For those of you who haven’t been reading the site for a while or just don’t keep this in your head, I’m going to start by laying down a couple of bona fides. I am, at the time of this writing, 41. I have been playing video games in one form or another for most of my life now. I have worked as a game journalist for over 15 years. I review games regularly. And despite the (exceedingly stupid) jokes about games journalists, I am in fact very good at video games. I should be, with this much practice.
Do you know what I do with every new game? I play the tutorial.
There is always a contingent of bright sparks who talk about how tutorials are the bane of good game design, that no game should have them and you should be able to figure the game out without any tutorials. This is, in short, similar to the people who insist that MMORPGs should not have a skill rotation (and when it is pointed out that every game does, move the goalposts to indicate that their preferred version doesn’t count) or that any features they dislike “ruin immersion” (disregarding that many of these features literally existed from launch day in Ultima Online). And you know this already because we’ve always had tutorials for video games, and I don’t just mean manuals.
Video game manuals do merit a digression, though, because it used to be that every new video game you bought was boxed up and had a booklet explaining the controls and how the game worked. If you were lucky enough to get a game at a store, you read it in the car ride home when you were younger, or otherwise went through the whole thing and internalized its deep wisdom. The game just came with a book telling you how to play it! Often times they were pretty thick!
Heck, some of them had some neat fiction, lore, and artwork in there to boot. That was one of the things that made Blizzard games a joy to buy back in the day. But now I’m digressing from the digression.
The thing is that even though these games came with nice booklets full of information, a lot of video games still featured pretty robust tutorials. There are so many discussions about the first level of Super Mario Bros. that it’s almost trite, so I’m going to pick a different example that’s relevant to the modern MMO landscape: the original Final Fantasy.
When you start the game, you get a text infodump about what you’re supposed to be doing in vague terms, but then you’re just… dropped into a field. The first thing that stands out to you are towns and a castle, so odds are good that even if you know nothing about the game, you are going to move up and toward them. But how do you account for players who don’t do that?
Simple. There’s only one other place you can go, the first dungeon. Your choices of location are limited, and if you aren’t sure what to do, by natural exploration your lack of options will steer your toward the weapon shop, the armor shop, the king who explains your actual first objectives, and so forth. It’s all just a very subtle form of guiding you in the right direction.
Heck, one of the things that’s easy to overlook is that the game is, for most of its run time, completely linear. People complain about later entries being linear, but the very first game gives you about three new places to visit at any interval, and only one of them will allow you to progress the game and unlock new places to visit. It doesn’t put you in a literal hallway, but it is linear in the extreme (there’s one minor spot where you can deviate if you want to, which has ups and downs).
It’s not a very good tutorial, of course; putting up fences to herd you in the right direction is a useful tool, but there are important things you can miss along the way. Later games are much better about offering new players guidance in order to teach them how to play the game before unleashing them on the main game. But there’s a reason why most games start off with levels that aren’t too punishing in order to let you get your feet wet.
The best tutorials are ones where you think there isn’t a tutorial at all. Not because there is actually no tutorial, but because the game is very carefully and elegantly designed so that you’re going to be inclined to do the right thing without needing outside direction.
For example, when you first create a character in World of Warcraft’s initial starting zones, what happens? You get a voiced explanation of your race and its place in the world with a camera zooming toward your character gradually, giving you a sense of the environment and such before dropping you into your character’s shoes and starting with your camera pointed toward someone with a hovering yellow exclamation mark. Your first instinct is going to be, “That’s probably someone important.” You then get simple introductory quests and learn that these are quests and you should do them.
Now, WoW in particular has expanded and enhanced its tutorials over the years. But this is not a result of the game somehow getting simpler over time. (Seriously, compare Onyxia’s launch mechanics to the mechanics of the Raszageth fight from Dragonflight.) It’s a matter of trying to give people a smoother on-ramp to the game, enhance the experiment, and generally do a better job of teaching people what they’re doing.
Yes, there are people who like to puzzle through things without instructions. And as someone who collects Transformers, I get that insofar as that’s how I first play with my own new toys. I try to figure out how they transform on my own, then check the instructions after for any features I might have missed. But the difference is that this is not how I played with my first Transformer. I now have a lot of experience with these toys, and so I don’t need a guide for them… but every toy might be someone’s first, so they may need the explanations.
An MMORPG is the same way. I am not getting a tutorial for how to play existing jobs when I start leveling through a new expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. But I do get a quick one for new jobs. When I started playing at the media tour, the developers had put together a nice handout explaining the job mechanics for Viper and Pictomancer before we started actually getting our hands on the jobs to try them out – not because the journalists there were unfamiliar with FFXIV but because these were new jobs, and it helped us to at least get started on figuring out how these jobs were to be played.
Yes, I read through them. And because I was on the media tour, I was (very briefly) the first North American player to clear a dungeon on Viper. And I promise you, my subsequent ability to play the job at a high-level skill is about executing, not just reading a tutorial; I read the tutorials because that ensures I can start playing with understanding instead of banging my head against a wall.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
