Every tutorial is bad

Homeworld Remastered

I finally got the time and a good excuse the play the Homeworld Remastered collection. I played Homeworld 2 before but thought Homeworld 1 was a bit to old, and it wouldnt run anyways on my computer for what ever reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I was directly greeted by a pop up saying I should play the tutorial and I thought, yea its a long time I played the game and though a refresher could be a good idea. How wrong I was.

The Problem with Tutorials

The tutorial is slow, everything takes way too long, and it’s not indicative to what you actually do in the game.

Weirdly enough the normal base game is the better tutorial. Because it slowly introduces you to the game mechanics, locks some behind normal progression and others are first introduced by giving you a slightly more easy challenge and then later a harder one, where you need to prove that you actually learned something.

I just don’t get it. Isn’t this problem solved? Players want to play the game, not read long text,nor want to be overwhelmed with options or wait minutes until they can do something meaningful.

Why don’t developers simply gate new functions in the beginning and slowly unlock them? It does not make sense to overwhelm the player with different options he will not understand in the beginning. I am looking at you Paradox Games.

Some developers do that really well, like here in the Homeworld Campaign and in the modern Doom games, where you slowly unlock more features, weapons, add-ons for said weapon, giving you new harder enemies, etc.

A Concret Example

In Homeworld One (Spoiler), you encounter a fleet that is mostly made out of many, small swarm fighters. While you need to protect your ressource collectors. While you can build light covets and Interceptors that are good against fighters there are so many of them that it is quite hard to do.

When you fight you unlock a new fighter class called Defender. They build faster, have a more accuracy and coverage against other small fighters. But they are much slower, so they can’t really go from A to B fast in an emergency attack. They can protect very well. So the idea is that you can put some Defenders on guarding duty for your ressource collectors.

The Solution

A tutorial should not be visible as such, and should to be intrusive and hinder the player to actually play the game. They should not be annoying. Do not overwhelm the player with options he does not understand from his perspective in the beginning 6 different options look the same to him. The difference between the options must be gradually introduced and made to be obvious in the context of the game itself.