Back in 2014, I played my first, and last, Assassin’s Creed game: Black Flag. The opening to this game is absolutely glacial – players are forced to sit through a bunch of dialogue that they have no context for, and the bits where you’re actually controlling the character are trailing missions. It’s truly awful.

After enduring almost an hour of this nonsense, players are dropped into the first major hub city. This is where the game truly begins, and players are finally allowed to take control of Edward. I mean – prior to this you’re the one twiddling the controls sticks, but you’re being railroaded through a bunch of nonsense. You’re not really playing the game. It’s more like you’re being taken on a scripted tour where you’re occasionally asked to press buttons.

Scoping out an island in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

Despite finally letting players off the leash, Black Flag would really rather you continue to traipse through more scripted nonsense. I’d suffered enough however, so I started running around the city instead. Through my travels I developed a better feel for Black Flag’s combat, and movement systems, while also learning about all the different icons on the map. 

I would later learn the error of my ways. While my grand adventure had been fun, and informative, Black Flag had different ideas for how I was meant to learn the game. When I eventually returned to the main quest, I was subjected to a laborious explanation of all of the game’s basic mechanics – the very same mechanics that I’d just spent a couple hours learning of my own volition. Lovely.

That brings me to what I wanted to talk about today: tutorials. I think they’re an essential part of many games, but I swear to God if I have to sit through another one that explains things like I’ve never played a game before I’ll lose my mind.

While I might have started with Black Flag, it isn’t even the reason I wanted to talk about tutorials. The actual reason is Pikmin 4. It begins with a horrendously paced tutorial that takes several hours to complete. What’s worse is how much time the game spends talking at you. For a game with nothing to say, Pikmin 4 has a LOT of dialogue.

The player character, Oatchi, and a bunch of Red Pikmin.

And don’t get me wrong – I think Pikmin 4’s tutorial is lovely if you’ve never played Pikmin before. Heck, it’s probably also rock solid if you’ve never played a video game before. With the widespread success of the Switch, and Pikmin’s cute aesthetic there is a not insignificant chance that Pikmin 4 will be many people’s first Pikmin. This necessitates having a tutorial that clearly explains things in a way that doesn’t rely on preexisting knowledge, or in-universe jargon.

While I recognize the need for a good tutorial to set up every player with strong foundational knowledge, I don’t want to sit through it. I’ve played, and finished all 3 previous Pikmin games. Multiple times. I’ve been through the equivalent of Pikmin Vietnam. Pikmin 4’s tutorial was a 2 hour slog that felt incredibly condescending. Moreover, it almost made me drop the game. Were it not for my significant other telling me that the game would eventually shut up, I’m not sure I’d have bothered suffering through the entire tutorial.

So what’s the solution here? How do we accommodate players of all skill levels with the tutorials that are offered within games?

Taking on a Burrowing Snagret in Pikmin 4.

Well…we could start by doing tutorials the same way we tend to treat difficulty.

While I’m not the biggest fan of static selectable difficulties, it’s hard to deny how successful they are at what they do. They give players some degree of control over the challenge on offer in the game they’re playing. It doesn’t work for every experience, but it can help players tune things to better fit their preferences. Perhaps a similar stance could be taken by more games.

Having multiple styles of tutorials isn’t even a new concept either. Almost every modern fighting game has tutorials built out like this. When you first start, you’ll enter play through a skippable tutorial that teaches you the basics of movement, and attacking the opponent. Then you can find additional playable, and text tutorials in the help, or training sections of the games. This lets players go through as much, or as little of the tutorial as they desire meaning that everyone has a lot of control over their individual experience. It also has the added benefit of breaking down a more mechanically complex title into several digestible chunks, but that’s a topic for another article.

The extensive list of tutorials from Street Fighter 6.

I’m also acutely aware that it’s significantly more time consuming to develop several different tutorials to appease different styles of players. Obviously. Doing just about anything well in video games requires that it not be the cheap, and easy route. But isn’t it worth it? I’d have completely bounced off Pikmin 4 were it not for my significant other telling me that the rest of the game was worth suffering through the tutorial for. And Pikmin 4 is only the latest game to do this to me. Numerous untold games haven’t benefited from the good graces of a second chance.

I dunno. Is this an unreasonable question to ask? Have you ever bounced off a game because you found the tutorial to be overbearing? Let me know – genuinely curious to hear back from other folks about this one.