How developers teach a player.

Tutorial – training, one of the most important aspects of video games. It depends on him whether the player will be able to move without problems in the plot, realizing what is required of him or will poke into all corners, like a blind kitten who was not told what buttons to click for walking.

Such a perspective scares many developers and some of them literally go crazy. They are afraid that the player, like a small child, will not be able to do without constant tips and reminders, about what is required of him and abandon their game. Such thoughts – make the developers much more often and describe the actions that the player must be performed in more detail.

Someone approaches the study of training with all responsibility, perceives it a full-fledged part of the game and thinks how to convey information more accessible to the player so that he is interested in. Some think about this, after the majority of the mechanic developed and realized, and only then ask the question: “And how to figure it out for a player”.

Click the jump to jump.

In many games, developers like to throw a whole wall of the text in the player’s face, where they will describe in detail what he sees in front of himself or what he needs to do and what it will lead. Often this decision does not cause players nothing but irritation or in certain cases – aggression.

In 2013, that is, seven years ago, Ubisoft ridiculed this approach to Far Cry: Blood Dragon. This is an addition to the third far Cry’yu, which was given nostalgia for the militants of the 80s in the satirical manner and their hyperbolized to steep characters, such as, for example, Snake Pliskin in a shoot from New York. Satire – allowed Ubisoft in addition to the hackneyed cinema cliches, to ridicule some ossified habits.

At the very beginning, the developers carefully take away the control from the player and offer to read the text where we are asked to click the “Jump” button to jump, “sit” – to sit and “look around” – to look around.

All these events are included in the plot. The main character is a cyborg, and his friend, for the sake of a joke, included in it the program “Teaching for dummies”. Thanks to this, you have to read obvious things, and then, upon the instruction of the game, you need to perform them. At the end of the training – the walls of the text reach an inconceivable amount and you already begin to get tired of skipping them, and the game makes fun of the player. “Tired of training? Buy his premium version, and it will pass the game for you!” – then no one knew that in the future Ubisoft could not recognize his own sarcasm.

We can say that the developers actually do not know how to make normal training and decided to disguise their stupidity with the help of irony. Such an opinion could have the right to a living if Blood Dragon was not an addition to the third Far Cry’yu, where the training was made with an exemplary way.

The game begins with the escape of the protagonist from the pirate camp. He is kept in a cage with his brother – a grant that will serve at the initial stage of a mentor. They are selected from a conclusion and they have to overcome the segment of the game, which is learning. Grant leads the player through various obstacles that are made in order to teach him the main mechanics.

When the main characters reach the first pirates, the grant says to bend, and the game carefully highlights the hint at which button can be done and gives a small description of what effect will be from this. The description is as laconic as possible, it can be read in a couple of seconds, and it does not pause the game, which allows you to observe the pace of gameplay and does not distract the player.

The description that pauses the game is also present in the game. It has details and a mini-roller for demonstration, but this description is not present in all a mechanic, and is an optional. The player himself decides whether he needs details or he already understood everything.

Training is divided into two stages. In the first, along with Grant, the main character recognizes the foundations of management and the main mechanics on which the entire gameplay will be built. In the second stage, a player to get acquainted with Denis, who will teach him how to hack towers, hunt and create objects.

All training is built on the actions that are inscribed in the plot, where the player is not just telling about various mechanics, but immediately forced him to do them to learn and all this in the context of the narrative.

Thanks to this approach, when the training is inscribed in the plot, it is built in such a way that the player can safely try the basics and does not have irritating walls of the text – the player remains immersed in what is happening, the gameplay pace does not get down to the sake of accessible explanations, and the training is perceived as a full part of the gameplay.

For contrast, you can take a fifth, which came out recently in 2018. It seemed that for so much time since the third part, the developers could learn many new things, study the player’s psychology and build training in such a way that he would be comfortable playing the rest of the game, well, or at least not make mistakes that there were not before.

The fifth far Cry in its structure is very similar to the third part, but is made at a much worst level. Instead of a linear dive, where the player is taught the basics, he is immediately thrown into a huge area where it is not clear where to go, and he is alone left with hostile sectarians, in the struggle against which he is a profan. There is a hostile atmosphere, where a player can make mistakes about which the game does not warn him and those who first play a similar game – this can be out of the rut.

The second stage of training begins on a separate island, where the player is already taught in more detail the main mechanics, but all this is done through extensive walls of the text that put the game in pause. Even seemingly a simple action to change weapons is shown in the form of a wall of the text so that the developers know for sure that the player will not miss their tips.

Far Cry 5 is a great example of what I talked about. Developers go crazy with anxiety that the player will not accidentally notice any hint. They even when going to the car constantly show which buttons they are responsible for what.

The developers tried with all their might to make their game as friendly as possible, but they forgot to smoothly enter the player into the gameplay and did not think through the training segment as a full part of the game, but made it as an appendage.

I act as an apogee of such madness: Middle-Earth: Shadow of War and Rage 2. In the first, the developers came up with a huge number of mechanics and various actions that complicate the game, but do not bring any cardinal innovations to the gameplay, only slightly diversify it.

For each such action, starting from control to a description of various objects, the developers carefully roll out a wall of text on the player, which pauses the game.

As the game, flashing inscriptions often arise https://frenzinocasino.uk that you can make any action that you pumped or distribute skills points.

The game simply ceases to be a game from which you enjoy and turns into annoying instructions that many throw when buying any household appliances. The only difference is that the developers have flexible opportunities for training people who will play their games, but in Shadow of War, they decided not to bother with something like that. They decided to simply smear the entire learning segment for several hours, and then constantly make reminders of various functions. Thanks to this approach, the players are in constant expectation of when a full -fledged game will already begin.

In Rage 2, everything is in a very strange way. This is a first -person shooter, which, from the very moment of its announcement, appeared before the players as an adrenaline mixture of madness and black humor and the developers from the very beginning of the game throw a player in the thick of the events.

A certain pace is set, comparable in the intensity of passions with the American slides and this is damn cool, but there is only one “but”.

All adrenaline, and with him pleasure – immediately disappears when the player is taken away from the control and forced to read the message about how to correctly change the weapon or how to restore health or it may be interesting for you to know what phylrest batteries are? The frequency of such messages simply rolls over. The number of tips is comparable to those in Blood Dragon, but there all this is irony and ends in the first ten minutes.

Rage 2 is seriously trying to teach the player to his mechanics in this way and is engaged in this for quite some time. This is enough for the player to be tired of such an approach and began to perceive the game not as entertainment, but as a routine and he wanted to turn it off. Although, it would seem, a game with such a frivolous plot, just begs for making some crazy learning in the style of the same Blood Dragon, but we have that we have.

But in what games then, training is done correctly and what does the correct training mean in general?

Training is part of the game.

Many developers, especially in shooters, create a peculiar, and sometimes literal, obstacle strip where the player is taught the basics of their game. One of the most interesting examples is the Call of Duty series and those parts that came out of the pen of Zapopel and the company.

In the first Modern Warfare, the protagonist is trying to get into a special detachment. He is checked in how well he knows how to shoot and handle cold weapons. The audit acts as training, where the player first meets the basics of management. He is taught shooting from the hip and from the sight, he is told that some obstacles can be pierced through and he recognizes one of the cherished truths of any shooter: “pulling out a gun is faster than reload the rifle”.

Then he appears in front of Captain Price, which makes him go through an obstacle strip, which in miniature represents the whole gameplay of the game. The player can make any mistakes, but due to the fact that Price at the beginning says that the record holder: Hus-has met in 19 seconds, the player wakes up a sense of rivalry, and he can make several attempts to win the record, thereby honing his skills in the game. And in the end, based on the set time, the game offers to choose the level of complexity for passing. This training turned out to be so tight that many began to conduct speedlers only on this segment of the game and this is how the world record looks like.

In the second part, the developer resorted to such a technique, but the main character no longer undergoes training, but acts as a mentor who demonstrates his abilities in the label of the shooting with yellow -bore newcomers. This is a great solution where the player learn the same actions that he learned in the previous part, but thanks to the context, he perceives it as something interesting. But the most important thing is that the walls of the text that break the player’s connection with the game do not pop up before the player, he himself to study through the gameplay how to play and all this is perceived by part of the plot.

The company resorted to a similar style of training in the very first Call of Duty, in which the player needed to go through an obstacle strip and learn to use various types of weapons. But I liked how they disguised and entered some tips into the plot.

When the player is taught to use the camera, he is asked to look at the old propaganda posters in turn, on which the developers tried to convey the main ideas of the game in a stylized image, which were new in the early 2000s in the early 2000s.

• move together like a team.
• Always run up from shelter to shelter.
• Return before going on the attack.

Call of Duty has popularized a similar type of gameplay and such an approach to learning cannot but rejoice. In fact, games that teach the player in this way are a huge set.

In a series of Hitman games, in each part we are invited to go through a mini level that serves as a tie of history and teaches the player the main mechanics who will be constantly applied in the future.

In the first Splinter Cell, Sam Fisher needs to go through an obstacle strip to be taken to a special unit. While Sam knows all this in the plot, the player learn acrobatics, passing the obstacle strip, interaction with enemies and how secrecy works in the shadows.

The player is offered to survive the usual day of the protagonist in Heavy Rain, in which it is necessary to perform the most common actions in order to get acquainted with the unusual management for that time. Unlike the previous game of David Cage, where the player was forced to go through a kind of tutorial that broke the fourth wall and did not fit into the game narrative, in Heavy Rain, training acts as a form of history and tries to reveal the characters.

All the games that were called by me once offered an innovative gameplay, which in most cases was first met to the player. But despite all the innovations, these games were able to avoid temptation: to click the wall of the text in front of the player, which would allow them not to think about such a simple thing as training.

One way or another, in many such games, the tutorial tried to enter into history, but at the same time, it is perceived by a segment that acts as a kind of prologue before the start of the main actions.

Many people fall into despondency when they find out that they need to teach something new. They have persistent associations with the monotony of what is happening, and all this flows into a bored state when all motivation disappears. We have repeatedly heard that training is best conducted in the form of a game, then a person will be easier to perceive the information received, and he will want to learn more and more.

This approach concerns video games, but since they themselves are “game’ ’, training should be as invisible as possible to immediately immerse the player in the process of what is happening. I know at least two games that were able to achieve something similar.

Ideal training.

The best training is training in practice, which means that the player needs not to tell how something is done, but to show. Valve understood this best when they developed Half – Life 2.

A few years ago I watched the video of Mark Brown about how Half-Life 2 creates invisible training and I was very interested in this approach.

The game has several unusual mechanics who can meet the player for the first time, which means that it is necessary to pay close attention to that he learned well, which the game wants at a certain moment.

To teach a player to teach something, developers create contextual situations that are trying in every possible way to distinguish in different ways so that the player remembers them as something unique.

How to teach a player to use advanced physics? You can focus on the world of the game and its totalitarian regime, where people require constant subordination. To do this, one of the future opponents throws a jar to the floor and with a mockery forces the player to raise and put it in the urn. The player lifts her and the inscription appears in front of him – “throw the subject”, the curious player immediately has a thought in his head – “what if …” and he throws the jar into the offender, for which he receives a club on the head.

How to teach a player to fight new opponents? First you need to show what they are capable of. When the player sees Barnaka for the first time, he immediately eats the crow who fell into him in the tentacles. The player understands that it is better to fear them. Further in the plot it is necessary to squeeze into a narrow passage, which is forced by barrels and the player, as if by accident, pushes them and together with them glides in the tentacles of these monsters, but they grab the barrels that fell ahead. It comes to the player that in this way it is possible to pass by these creatures and when he sees a few among the pile of barrels that can be blown up, he again has a question – “What if …”. He throws a barrel, sets it on fire and destroys the whole cluster of enemies who tried to gobble up.

The game adheres to such a design in everything. Where it is impossible to build this – invisible training, it still introduces a character who will explain the work of a device and will do it in the context of the history itself. Immediately you can remember how Alex teaches the player to use a grave gun, by playing with her pet-“dog”.

Half-Life 2 was released in 2004, and in 2012 it was awarded the title “Best Game of Decades”. For 16 years, a huge number of games have been released since its release, but it seems to me that one of them is as similar to Half-Life 2 and is trying in every possible way to develop her ideas-I’m talking about The Last of Us.

I know that many such an opinion may seem absurd, because I have repeatedly heard that this is not even a game, but an ordinary “kinzo”. Honestly, I do not know how to convince these people, and I’m not sure whether it is necessary.

I have already addressed The Last of Us when I made a video about the game narrative and there, as an example, I analyzed this game on a par with the first Half-Life. In my opinion, these games are very similar to each other and seek to achieve the same goal – the maximum immersion of the player. And training is the very first stage to achieve this goal.

The Last of US begins with a prologue that serves as a form of history and reveals one of the main characters of the game – Joel. The developers tried not to load the player with excess mechanics from the very beginning and made training very smoothly tied on the plot. I immerse a player in history without rushing, give him time to get comfortable with management. For this, in a calm atmosphere, he controls the daughter of the protagonist and wanders around the house, trying to understand where her father went. As the events develop, management goes to Joel, after the heroes had an accident. The daughter turned her foot, and her father takes her in her arms, giving her a gun to his brother to protect them.

Most developers in such a situation would like to teach the player shooting, but the Naughty Dog simply speed up the gameplay pace. They offer the player to flee, so that he is already used to fast movement and teach him to distinguish between contextual landmarks that serve as hints for where to move.

For example, a bright refueling attracts the attention of the player, and he begins to run to it, thinking that you can hide, but a car crashes into it and an explosion is heard, after which a lamppost falls, simultaneously blocking the way to the player and indicates the right direction.

The next landmark is a cinema, the sign of which illuminates the street with light, but after another explosion, the light goes out and the only lamppost that is on the street that burns near the alkalka, where the player needs to move.

Throughout the game, the developers are using this approach to navigation, which is taught the player at the very beginning. And to build all training precisely on the principle: “Training is part of the game, part of the plot”.

How in most games they teach shooting? Usually we meet the first enemy and we tell us which button you need to press to shoot, in the worst version – the game is paused.

In The Last of US, the player is taught to shoot for the first time not at enemies, but by a doomed person who became infected with a virus and asks to interrupt his suffering. The inscription appears in front of the player: “L2 – aim, R2 – shoot”. A similar action causes an emotional response in the player, immerses him in history, makes it possible to penetrate more deeply and … just teaches to shoot.

You can rightly notice that all the games I have named are not too complicated for the development of most players, so it is much easier for developers to do training. There are also various simulators, strategies and just games in which there are mechanics that are difficult to describe in a nutshell.

But I still believe that many developers simply do not want or forget to devote enough time to such a segment as training. On the example of the Far Cry series, one can perfectly notice how games with almost identical mechanics teach the player differently, and in the same strategies the narrator is often found, which is inscribed in the plot and is a kind of assistant to the main character.

Teaching in the game is not an appendage that needs to be endured to start the main game. Training is a full part of the game, which must be correctly entered into the narrative and make it as simple as possible, but at the same time practically not noticeable. Yes, this approach takes a lot of effort and time, it is necessary to understand the psychology of the player well and know what audience the game is being developed for, but as one maxim said: “No pain, no gain. Capisce?”