Forced Tutorial

[Actaeon]

Is there any way to bypass the tutorial in the beginning of any of Jeff's games? 'Tis a minor inconvenience, but it does prevent long time Spiderweb fans from jumping right into it.

 

My apologies if this has been raised before. The forum search engine doesn't always pull up what I'm after.

[Dikiyoba]

Nope.

 

Well, Blades of Avernum, but that's it.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Actaeon]

Ah, well. Someday, perhaps. He already put a play-in-window feature. It's the little things.

[Soul of Wit]

I've always seen the forced tutorial as a part of the retro appeal of Jeff's games.

[Slawbug]

How is a forced tutorial retro?

[Alorael at Large]

How is the forced tutorial a problem? Games have to start somewhere, and the only real tutorial element is the message boxes that pop up and tell you how things work and what to do. It's not hard to just close them without reading.

 

—Alorael, who is pretty sure retro would be true sink or swim. But fortunately, Jeff's not deliberately being retro. He's just charmingly antiquated.

[Slawbug]

The tutorial actually stops you from moving forward if you don't do what it wants you to -- picking up and equipping certain items, using certain skills, etc.

 

I'm not saying it's a real problem either, but it's not as simple as just clicking out of a text box.

[Dintiradan]

An in-game tutorial is anything but retro. Older games took the sink or swim approach, like Alorael said. The other approach was shipping games with instruction manuals. It got pretty extreme at times. Star Wars: Rebellion came with a instruction booklet that was almost two hundred pages long (and had an in-game 'briefing' besides).

 

(Star Wars: Rebellion is the only game on my shelf that actually needed those ludicrously huge boxes they used to ship games in.)

 

EDIT: How many games nowadays require players to "press F1 for help" instead of trying to teach everything in-game? There's been a definite shift in game design philosophy.

[Earth]

games are made for masses today so help-manual isn't good thing so tutorials exist and sometimes it feels like that some games tutorials are meant for torals newbies.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Alorael

How is the forced tutorial a problem?

It's immersion breaking and when it's the 200th time you've started a SW game, it's just annoying.

Plus, Dikiyoba just doesn't like to be told what to do. Make a creation to continue. No! Dikiyoba isn't ready to make one yet. You should use a spell now. No way, that's a waste of spell energy. It'll die fast enough when Dikiyoba runs up and punches it in the face with a dagger.

[Lilith]

I do kinda wish there were an option to disable the tutorial windows, at least on difficulties above Normal. If you're choosing to play on Hard or Torment, you probably get how RPGs work already.

[Slawbug]

And if you don't and are choosing that option anyway, you probably won't read the tutorial regardless.

[Soul of Wit]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

How is a forced tutorial retro?

It is retro in the sense that modern games often make the tutorial a preference. The default is to run the tutorial. Uncheck the box and no tutorial.

[Slawbug]

Can you give any examples of older games that had forced tutorials?

 

Most didn't have tutorials at all, and I can't think of any that forced them on the player. "Retro" would really be having no tutorial at all.

[keira]

Please touch where Zelda had a tutorial. Please touch where Nethack had a tutorial.

 

I havent been around long, but I remember that when there was a tutorial, you could easily get out of it by buttonmashing enough. Now you have to, ugh, do the tutorial.

[Randomizer]

I started out on Ultima I, II, and III, Might and Magic I and II, And Wizardy I and II and all of them didn't have tutorials. They had instruction books and if your copy didn't have them then you got to figure out the game by trial and error.

 

In the case of Might and Magic I they deliberately left out information that you had to discover on your own like secret doors. I found the first one with a typo while grinding around a floor.

[Lilith]

trying to do the first Wizardry or Might & Magic games without the manual would be a tremendous exercise in frustration. you wouldn't even know what the spells did

[Soul of Wit]

I think this is an exercise in semantics. I'm using retro to define a more recent vintage of games. Now, classic games--those had no tutorial.

[Lilith]

What year are you thinking here? Like 2005 or something? 2005 isn't retro. It's just old.

[Dintiradan]

Hmm, I wonder how much of "no in-game instructions" was poor game design, and how much was proto-DRM. I know of some games where it was impossible to proceed without secrets printed in the manual. Maybe designers didn't want any in-game help because they thought it would make it even more tempting to copy that floppy.

[Ephesos]

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit

I think this is an exercise in semantics. I'm using retro to define a more recent vintage of games. Now, classic games--those had no tutorial.

I think we're just using random words to describe things at this point.

In my humble opinion, the best kind of tutorial is the kind that you never identify as a Tutorial. Sufficiently integrated into gameplay/narrative where the experience isn't disrupted significantly.

[SapientCrow]

The forced tutorial is bad and so is the every ten or so moves auto save which pops up a message on screen.

I wanted to immerse myself in these games and the constant pop ups and tutorial info is making it very difficult.

each time something new occurs I get a pop up. I had to get myself killed so I would not see that message again.

 

Is there any way at all to hack into the game and at least find the config for the pop up messages or on screen window messages?

[Tracer Bullet]

Loderunner: the Legend Returns had a perfect tutorial. No instructions, no manual, just two "sandbox" levels right at the beginning of the game.

 

Just my two cents.

[Actaeon]

I think all it would take to make Jeff's tutorials perfect is an opt out option on the very first dialogue box. Surely that's not too hard to program.

 

... Have you always been a Calvin and Hobbes reference and I just haven't seen you, or did you change PDNs?

[Tracer Bullet]

New name.

[Soul of Wit]

Calvinball: Create your own tutorial.

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit

Calvinball: Create your own tutorial.

Nico has mentioned that the school she went to in Massachusetts actually had Calvinball as an activity.

[Ephesos]

My college actually had it too. I never made it to one of their events, though... they seemed pretty disorganized. Which is appropriate, I guess.

[Actaeon]

I would be significantly more likely to join that than the faux-Quidditch I see here.

[Ephesos]

See, now emulating Quidditch has a serious built-in limitation in that we don't possess any sort of antigravity tech. With how much of the game depends on using all three dimensions, I can't imagine how this would look in practice. Like ultimate frisbee and dodgeball, but with brooms?

[ShieTar]

Sure we have antigravity tech. That's how we keep string puppets from falling down ;-)

[Dintiradan]

I remember reading about one elementary class that played Quidditch in gym, but all they were doing was playing floor hockey while "riding" their sticks.

[Actaeon]

My experience is pretty much confined to watching the "snitch" (a human being dressed up as such) blast past me on an obscure corner of campus with a seeker (a running person with a broomstick) on his heels. I cannot begin to imagine what the core of the game looks like.

[Ephesos]

Originally Posted By: Actaeon

My experience is pretty much confined to watching the "snitch" (a human being dressed up as such) blast past me on an obscure corner of campus with a seeker (a running person with a broomstick) on his heels.

This is actually the part I had the hardest part envisioning, in a way that wasn't stupid or broken from a balance perspective. The rest of it really boils down to dodgeball mixed with basketball/ultimate frisbee.

[Dintiradan]

Wait, why would anyone trying to implement Quidditch include the Snitch? As far as I can tell, the Snitch is designed to be the worst possible game mechanic ever. Yes, it's there in the books to make Harry be the athletic hero, because being a normal hero isn't enough and high school athletics is all that matters. Are they so focused on perfectly simulating the books that include the aspect that negates the entire experience?

 

This shouldn't bother me as much as it does, but there's something about the Harry Potter universe that makes me foam at the mouth.

 

(Why not just have everyone on your team be a Seeker? GAH!)

[Actaeon]

In this case, the snitch isn't worth nearly so much. It adds thirty points and ends the game; that's all.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggle_Quidditch

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

As far as I can tell, the Snitch is designed to be the worst possible game mechanic ever.

Indeed. JKR seemed to realize this in later books, and put in some attempts at making the rest of the team more than course hazards, by having the tournament decided by cumulative scores rather than game outcome. Still there was only a single game in the series that wasn't won by the seeker (at the beginning of book four).

[Slawbug]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

This shouldn't bother me as much as it does, but there's something about the Harry Potter universe that makes me foam at the mouth.

This.

[Tracer Bullet]

redesign: Snitch is worth twenty points, plus an additional ten every seven minutes.

[Alorael at Large]

There are various ways to address the problem, but none that I've seen fix the basic problem that there's a game ending condition that's substantially random, unrelated to the rest of the game, and optional. Making the snitch worth less means that you're less likely to suddenly win while you've spent the whole game losing, but more likely that your seeker may just sit around doing nothing until the scores are close enough to make catching the snitch a win, not a loss.

 

—Alorael, who found Harry's quidditch stardom and the game itself equally irritating.

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: Tracer Bullet

redesign: Snitch is worth twenty points, plus an additional ten every seven minutes.

That's interesting. It would still be two completely separate games that happen to affect the same score, but at least the significance of the two games would be kind of balanced.

[A less presumptuous name.]

I don't get why the book-version of quidditch has to make sense, though. It's pretty soft fantasy: wizards are almost completely ignorant of any technology in the muggle world, so who says that their games have to make any sense? As far as RL (Physics EM makes it hard to type this without groaning) quidditch is concerned, though, I'm interested to try out a game or two. It may not make all that much sense, but it could be fun nonetheless.

[Tracer Bullet]

Originally Posted By: Pedipalps of our fathers

Alorael, who found Harry's quidditch stardom and the game itself equally irritating.

The game wouldn't be so irritating if you took out the Seeker, but then how would you make Harry stand out?

From an entirely negative view of Quidditch, I guess that's a two-birds-one-stone situation, but myself I kind of like the concept of Bludgers. Just cut everything else out and make it into a game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket.

[Alorael at Large]

Harry Potter is soft fantasy, and the lax world-building bothers me some. But Quidditch (apparently capitalized) isn't played for laughs but is too ridiculous and poorly-designed a game to be taken seriously. It would work just fine in Discworld, but as a way to show a protagonist's prowess it's a failure.

 

—Alorael, who would also be perfectly happy if the game explicitly revolved around seekers and the snitch. An aerial brawl with people hunting a tiny golden ball and more people trying to harass or protect the hunters would be at least an internally consistent and entertainingly belligerent sport.

[Student of Trinity]

I always took Quidditch as a little bit of satire on team sports in general. You're not supposed to think it makes sense as a game. You're supposed to think wizards and witches are a bit crazy when it comes to their favorite sport.

[Alorael at Large]

Again, it would work better if Harry weren't the star, or if he at least dwelled upon the absurdity of his sport a little bit more. It doesn't quite work to make him both ironically and unironically heroic.

 

—Alorael, who supposes Quidditch is at least no worse than curling. But does anyone really take curling as seriously as those wizard take their Quidditch?

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Iconoplasia

—Alorael, who supposes Quidditch is at least no worse than curling. But does anyone really take curling as seriously as those wizard take their Quidditch?

Only when we're winning gold medals in it.

(Wow, that was ten years ago... I would guess that even Britain doesn't care about it that much anymore. )

[Dintiradan]

Quote:

—Alorael, who supposes Quidditch is at least no worse than curling. But does anyone really take curling as seriously as those wizard take their Quidditch?

I don't take any sport seriously, but curling is one of my favourites.

[Student of Trinity]

Oh, Harry is quite non-ironically heroic. He's a seeker, so his part of the game is really important and difficult and all. It's the rest of the game that makes no sense, given the existence of seekers.

[Alorael at Large]

Even the role of seeker itself should be seen as random and arbitrary. Do you happen to be looking in the right direction while your opposition isn't? There's a skill to searching for small objects, but it's not really an athletic skill in any normal sense of the word.

 

—Alorael, who has another proposal: Quidditch is a ridiculous sport because no one cares about the sport. It's actually just an excuse for hooliganism and a chance to watch and hope for the equivalent of bench-clearing brawls with the added excitement of fatal falls from great heights.