So long as it is an intuitive process. I hate needing a little help when turning on the help/tip option makes the game spit huge idiot guides at me constantly when all I need is short concise explanation of a few features so I can understand what I'm looking at.

Quote:

Original post by Wavinator What's your opinion on the concept of training a player in an earlier part of a game to deal with challenges later in the game? What do you think of a game which throws the player into an environment and challenges them to learn the rules on their own? This is opposed to those games which stage challenges, keeping more complex ones at bay until the player is deemed to be ready to take them on. I raise this because I was thinking about first person shooter design. I love FPS games, but I've gotten a bit tired of the notion that I'm supposed to be trained in baby steps for later challenges. One thing it does is take some of the mystery and excitement out of the game for me. I know I'm being groomed for something, and that takes away from the something once I encounter it. What I find more exciting is to be able to play around in the game world and discover its limits, preferably with varying degrees of consequence. If, for instance, I find out that rocket launchers don't work on giant mechs and get squashed for my efforts, then so be it-- as long as I can keep learning. If you prefer this kind of approach to games, what do you think makes the "sink or swim" dynamic work well? What sorts of things would you emphasize and avoid?

I think the player should always feel that any serious consequences (which, for a game, generally involves loading your latest save and having to repeat some area) are his own fault. If you can 'safely' find out that the rocket launcher doesn't work on mechs (meaning you can either escape or will always have some other weapon that works that you can quickly switch to), then lack of training is fine. If the first time you discover that it doesn't work is at a critical point where you only have time to fire a few shots and either live or die based on whether you do enough damage with those shots, then it doesn't work so well because you just punished the player for not having already played the game.

Just being able to 'safely' learn isn't enough, either - you also need to make the knowledge obvious. If the mech shudders and smokes each time I shoot it with a rocket, it will take far, far longer to learn that rockets aren't hurting it than if a yellow shield shimmers around it each time and it doesn't react to the rocket at all.

I am definitely for being able to learn in game, tutorials suck a lot of fun from games I gain from learning interesting things about the game's systems. The learning does need to be well presented though.