New Malstrom article - Secret to the “Casual”

[Jaos]

RolStoppable said:

DMeisterJ said:

RolStoppable said:

The problem is that Malstrom wasn't very clear in this article. About the tutorials he is talking about forced ones, like in Final Fantasy XII which I described in my previous post. TP doesn't force something like that on the player, the tutorial is integrated in the game so that the player learns how to play the game AND proceeds in the game, meaning that completing the early tasks in Ordon feel like accomplishments and worthwile.

You don't get everything thrown at you at once or are explained how to push the analog stick like in FFXII, you are free to explore the first section of the game at your own will. You are learning how to play the game while you are already having fun.

So a tutorial is okay if you're doing other things while in a tutorial?

A tutorial is a tutorial. He didn't explain himself, he said "Tutorial = Broken". Now we could try to figure out what he meant, etc, but if he didn't feel the need to make sense of that dumb-ass comment, why should I give him the benefit of the doubt? Zelda: TP has a tutorial, so therefore, according to Malstrom, the game is broken. It's not my fault that he decided to not be clear when making the article. Which brings me back to my first point, which is the article is very well written. He spends 24 paragraphs contradicting himself (Casuals are not stupid, to, simiplify your game until you don't need a tutorial) and not enough time explaining what he means. His writing in this article is very poor, and he goes on and on about nothing the whole article, and manages to hurl insults at even Nintendo-developed games. Thus making his point moot. I mean, he even got the comment "Next Gen doesn't start until we say so" wrong. Mark Reindidn't say that, it was Kaz Hirai! How are you going to quote someone but not get it right? Then he used GTA IV's 100 million dollar budget to call Rockstar "egomaniacs", when the hundred million was spent on making a huge and detailed environment.

It's a good read if you're sipping the juice, but his whole article, is opinion.

Let's take another look:

Does it have a tutorial? If yes, then your game is broken. The best games don't have tutorials. ‘Super Mario Brothers' and ‘Legend of Zelda' had no tutorial and no tutorial 'stage'. Mega Man did not have a ‘tutorial' until a tutorial stage appearing in Mega Man 7 (and they wonder why the series went downhill). Tetris had no tutorial. People want to play the game, not be forced to act out a manual. If your game *has* to have a tutorial because it is too complicated, then your game is the problem. Simplify it until you don't need a tutorial. Wii Sports doesn't even have a tutorial. It will simply give a ‘reminder' of how to do stuff only if you mess up.

Are you forced to act out a manual in TP? Or is Final Fantasy XII a much better fit for this description? Remember, that game forces you to do everything step by step with other control functions blocked while acting out the tutorial.

A game being too complicated doesn't mean that the user is stupid. It means that the user doesn't want to spend 20-30 minutes before he is finally able to play the game. Consider that a lot of people only play an hour or less per day. If you were one of these people, would you bother to waste half or more of your playtime on a tutorial or would you rather just play a different game instead?

He got the quote from Mark Rein wrong, yes. But the Rockstar guys are definitely egomaniacs. Remember what one of the Rockstar guys said after GTA IV failed to move systems in large number? "F*** casual gaming" - that's a clear sign that he is pissed that his awesome product didn't live up to what it was supposed to do. Instead of asking "What is wrong with our game?" he blamed the consumers and that's exactly the mindset that Malstrom is describing in his article:

The secret to the "Casual" is a change of mindset from being "look how awesome I am" to "look how awesome the new customer is". Thinking that these new customers are ‘retards', that they are ‘beneath you', is really thinking that ‘I am so awesome'.

Also, you can find lots of quotes from Epic that show that they are egomaniacs as well. Whenever they talk about the Wii you can notice a negative attitude and comments like "Gears of War 2 is going to be bigger, better and more badass." are also signs that Cliff Bleszinski thinks that he is awesome.

 

 What you criticized about the FF tutorial isn't that it's necessary because the game's too complicated, it's just that it's made in a dumb way. If it had been integrated more with actual gameplay, it would have been ok, according to you. But that's a different argument from Malstroms

I don't like Malstrom because he is full of himself, he has a really poor writing style and uses flawed and contradictory arguments. But even I can't deny that he's got a lot right. His rambling about tutorials, though, is wrong. Zelda games do require a tutorial, otherwise a lot of people wouldn't get the game. When I first played Zelda OoT, I might have been frustrated if there was no tutorial stage, which is what Kokiri forest and the deku tree dungeon are, even if it's not officially labeled tutorial.