"In-game tutorials are both hugely important and difficult to pull off, and today's game-designers have gotten pretty clever about putting them together."
Disagree heavily. Many of the most complicated games from the past had no tutorials, but people were still able to figure them out. Figuring out was part of the fun in fact. Most people I know simply ignore tutorials.
And I can't blame them, because developers tend to be horrible at putting tutorials together. Most tutorials today start with the most basic things imaginable- moving your character and moving the camera. These things don't change from game to game. Only a very small number of modern games have tutorials worth playing.
Most new games I see have cleverly disguised the tutorial as the first few levels (probably because everyone skips them).
Instead of explicitly introducing concepts, concepts are introduced in-game one by one. There's a gentle ramp-up, and the goal is to have the player unaware that they're playing a tutorial.
It's very tricky to get the right balance between teaching and action in the first few levels.
Examples of games where the tutorial is the first few levels (off the top of my head): Halo, Portal, Half Life 2
First, there are a lot of mini-tutorials throughout the game with no instructions where you can not advance until you learn some easy skill - like breaking wood with crowbar, shooting a padlock to open a door, putting concrete blocks on a swing for it to rise, etc.
Then, there are cases where you'd want to practice a skill before the using it in battle - like using Magnusson devices to hit striders. You get instructions and a chance to fire it seveal times to get a feeling of its trajectory without having to load the game a dozen times during the real battle.
I hardly ever play tutorials - mostly because they are really boring.
However, I do have an 11 year old son - I usually learn games by having him explain to me the bare minimum of controller commands and learning as I go after that.
If an 11 year old can't explain in 30 seconds enough to get me started in a game then I probably will get bored and go back to playing Halo 3 online.
Disagree heavily. Many of the most complicated games from the past had no tutorials, but people were still able to figure them out. Figuring out was part of the fun in fact. Most people I know simply ignore tutorials.
And I can't blame them, because developers tend to be horrible at putting tutorials together. Most tutorials today start with the most basic things imaginable- moving your character and moving the camera. These things don't change from game to game. Only a very small number of modern games have tutorials worth playing.