During my Batman Arkham City series, I praised the game for the way it seamlessly wove the tutorials into the flow of the story. It’s a big game with a lot of different systems. You’ve got brawling encounters, stealth encounters, detective mode investigations, traversing the worldStuff like gliding, swinging, and parkour., and using gadgets to solve “puzzles”.
The challenge the game designer faces in these kinds of games is that you want to teach the player as quickly as possible. We want the player to have access to the full open world so they can engage with whatever content seems fun to them. That’s the whole point of having an open world. But we can’t let players off the leash until they know the basics because if they explore the open world and encounter gameplay system they haven’t learned yet, they’ll get confused and blame the game. At the same time, ramming too many tutorials down their throat at once is just as bad. It’s tedious, it gets in the way of the narrative right when we’re trying to get the story off the ground, and players will have trouble remembering the lessons if they’re packed too close together.
What you want to do is introduce a concept, allow them to try it, and then give the player a few minutes of doing something else. Then you remind them of the concept. Then later you give them some sort of “final test” where you present the challenge again, only this time with more pressure. Maybe they’ll have to deal with a time limit, or they’ll have less room for error, or they’ll have to blend this concept with another one. The point is that it sort of follows the rule of three in the form of “setup, reminder, payoff.”
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spider-Man Part 5: How to Spider-Man”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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