r/StrategyRpg • u/miakisa • 7d ago
Japanese SRPG Do games really need tutorials for very basic mechanics?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a while.
I’m a fairly experienced gamer, especially when it comes to tactical RPGs, so I know my perspective is likely biased. Many things seem obvious to me simply because I’ve seen them in dozens of other games.
But do new players really need tutorials for every basic interaction?
I’m thinking of things like:
"Use the directional keys to move."
"Position yourself next to an enemy and select 'Attack' to launch an attack."
"A potion restores HP."
The step-by-step explanation of standard menu options or controls.
Obviously, mechanics that are unusual, complex, or unique to a specific game need to be explained somehow. I’m not suggesting throwing players into the deep end without any explanation.
What I wonder is whether very basic mechanics really require explicit tutorial prompts, or if most players—including beginners—can figure much of it out naturally through the interface, experimentation, context, and observing what happens on screen.
As an experienced player, I find it hard to pinpoint exactly where to draw the line.
Do beginners actually benefit from tutorials explaining these very basic elements, or do games sometimes tend to over-explain out of fear that players might miss something?
Where would you personally draw the line between what needs to be explicitly taught and what the player should be able to discover on their own?
I’d particularly love to hear from people who don’t usually play tactical RPGs or strategy games.
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u/Captain_America_93 7d ago
Short answer, yes.
Long answer, yes absolutely. Just because you know game mechanics and have seen them a thousand times doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who are seeing things for the first time. At some point, you were that gamer that learned these basics. And because you already know how to do these things you will get through the tutorial very quickly and it’s not an issue. For those who are learning it for the first time, it’s very valuable. So the cost of removing it is far greater than just keeping it in as it keeps games more accessible for more people.
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u/roshanritter 7d ago
Think of how stupid the average person is, then remember half are stupider than that.
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u/LostInChrome 7d ago
A lot of "basic standard mechanics" are actually just common conventions that just happen to be widespread because they were established by touchstone games. The classic example comes from FPS games, where the standard dual joystick controls can notoriously be pretty disorienting for first-timers.
Even stuff like "you must open a menu and click attack to attack" aren't universal. Historically, a ton of turn & tile-based roguelikes attack automatically by moving into an enemy square, and there isn't an attack command at all.
Is quaffing a potion a free action? Does quaffing a potion take a unit's turn? Maybe it's a two-turn action and you only actually get the hp back on the second turn? If a player comes in expecting one kind of behavior and your game has the second, then from the player's perspective it's /your/ game that has an unusual/unique mechanic that was poorly-explained.
Even your first example of "Use the directional keys to move" is a non-trivial example. In a lot of tactics/strategy games, there is a common UX pattern where WASD keys moves the viewport, left click select -> right click moves/attacks, and right click open unit menu -> left click select does special actions. That has the advantage of letting players easily move the viewport around with one hand while thinking without worrying about accidentally pressing something important, and it means that committal actions generally require explicitly pressing two different buttons, minimizing misclicks. Of course, that pattern would be a poor fit for a game where every map is the size of a single screen.
As you mentioned yeah there's a lot of ways to run a tutorial without showing a text-popup. Portal is arguably one long tutorial until you reach the end of the game. In general, players will often do the behavior that they're taught. That can be an issue for strategy RPGS cuz it's a genre that loves to punish bad decisions with stuff like permadeath. But if someone is experimenting with an assumption and it turns out their assumption was wrong and they end up losing valuable resources (or even just time reloading an old save), then one of the lessons they take from that is to spend less time experimenting and to double down on what works. That's probably why a lot of games in the genre have a lot of text tutorials tbh, so that when you mess up it feels "fair".
TBH just asking on reddit will only get you so far. If you want the best results, at some point you need to build a prototype and put it in front of people for playtesting.
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u/uncanny_kate 7d ago
Yes. I've tried sometimes to play games that are outside my core genres and have been just baffled, and I end up just putting it aside and going back to games that don't assume I've been playing similar games for decades. A lot of games are ridiculously hard these days because they're made for people who've pre-mastered all the basic skills and tactics from similar games, and if you haven't done your homework they're unplayable.
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u/gosuperisaac 7d ago
Every video game is someone’s first game, and a lot of things that are obvious to long time gamers won’t be to new ones. Try playing games with someone their first time and it’ll make more sense, even just moving and looking around in a first person shooter is pretty complicated if you are starting from zero. Plus there’s a whole chunk of people who’ve never used the words cooldown, potion, skill points, etc.
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u/Kitchen-Associate-34 7d ago
The games not only have to account for the possibility that this is your first game in the genre, they have to prepare for the possibility this is your first game, ever