[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.