Can we Improve Tutorials for Complex Games?

U had me at "Bivouacing"...

As you mentioned in this video, the absolute best 'tutorial' is Affordance - aka "copy what everyone else is doing". Red is health, blue is mana, [ I ] opens your inventory, and never start a land war in Asia. Few things will make a player ragequit a game faster than defying conventions.

Part and parcel to this are the two universal keystrokes of PC gaming; [Esc] to bring up a menu and [F1] for help, both of which (should always) pause the gameplay. These can both be taken a step further with the simplest of State Engines. Using the "end turn" example... If, say, two minutes have passed since the click was expected, pressing [Esc] brings up the normal menu with a topmost addition asking if the player needs help; [F1] is context-intuitive, showing a highlighted closeup of the icon they need to click. After five minutes or so, if the player seems lost, have an advisor pop up (regardless of whether they're otherwise disabled).

I gave up CK2 3 or 4 times before actually learning how to play it and getting completely addicted for a long time. CK3 was much smoother, but I had already played CK2. I am still trying to dedicate myself to learn how to play Europa Universalis IV. Paradox games are amazing, but they're not readily accessible at all :(

This is my problem trying to get into Yu-Gi-Oh, it's so complicated and I have no idea what I'm doing

9:15 This is how all Civ 6 DLC works as well: it's a toggle that you can choose to enable at game creation.

I wonder if a game can be so complex that the tutorials themselves are as engaging as some actual games? I was on the fence about trying KSP because I'm bad with both complex games and directionless sandboxes, but I found that its tutorials are a campaign in their own right, despite being of the "do this, then that" variety. Though they always explain why you're supposed to do the thing, and I see some interesting techniques used.

For example, the first tutorial forces you to make a mistake (shows you only one part, and it's the wrong one) that you might not have made if you were given the choice and use the opportunity to explain not only how to delete parts, but why you should go with a different one (then it lets you pick only the correct part). The tutorials are structured as scenarios that keep the lessons separate and digestible, are easy to restart, and set up everything as it needs to be, preventing a past mistake from affecting the thing you're rying to learn now - I'm sure many games could make use of these. And while they don't always catch you and explain if you mess up (yes, Kerbal tutorials have fail states, not very surprising for literal rocket science), if you do they let you try to salvage the situation or otherwise mess around instead of forcing you to restart immediately,

Late to the party, but seriously, this is the fundamental problem with Red Dead Redemption 2. Sure, you could also say that it has an extremely slow start and the player isn't turned loose for a very long time, so the game is a failure before it even gets started. But in the context of this video, I would argue that the primary failure is way too many control systems, on foot, horseback, combat, etc. People have made elaborate cheat sheets to refer to in order to play the game. Yes, if you commit to just playing RDR2 a lot, then you will not have to think about most of the time, but it is an impossible game to just pickup and play for a bit due to the stupid level of complexity.

Against the Storm has this thing that you mention, where certain more complex features (like corruption and steam engines) are gated behind higher difficulty levels. And you choose your difficulty level when starting a new city (it's a city builder where reach city takes 30min-1h to complete). You choose when you want to up the difficulty (you don't ever have to), but you also get bigger rewards at the end of the city if you manage to fulfill the objectives, giving you an incentive to try the new things once you feel you are comfortable with the features you had so far.

And then - Civ VII released...

I like the idea but honestly the tech tree and game play doesn't really make a lot of sense and there's really not much control you have over things.

0:24 IRELAND MENTIONED

I remember when Eve online first came out. I tried the tutorial and died... not sure how I ended up outside of my ship, but I died... in the tutorial... I felt stupid and just uninstalled the game. Not my finest gaming moment of my life.

Warcraft 3 had a good tutorial. Super simple, story driven and opened the curiosity for strategy game.

Caesar III did a really good job of teaching you over the first 2/3 levels of the campaign by slowly introducing new systems every level. But importantly doing it diegetically via Caesar asking you to fulfil a small task then moving you on to the next region to start the whole process again with the acquired skills plus the new task he'd given you. (chef kiss)

P.S. Just come across your channel in 2026! Great Stuff!

This very good advise and you did not even get to left hand play, sight or hearing problems, dyslexia. Each one can reduce the fan base (buyers)

I hate when game tutorial steals my controls while I was doing something and displays a page of text on fullscreen

Project Zomboid is probably my favourite example of affordances, the entire game uses mechanics from real life, so everything you see is familiar to the player

These videos are amazing. 4 years later and its still the best think tank video on tutorials.

just don't make quality games and the fans will do the rest as proven many times over by big studios like Paradox

Civilization (all of them) is boring AF

When do we get to the ride?

This IS the ride!!!!!!!

I refuse to play games that immediately require me to memorise heaps of controls and systems to start playing.

You know, I hated doing it, but one of the better tutorials was that for Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. Each segment of the tutorial can be done at any time, and repeated whenever you like. You can take the tutorial entirely at your own pace. The tutorials will teach you each element of the game's fighting system, and then put you through several exercises meant to teach you the nuances of things and hone your your recognition of opportunities to use that element and your timing in doing so.

Some of these tutorials are not easy, requiring you to pull off difficult combos, but you can retry them infinitely. And if you just can't get it and need a break, you're not penalized for quitting the tutorial and going to do something else.

Since these tutorials can be done at your own pace, you can come back to them when you need them. If you go out and play the game, and find yourself getting your ass handed to you, come back and do a couple tutorials, then go back and replay that mission that's giving you trouble and see if you can't apply what you learned. More often than not, it helps! I still replay the blocking and perfect guard tutorials from time to time as a refresher, because remembering to block to save stamina when I have Z-vanishes and vanish-dodges is a problem I have, and it definitely helps. It feels really good to see an enemy rushing at me and just casually perfect guard their attempt to initiate, then launch into a combo of my own that they can do little about.

factorio does it best, you dont need a tutorial if you design the game to drip feed little bits that build off of eachother

Planet Zoo mentioned 🎉💯💯💯

I want printable PDFs so I can take the reading and learning offline wherever I happen to be. When playing the game, having the pdf open on a second screen makes it easy to pause and look things up, Tool tips are fine, but when you need to click 15 times down through them to learn everything, you are no longer playing the game, your reading the manual. Thus my preference for PDF.

It is okay, it only took 400 hours in ck2 and now i am successfully painfully mediocre

Once upon a time I used to sit back and read the instruction manual and/or 'strategy guide' (which was generally no such thing). Only then would I even load up the game: that method worked really well for me: by the time I came to actually play, I had a fair idea of what I wanted to do and roughly how to go about it. The method in Planet Zoo worked fairly well for me, though I found the 'friendly chit-chat' a bit tiresome. In Jurassic World Evolution 2 I gave up during the tutorial campaign because I wanted to play the actual game in a sandbox mode, but various items and options would not be unlocked until I had played a full scripted campaign for hours and hours. As a method of teaching, it was working but it was far too slow. A simple instruction manual would have done the job quickly and without the pain of turning a game into a job. I've never succeeded fully with Victoria 3: the tutorial is kind of present in the background (good move) but their systems are too complex and many are not mentioned at all: you have to assume things that are not even modelled in other games will work much as they do in real life. Also the interface is overly complex for me and I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get this or that piece of information out of it, or how to control this or that game element (the market pricing of this or that, or invading some island or something). An AI version of it, where I could just ask it what I need to know, might be an idea for a future version or mod.

Remember – you are loved! Jesus loved you and gave his life so that you could be free because of Him! He died for our sins so that we can be reconnected with our Creator God. At His crucifixion Jesus took all our wrong thoughts words or deeds we ever did to the cross, paying for them. This is because our sins separated us from Him, and sin's punishment is death. While we could do nothing to get back to God, He sent His Son so that we could get back to Him. He rose again three days later proving His power over sin and death, and He is returning soon to bring all His believing children to Heaven when He returns, and let those who reject Him choose the only other destination (Hell).

He wants us to choose life. He gives us the choice to follow Him right now and have Heaven when He returns, and a true relationship with Him now. He wants us all to repent of our sins and receive a new life in Him!

A life of strength, faith, and the ability to truly love others as God has loved us. He wants us to follow Him, and let Him be the Lord of our lives. Why is that part important? Because through Christ we will be given the power to overcome sin in our lives today and to love like He does. Christ offers this blessing to all who choose to believe in Him, trust Him and follow Him xx He will never leave you nor forsake you xxx

8:48, this is really genius, it solves two problems! It's killing two birds with one stone!

You speak of Civilisation positively but I clicked on this because Civ6 is a game I have literally just bounced off of due to the learning curve being annoying. My experience with the advisor went:
[vague suggestion that doesn't feel like it explains to me how game's systems interact with each-other, only tells me I should do a thing]
[tell me more]
[MULTIPLE tabs of walls of text]
There is nothing in-between.
The weird thing is I used to be good at age of empires, why is this so hard? XD

Very well made video! I was captivated the entire time. I'm not even big into video games, probably because I'm broke, but exploring tutorial methods was very fascinating to see!

This hit me when I tried From Glory to Goo. There was almost no tutorial and, well... I feel that no matter how much I play I will never be competent enough at Age of Darkness/From Glory to Goo/They are Billions.

EDIT: The first time was when I played Against the Storm.
I thought barely winning at Year 10 in Veteran was good enough, but I kept failing in Viceroy at that level. Apparently the game is balanced around winning in Year 6-8, and I only found that out after asking in Reddit. THE GAME DID NOT TELL ME THIS. WHY DID THE GAME NOT TELL ME THIS?!

This is a very good resource for me. I'm currently working on re-designing a tutorial for a shooter, where the current tutorial is linear, slow, boring, and filled to the brim with endless text boxes.

Even after completing the CK3 tutorial, you're on your own. The tutorial is useless.

Now we just got to do this for schools 🚡

Trying to learn a complex game without the time resources of a school kid was the rookie mistake here

I bounced off Civ5 because it was too different from all the other upgrades since Civ2, not necessarily because of removed features (because I didn't even get to the point where religion gets relevant and whatnot) and I was looking for a "familiar but better" game. Most of my Civ enjoying friends liked it and I see their points (and yours) but that just wasn't what I was looking for.

I think there is something else involved in tutorials being meh... tutorials are extremely hard to playtest. It's hard to be objective about a tutorial for a game you already know. Each new playtester is money. You can only learn a game once, and so each person can only playtest your tutorial once. That's a huge barrier.

Does this mean that happy birthday is a legit term in fighting games😭😭 7:19

Global strategies are very hard in a lot of ways, and it’s one of the reasons why people like me love them

14:56 actually I would not have guessed that. I've never played plants vs zombies as far as I can remember and I wouldn't have thought the things on their heads meant different levels of armor or hit points. From looking at this quick bit of game play I just assumed they were decorative/aesthetic. Also the plants don't appear to be shooting at their heads so I wouldn't have thought of it as a defensive accoutrement.

Cities Skylines is great at gradually introducing complexity. You start the game with only roads, basic zoning tools, and utilities. Things like garbage, police, and public transportation are unlocked and explained at certain population thresholds over the next couple of hours. The game gives you plenty of time to figure out how each new feature works and implement it into your city before throwing another one at you. They also give you some money each time you unlock something so you can actually afford to build it.

This happened to me for Civ on Switch
I played the older ones and like em
Here I got bored 20 mins in unfortunately

Allow everything to be automated and only turn of the automation piece by piece.

Learning styles do not exist!!!!!!! This has been debunked again and again for decades. You are not a kinesthetic learner. You learn better doing generative learning tasks, which all people do. People learn differently because they have different working memory sizes.

Any UI that has to accommodate beginners and experts has this issue. Experts want to have everything visible and available to them, but beginners want step-by-step only show me what I need to know.

UX designers commonly refer to Bloomberg terminals which are used for trading and investments.

Same! 🤣🤣🤣

There is a game called "they are billions" who did that. IT SUCKS. When the game released the campaign I just straight up go to free play instead of the campaign of the game. Imagine investing one hour session in a stale gameplay just to unlock a new unity, new building... Just t spicy up the gameplay. So you are there, doing the same core gameplay loop but BORING AF just learn? When you are done you have already 50 hours in the game. I think no one will endure that

15:29 Ghandi, the nukemancer