Gaming Horror – it's a Game Dev's Life

From my own experience and by looking at other games i am aware that in a lot of cases – even today – Tutorials in games are an afterthought. I would even go as far as to say that if i don’t like the tutorial chances are, i won’t like the rest of the game either. For a good game, the Tutorial blends in with the game, it just feels natural. Where it is an afterthought, it’s in cases like Prototype: at first, you get all the good stuff, all the weapons and powerups and what not and you are free to try one after the other. Then the game starts, and you’re just that little guy without all these powers.

Types of Tutorials:

1) you get it all but then we’ll take it away from you
2) we explain our overly complex system to you…
2a) … in just 5 minutes, even if you wouldn’t use most of this stuff anyway – we know you just want to play the game, right?
2b) … in 60 minutes because we think it takes this time to really memorize all the good stuff
3) we interrupt your playsession for this trivial hint shown in a messagebox!
3a) PC: if you happened to be clicking your mouse where the OK/Cancel buttons where – we are sorry, you don’t get this message a second time
3b) Console: if you happened to be pressing one of the action buttons that dismiss the messagebox – again, we are soooo sorry we didn’t think you might hit that button while playing our button-smasher and might want to see that message again.

From the comments:

4) Let the game show everything to the player, while not giving him the chance to try out for himself.

5) This is your sixth playthrough for the game? Too bad for you, you must take the tutorial again and you cannot skip! :]

Do you have more tutorial cliches to add to this list?

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