The Tutorial - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 31

buttons do. The game then drops you into combat with a big unholy
doom beast from beyond the Sun. If you manage to live, you have
effectively mastered the controls to a degree that you can attempt the
challenges of the rest of the game. Dark Souls is hard. Unfortunately,
it doesn't provide much learning to mitigate some of the difficulty and
make the challenges seem possible. Further, it provides no guidance
as to which direction (as in North, South, East, or West) is hard,
easy, and so on. As a result, avid players will turn to wikis and online
guides, while novice players will simply turn the game off.
Right: Early tutorial level has clear goals and objectives.
Wrong: Everything else. Pop-ups only, no audio, no auditory
cues, tutorial isn't particularly meaningful, can't skip tutorial
level, and so on.
Metal Gear Solid Rising: Revengeance™
A mouthful of a title, this action game in the Metal Gear ™ series is
fast-paced, frenetic, and requires many inputs from the player in a very
short amount of time. There is a combo and blocking system to master,
special slow motion slice-and-dice mechanics, and more. Fortunately,
the game pairs on-screen traditional pop-ups that unfortunately do
little to help players with auditory tips from the commander to help
the player navigate the game's obstacles. One irking complaint is that
the text and audio are redundant in that the player not only is told the
tips audibly, but also a visual subtitle is present at the bottom of the
screen. Arising as a limitation in voice-over quality in the early era of
sound in games, the subtitles helped players overcome what might be
choppy audio. Today, this habit lingers in games for reasons I don't
entirely understand. There are no English subtitles when I go to see an
English film; why are there English subtitles when I play an English
game? Certainly, these should be an option for the hearing impaired,
but for the rest of us, the result is negatively increased cognitive load,
which I will talk about in Chapter 6.
Right: Tutorials are in audio form and are contextually relevant
to on-screen events and actions. The player learns both by lis-
tening and by looking, promoting active engagement in the
game's tasks.