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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

> Games are generally mass-market products so any feature that only helps a very small percentage of buyers is much less likely to get added.

Your point kind of proves the opposite. Many players will benefit from tutorials, of course. But if making them unskippable helps the bottom 10%, who otherwise can’t correctly judge if they would need them, then we get unskippable tutorials.

The same bullshit applies to dynamic (cheating) difficulty levels, another bane of modern game design where you can’t get ahead by doing well.

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That 10% figure you quote is pulled out of thin air. What if it's actually 80% of players who benefit from the tutorial? At least a little bit, like a refresher on the stealth or crafting system in this particular game?

In any case, even it it were only 10% it's hardly a symmetrical tradeoff. Those bottom 10% cannot play the game at all without the tutorial, while for the rest it's a few minutes of boring content in an otherwise hours-long game. Seems like a worthwhile investment to add the tutorial.

> while for the rest it's a few minutes of boring content in an otherwise hours-long game

One of the examples in the article was about spending an hour on intro levels before getting to the "meat" of the game.

Plus, "a few minutes of boring content" is no small thing to trudge through.

Before responding, please listen to this musical piece in its entirety[1]. It's only about four and a half minutes long in an otherwise hours-long conversation, so should not be a problem for you.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

We're not really discussing adding the tutorial or not, we're discussing not adding the button to skip the tutorial so that users cannot make their own choice of whether or not to watch it.

The 10% most familiar with the game/genre/developer/controls don't need the tutorial, and know it. I'd argue it's not the bottom 10% least familiar with the game that are harmed by the skip option; they know they need the tutorial, and aren't significantly harmed by the presence of a discrete skip option.

The 10% that cannot play the game because THEY chose to use the skip option, and not to return to the tutorial when they can't figure it out, but instead give up and leave a bad review... they're the only population (against their will!) from the removal of the skip button.

I don't think you give the right weight to BORING,that's the issue here.

I have 2 hours of gaming per day during the week if I don't have anything else to do, which is rare, so it translates more to 2 hours once every 5 days (weekend is ad-hoc).

10 minutes is roughly 8% of that time, so if the game doesn't hook within 30 minutes (that can be with a nice intro, with a FUN tutorial, or throwing me into the gameplay) it gets dropped unless I have a strong referral from a friend.

That being said, most videogames I play have skippable tutorials. Not sure if that's a new problem specific to AAA, i rarely play those (although returnal on pc was very recent)

Oh I like dynamic difficulty. I get so bored with Stellaris, Civ 6, or RimWorld when I'm so far ahead I can easily deal with any challenge. Dynamic difficulty lets you progress through a game without outpacing the AI.

RimWorld has so many ways to kick your ass if you're getting too comfy, unless you're playing on peaceful/builder. Some of the late game random events are brutally unfair unless you know specifically how to prepare for them.

To paraphrase SSethT's review -- Randy isn't ashamed to admit he's out for blood and DGAF. He'll make it rain toxic fallout, then drop 600 units of milk on you.

Actually it's the "bottom 10%" that'll keep trying different stuff until they figure it out.

It's the "expert gamers" who skip tutorials and then get stuck and end up all frustrated and angry because the game doesn't work exactly like God Of Thing I Played Last Week.

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