[lazaroclapp]

Interestingly, there are basically two kinds of programs I am sometimes happy to see guided tours embedded in:

* Creation programs (image/video editors, 3D rendering... hell, even a slides program or an IDE). Doesn't mean I won't dismiss them sometimes anyways, but these are tools that often I do want to get an initial idea how to use, that I have allotted some time to play around with, and that are sufficiently complex that a tutorial is justified. These are also places were I can spend 2-5 minutes learning the basics of the tool, because whatever I am about to do with it is going to take the next few hours anyways.

* Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Also, this is always on first install. Getting a tutorial on update for an authoring tool (and to a lesser extent a game) is far less likely to be welcome.

[atoav]

So the types of programs you usually bring time to exploratively use anyways.

[wongarsu]

Videogame tutorials also used to mostly suck. But in the last two decades they recognized the issues, and there's a lot of knowledge sharing in the industry

If you want to learn how to better teach new users about your product, GDC talks about video game tutorials are one of the best resource you can find

[account42]

Hard disagree - at least tutorials used to be skippable and/or short. Now you're more likely get an extended tutorial-like section at the start of the game that is just tediously boring if you have half a brain cell. Like Half-Life mentioned in the sibling, the tutorial is a separate mini-campaign you don't have to start before the main campaign - which doesn't actually need any tutorial if you have played an FPS before.

For most games I don't actually want a tutorial at all. If there is something not entirely obvious then I'd much prefer a reference sheet I can pull up when I actually want to do that thing.

[wongarsu]

That's a bit like saying all CGI is bad: the bad instances are the ones you remember most vividly, the best instances are the ones you never noticed.

In my opinion, the best tutorial in any game I've ever played was Portal (yes, also 19 years old, not a good case for "tutorials were terrible back then"). Portal has 19 levels of tutorial (the test chambers) which gradually introduce mechanics with Glados as your sarcastic guide, and five levels outside the tutorial (escape and destroying Glados) where you use what you learned

Meanwhile the colony sim genre has mostly arrived at the checklist style: you get a checklist of things that would be useful to do, and when you complete them you get a new checklist. But you are free to just ignore it and do something else. Captain of Industry or Timberborn come to mind

In the FPS genre Titanfall 2 had a pretty nice tutorial in the campaign that ended in a timed obstacle course

[tardedmeme]

Just watched someone play Half-Life (the original). Its tutorial is better than a lot of tutorials today.

[PaulHoule]

Onboarding is such a big thing in games. A lot of times I have a few minutes to play and I play a pickup game of Beat Saber or maybe a round of Dynasty Warriors because I can just pick up the controller in play. A lot of games stay in my backlog because I don't want to spend a few hours watching cutscenes and playing through tutorials just to know if I like the game or not.

[PetitPrince]

> * Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Oftentimes it's less jarring to have an invisible tutorial though (a level made to exploit the new gameplay element / feature). But it depends on what you want the user to learn and the type of videogame; I don't mind a guided tour in more strategic games (RTS, turn by turn RPG, ...).