If it takes X time for a new player (totally new, never played an aRPG before) on average to learn the basics, this includes:
Orienting in the game and world map
Orienting in the menu and character sheets
Picking and selling items to vendors
Equipping and swapping items in a productive/self-improving way
Selecting skills and making a proper/working build
Fighting through monsters successfully
Following the storyline and completing quests
Then this X time should be the tutorial. This isn’t 10 minutes for sure. It would be more than 2 hours even for the most quickly adapting players.
I don’t know. I don’t follow story in Diablo games. The story is the same on every playthrough, your character building is not. This is what drives the replayability - different gameplay options, not same boring story.
It’s either endgame capable items or not. If such drop, the content must be challenging, but you can’t serve such content to a new player that just learned how to swap axes. If endgame stuff doesn’t drop, you simply artificially gated the progression in what is to be a highly replayable game.
What story is in Pac-Man? I mean, you don’t have to bother with a story at all. Frankly a game with a great story an bad gameplay is bad. A game with great gameplay and a bad story is still great IMO.
It is NOT the job of a tutorial to teach you these things. It is the job of your brain.
Now, it is the job of the game to give you all relevant information (not the solutions!) for your brain to learn and figure out stuff. Diablo could use much better ingame information. Add a bestiary or something.
These are the job of a tutorial. And yes, it can be done in like 10 minutes.
Luckily Blizzard has said, and it is a good decision, that D4s campaign will have the so-called “adventure mode” systems active throughout. So each playthrough can be varied, driving replayability.
I’m sure they will add a button for skipping dialogue too.
If you can upgrade a lvl 10 dagger (with expensive crafting mats) to a lvl 40 end-game item, it is end-game capable.
I figured all that out in Diablo 1 in less than 2 hours and I was 8 years old when that game released, and I’m by no means some kind of gaming savant.
I’d also disagree that a tutorial ought to teach players how to be good at the game. That’s something that should come naturally through playing the game and adopting the tactics that work best for the individual player.
and of course, offer a sufficient respec option for low level characters for the new player who naturally mess up their first builds or want to try a different approach. This is an area where even Diablo 2 isn’t great.
If you explain every detail in how to play best, you are literally killing the gameplay.
Yet a bunch of 8 year olds etc. did exactly that in D2. And a ton of other games.
Easy to learn how to move around, and click left mouse button.
Not easy to learn what work best, how you beat enemies efficiently, or how you manage to survive.
I know I was good and all, but I don’t think it would take 2+ hours to teach somebody today the basics of playing Diablo 1. Not even if they had never played an action RPG before.
I don’t think it would take 2+ hours to teach somebody the basics of playing Diablo 2 or 3 either.
Like Shadout said, a lot of kids back in those days managed to figure it all out without any sort of tutorial at all.
Explaining what stats do honestly should just be a tooltip on the character sheet which should display what all your stats are.
Once I have a tooltip explaining to a player what a critical strike is, I don’t think I need to explain the effects of stacking more +X% chance to get a critical strike.
I feel like at some point I would be insulting their intelligence if I did that.
i wouldnt give people any credit at all, for figuring things out themselves. i dont even give myself any credit. each time i play a new game, i start with a walkthrough in front of me, because i want the best start possible, and the most knowledge possible before i do anything.
it got so important that not doing so is just… no. just a terrible idea. do you know how many things you could miss out, or do, but turns out to be a complete waste of time? and so on.
to be honest, id be fine if it killed the gameplay. id most likely just play diablo 4 for the storyline. if i like the gameplay, ill continue playing it…
The new player has to be able to complete the game successfully after going through the tutorial. That’s the way to hook up players to the game.
The player going through all stats takes much time by itself only.
No one forces the new player to follow up the tutorial closely and read everything presented to him. It’s just that not all people are born gamers and capable of learning fast.
The job of the tutorial should be to drag all people to the game.
That’s on you and I doubt any tutorial could ever fully cover what you’re after then. You pretty much need an experienced veteran to tell you every step of the way from the sounds of it.
Which to me would just kill the game for me but hey, there will always be people who make step by step guides for things on the internet.
I can remember the very first time I played a game called Fire Emblem I fell into a classic trap most new players back then fell into and I actually couldn’t beat the game so I restarted at one point(this point literally being the final level).
That doesn’t bother me though. I don’t feel as though I “wasted my time” because I was having fun playing the game. It’s 16 years later and that game is one of my favourite games of all time, and I still love the Fire Emblem series.
I play games to have fun. If I had fun, I wasn’t wasting my time regardless of what else happened in the game.
That is fine, but you can enjoy the story even if the game does not hold your hand. If you are there mostly for the story, then it hardly matters if you are playing optimally, or understand all the game mechanisms.
At the same time, I would bet the vast majority of customers do not play Diablo mostly for its story.
Where is the problem?
Again, learning is not a bad thing. Not something we need to get rid of.
Not to get melodramatic or anything, but where the heck is humankind going with this kind of attitude, where we have to have guided, handholding experiences in everything we do
Give the player the means to solve the puzzle, but dont throw the solution in their face.
Then you learn a bit slower, and everything is fine.
Fun, engaging, and yes, challenging, gameplay is what should drag people to the game.
Not all people of course. That would be a crazy and unrealistic goal for a game.
i played many games, and i managed to beat most of them in the most suboptimal and worst ways possible. for those, i don’t bother with a guide, because if i was able to beat them blind, a guide just makes things easier.
it was only recently that i started using a guide. with that, i can know what i can safely skip, and whatnot. a guide can be used to make things harder on you, not just easier. think of it as a guide of things to avoid.
It shouldn’t take too long to read through a tooltip for a few stats.
When it’s all said and done I don’t know if I would strictly agree with it being “10 minutes max” but I feel it would certainly be closer to 10 minutes than several hours even for the most quickly adapting of people like you suggested.
It’s also worth noting that once we start talking about things like tooltips we’re going beyond the original implied format of “Tutorial of X minutes → Now you play the game” because the tooltips for stats should be there when you’re max level running end game stuff too.
When I say tutorial I’m talking about taking the player aside and going “Okay, here is how you play the game”.
There are things outside of that you can do to improve the new player experience, but that part of the game doesn’t need to last long.
Again though this is a really specific way of doing things that no tutorial ever is going to be able to properly cover.
What you want isn’t a tutorial. It’s a strategy guide.
Which those already exist, and they’re really not going anywhere.
So, you want a bunch of hand holding to play the game for you. I want to be able to explore the world and figure things out, not follow a bunch of arrows to progress through the story and stop every 5 minutes, so the game can tell me to put the gloves I just picked up into my glove spot.
Well, D2 you could find magefist or SOJ in the level 20s on the first playthrough. They were used on many end game builds, but were by no means mandatory. They also did not make Normal/Nightmare content trivial. If the game is designed right, you can find useful gear all throughout the leveling process. If max level gear is designed to be 10,000 more powerful than non-max level gear, then you didn’t design your game right.
A tutorial should not teach the slow learner. The game should do that.
After the player throw their corpse against a boss 10 times, dying horribly, you know what happens? They start (fast or slowly) to figure out how to improve their strategy. Until the boss dies at some point.
Also dont take such numbers too literally If it takes 12 minutes I wont come out screaming bloody murder.
If it is a 2 hour tutorial, I will.
Yeah. Those are fine. But definitely should not be offered within the game. It takes away the entire purpose of playing a game and getting better at it.
People are free to do whatever they want, and I have certainly used guides sometimes, especially for obtuse old-school JRPGs where missing a pixel somewhere in the game can lock you out of all kinds of content. Diablo is not really that kind of game though.
Here’s where we disagree. I put extremely high value in the “new player”, up to the point that I’d change the whole itemization to make it more newcomer friendlier. The reason for this is very simple: A game without new players is a dying game.
The new player has to be “king” and the game should do everything possible to make him stay and play for longer time, learning and adapting to the game world. The tutorial plays a crucial part in this and how the new player forms his opinion about the game.
I’d say the tutorial is way more important than any polishing or game mechanic that could be added at later point.
I want the new player to instantly feel at home when he starts Diablo and begins to learn the game. This is the way to attract these players and make them Diablo fans. And it can’t happen for just 10 minutes.
Even if it’s 10% more powerful, it’s still more powerful making that leveling gear less attractive to find.
At some point you have to draw the line and allow for endgame gear drops. The time investment before that line is a burden for the player that is to replay the game many times. And if you never make a line then the challenging aspect will be too much for the starters, except if you don’t bind drops with difficulty aka make a no skill casino.
Why? The tutorial is exactly for the slow learner, newcomer type of player that we want to keep interested in Diablo.
He’ll QQ and never return back, which equals potential lost money for the company and less future content for us.
I hope for a slow but steady leveling curve. A Diablo game, should be like a staircase, you take 1 step at a time, sometimes you might get lucky a skip a few steps, maybe even 5 or 10 with a good drop.
In Diablo 3, you take a step every now and then, then you get your first legendary you jump 50 floors and then you get your set items and you jump 1 BILLION SKYSCRAPERS.
Like seriously, you can go from doing 50.000-100.000 dmg to 100 BILLION, like wtf. That’s really bad game design.
It seems like in later years Blizzard have lost the idea of the important of leveling, i think its because of World of Warcraft, where everything is about the endgame. That is again, terrible game design.
I really hope they remove all the Torment levels, those were yet another big mistake. Game should have 3 difficulties, Normal, Nightmare and Hell. Not 16 or however many D3 has currently.
If it takes 12 minutes I wont come out screaming bloody murder.