible' and there are gamers that love this idea.

 

While I definitely can see the appeal, there are times where this concept is just taken waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too far. A prime case of this is Elite Dangerous, a space exploration game that I love, but I will always acknowledge that the game is absolutely hostile to new players, as the in for given in the game is bare minimum and nothing else. You are essentially left tp fend for yourself in a game that is incredibly complicated and takes hours upon hours to get the hang of at all. It seems the devs rather prefer us to rely on the Wiki instead of them giving us info in the game proper. This is a horrible way to go about it. They basically make it to where that having the Wiki open at all times is a requirement to play the game. The New Horizons expansion continues this trend harshly.

 

So this brings me to the question: What do you all prefer? Do you prefer games that give you plenty of info to work with in the game, one way or another or do you prefer games that basically give you almost nothing and leave it up to you to figure it out, or look it up on the internet instead?

 

I highly prefer games that give us info. While discovering certain things can be really exciting and fill you with wonder and adventure, a game not giving us info can make it very, very difficult to get into the game from the start and it can be very off-putting. Many games that do this strategy usually end up with us looking things up online anyways, so it makes me question why they decided to give us nothing to work with in the first place. With something like Dark Souls it works okay, but with Elite Dangerous? It makes the game an absolute night more new players.

 

 

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I've always hated tutorials personally. Even when I have no idea what I'm doing, I prefer to learn the game on my own without the game shoving it in front of me. But I understand why they're there but sometimes they just tell you the simplest things ever, so in that case it seems pretty pointless.

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Don't hold my hand, but don't leave me blind. At the very least I want the game to be clear on what I'm supposed to do.

 

As for tutorials, either make them as simple or quick as possible, or allow me to skip them.

 

To this day I still think Megaman X has the best tutorial stage, and I'd love it for more devs to take more cues from it

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Don't hold my hand, but don't leave me blind. At the very least I want the game to be clear on what I'm supposed to do.

 

As for tutorials, either make them as simple or quick as possible, or allow me to skip them.

 

To this day I still think Megaman X has the best tutorial stage, and I'd love it for more devs to take more cues from it

Definitely agree with you on Megaman X. That game has such an amazing intro level. I think that devs need to find a solid middle ground. Elite Dangerous is one of those games that has soooooooooo much information that is not in the game, that it can leave you not knowing what to do for hours on end. I think I keep mentioning it because I love that game so much but the first *several* hours were torture. I wanted to get into the game and love it, but that took a good while for me to do and I know so many other players hit the same wall. :c

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Honestly, I prefer as little information as possible. Anyone else played Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WW2? That game had a tutorial level, yeah, and it gave you a lot of information in that level, yeah, but I'm speaking of the Top Secret level, and of the various stages of the higher levels like Paris Liberation.

 

In Top Secret, I struggled. I didn't have a map. I didn't look at the wiki, and even if I had, there was no wiki that had any real information, as I discovered a year later. Yet, when I finally completed Top Secret, I loved it so much more than if I had been told when to turn and when to dive. It was amazingly hard for the gamer I was back then, but yet I loved it the more for its difficulty; I had to keep trying, and that made it simply more rewarding. The less information Top Secret gave me, the more challenging it was, and the more rewarding the payoff. That's just what evolution has wired us for.

 

In Paris Liberation, you had no idea what was coming next. You'd know you had to defend this place or that place, but until you made it all the way to the end, you never knew where the enemies would be attacking from, and the spotty checkpoint placement forced you to play carefully. The little information you know in advance plus the checkpoint placement not only made it more challenging (ergo, more rewarding), but also made it more of a true test of your flying skill.

 

You'd be tooling around in, let's say, a FW-190A, and you'd have just destroyed the first wave of tanks heading to the Arc D' Triomphe, and then the next wave would appear, and you'd get whiplash from how many enemies suddenly appeared. "What do I do? What do I attack next?" hypothetical you would say to themselves. And there was no "right answer." The game didn't hold your hand. Frank didn't say "Okay, kill this guy, move in a Z pattern across this area, make sure to use Tom's abilities here and here at twenty to thirty-second intervals," and that made it all the better.

 

(Honorable mention for lack-of-information whiplash goes to the Berlin mission, where the sudden Me-262 squadron appearance literally made me spit the "I-just-beat-a-game-campaign" celebratory cherry cream soda all over my carpet.)

 

In any case, what I'm trying to say here is that less information makes games better, in my personal opinion. There's a median to be walked, as Megas said, but I prefer my games to err on the harder side of said median.

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I don't necessarily need everything given to me at once at the beginning of the game, but I would like to at least get a decent amount of information about how to play the game when I begin.

And later on I would be able to apply some of those skills in order to learn how to progress throughout the later parts of the game.

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In many Games i play, there is either no Tutorial ( Silent Hill ) or a few Tutorial Missions that are optional ( Worms ), so...i never had a problem with to long Tutorials.

 

In Fact, i always loved the Tutorial Missions, because they just gave me even more Levels, for me, more Tutorial means more extra Levels, which is very okay with me.

I wish a few more Games would have more extra Tutorial Levels.

 

And for keeping things secret...why? I want to know what im doing.

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I fully support an optional tutorial available in games especially if said game is particularly complicated. For example, most/all Paradox grand strategy games. Tutorial in Europa Universalis IV only covers common sense aspects of strategy games and doesn't at all cover complex mechanics. Tutorial of recently released Hearts of Iron IV explains more of the gameplay mechanics but still doesn't cover everything.

Hearts of Iron III is an example of a game I wanted to play but couldn't due to its complexity. If I need to resort to using wikis or Youtube videos to understand fundamental gameplay mechanics, then the game's tutorial failed.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

give me a small tutorial. not 1 hr long.because tutorials are boring. i usually read the instructon manual before playing. as for games with no instructuons, they can go die in a hole. i got nba 2k?? and there is no tutorials so when ever i was playing i had to have a manual next to me.

 

now days its either too much tutorial or too less. whatevenr happened to the perfect ammount?

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It depends on the game, some games are more complicated than others and may require a bit more but most of them don't require all that much.

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My problem is that "tutorial" in a lot of games comes down to telling the player the most obvious things like what each button does as if they were completely braindead and couldn't figure it out just by pressing things.

 

Save it for the actual mechanics that aren't obvious like how this attack affects enemies around you or explaining convoluted battle systems and the effect of stats on your characters.

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  • 5 years later...

I like the tutorials most of the time, but I think all games should allow you to skip them if you want to (or are playing the second time etc).

While figuring things out for myself is OK for a simple game, quite a few newer games are rather complicated.

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  • 5 months later...

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