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Learning to Fight Again

Contributed by DJMMT

Here's a scenario that never applied back in the day but is now super common. You buy a new AAA game, day one. Let’s say it’s an open world action game with light RPG elements. You decide to play it on hard. You complete the tutorial and then spend several hours learning the nuances of the combat. By the end of the game, you have truly mastered the gameplay, fallen in love with the world, and obtained 100% completion. Then, like a normal person, you moved on to other games, because you exhausted everything that game had to offer. That doesn’t make it a bad game. If anything, that makes it a good game. Then, months later, they release DLC for this game. Excited, you buy that DLC and load up the game for the first time in months, or even more than a year, to return to a game that you truly loved. You keep the difficulty on hard, because why would you lower it after achieving 100% completion at that difficulty? Then you proceed to enter the DLC, which has been intentionally designed to be more challenging than the base game, and get your ass handed to you over and over again. Not because the game is too hard, but because you can’t remember how to play.

This scenario never happened back in the old days, because there was no such thing as DLC. There were plenty of instances where people would stop playing games and then return to them later, only to find that they don’t remember how to play. But the idea of people who actually did complete a game returning to it months or years later with no intention of starting it from the beginning is a modern scenario. Now that pretty much every AAA game has DLC added in later, a large number of gamers often find themselves returning to games with no idea how to play them while having to tackle some of the hardest challenges the game has to offer.

I’ve personally experienced both scenarios many times. I still haven’t played the DLC for Dragon Age Inquisition, because I originally beat it on PS3, then purchased the DLC on PS4 after transferring my save, couldn’t remember how to play it when I logged in, but ended up transferring it to PS5, planning to play it eventually with the announcement of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf as my major motivation. More recently, as in this month, I went back to Ghost of Tsushima to play the Iki Island DLC. I platinumed the game on PS4, but hadn’t played the DLC, because it was only free on PS5. So I waited until I finally got a PS5, for Christmas, and have finally returned to the game to play the DLC. The problem is that Ghost of Tsushima isn’t particularly easy to pick up, and I’m playing it on hard. I’ve regained a lot of my technical knowledge of the game after a few hours of play, and I have started to rebuild to my original skill level with the combat. But I know I’m not nearly as good or precise as I was when I got the platinum.

The major reason for my inability to smoothly and quickly regain my skills in Ghost of Tsushima is not a lack of ability so much as a lack of knowledge. The truth is that I’m still trying to remember how to play the game. When I first loaded it up, I couldn’t even remember which button was for attack. I couldn’t recall basic gameplay mechanics like that you can parry blue attacks but not red ones. I didn’t remember which ghost items did what. These aren’t advanced techniques that help you excel at the game. This is the bare minimum.

We already know how to help players learn to play games. It’s called a tutorial. Most games have them in some form. The issue is that few games today have a formal tutorial like they used to. A lot of older games had tutorial modes. This was a special option in the menu screen that allowed you to enter a controlled environment and take formal lessons about the gameplay. We do still see this in some games. Fighting games often have them. You’ll also see them in JRPGs sometimes. Nioh will let you travel to a dojo and test out anything you want. But most games today have what I’ll refer to as embedded tutorials. You learn the gameplay as you progress through the game. Sometimes, the entire tutorial section takes place towards the beginning. Other times, it’s distributed piecemeal as you move forward and learn/unlock new skills. I really like when games let you access a practice room from the skill tree to test new skills before/after you unlock them.

The problem with embedded tutorials is that they’re static and almost impossible to allow the player to revisit them. Like the way you learn the leap of faith in the first Assassin’s Creed game. It’s a great sequence that’s embedded directly into the story and even has accompanying cutscenes around it. It’s absolutely a tutorial sequence, but it’s also a major beat in the story. There’s really no way to allow the player to reexperience that tutorial, as presented in that way, that doesn’t involve making the player start the game over or allowing them to revisit and replay that entire sequence of the game. It’s a great instance of immersive gameplay mechanics. It’s a horrible tool for repeat lessons. In a lot of games today, all tutorials work like that. You can’t effectively relive those lessons without starting the game over and replaying the entire introduction. And if the game doesn’t have multiple save slots, sucks to be you.

My conclusion is not that we need to necessarily bring back formalized tutorial modes, though I wouldn’t personally be against that. Really what we need is to develop a more hybridized tutorial scenario. Recently, I played the Forspoken demo. In my opinion, the demo fails to effectively do anything except allow you to experience the combat. It’s a short demo. You have five simple objectives to complete, a decent sized section of the map you can explore, and a final boss fight. There are some additional things you can do, like a bit of crafting, with little in the way of explanation about it. But mostly it’s just an interactive presentation of the combat. That’s fine given all the other footage, presentations, and available resources they’ve already released for the game. But if I had simply played this demo and seen nothing else, I may very well have passed on this one. Because I’m not personally in love with what I experienced from the combat. But I digress. The reason I bring up this demo is that I really liked the way it handled the tutorial.

The Forspoken demo’s tutorial only covers combat. It doesn’t address character building, unlocking skills, crafting, or any of the other important aspects of the gameplay that need to be explained; but the way it handles combat is modern, efficient, and ideal for many of the games that suffer from the problem of returning players I’m talking about.

The tutorial in the demo is completely optional and features three or four scripted fights. But what’s nice about it is that those fights don’t feel scripted. Because of the way enemies seem to randomly spawn around the world, the fights in the tutorial don’t feel embedded. Even if you skipped the tutorial, I believe you’d still end up doing the fights involved in it simply by walking through that area, but they would in no way feel forced or out of place. What’s important is that the tutorial isn’t actually interacting with the fight itself. It’s using a series of overlays with pictures and text that you then apply to the battle. It felt as if you could have this same tutorial sequence happen at any other time in the game and you’d have much the same general learn by doing experience. Certainly, there would be some slight differences, depending on the type of enemy you were facing. Like part of the tutorial was about shooting aerial enemies. If that portion of the tutorial happened when no flying enemies were around, it would be less effective. But only visually. Mechanically, you could still implement the same combat techniques against grounded enemies. Meaning that, technically speaking, it would probably work if you could initiate the tutorial at any time while playing the game, no matter how far along you were.

The same collection of overlays would appear on screen in the same order when you encountered the next set of enemies, regardless of who/what they were. It might not fit perfectly, but you could effectively relearn the combat gameplay via a formal tutorial from any point in the game you wished without having to enter a separate tutorial mode.

Note that I’m not implying that developers need to necessarily do more work. They simply need to modernize the tutorial experience for current gaming scenarios. And doing so would also help players who return to games later, even if there isn’t any new content. Or go the old school route and include a tutorial mode accessible from the menu. Either solves the problem without demanding more work than has already been done with games for years. My point is simply that developers should take into account the fact that the new normal, because of their own chosen content release schedules, is that players now play, leave, and then return to games, sometimes multiple times, with huge gaps of time between sessions. And that frustration hurts the player experience. I’ve literally tried to pick games back up and ultimately gave up on them for good, because the process of trying to relearn them while being too far into them to manage the difficulty while trying to relearn how to play was too troublesome. Updating the model is well overdue.

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