I'm sick of tutorials.  Why?  Because they get in the way of fun.  Because they're insulting to my intelligence.  Because they're detrimental to a game's success.  Look at the top 50 selling games of all time and count the number that have a half-hour unskippable tutorial at the beginning.  There are quite a few I haven't played in there but I'd safely bet it's less than 10 of them.

The first game that made me think, "Why did they put this long stupid tutorial in here?" was Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell.  I gave up on the game twice before finally beating the tutorial about 3 years after I bought the game.  I didn't realize it at the time, but this was my first epiphany that a long tutorial can hurt a game's sales.  Unlike me, a lot of people would have tried to return the game or they would have sold it to a second-hand game store.  The sad thing is after three years I discovered that the game is indeed good; but the good parts are hidden behind a wall of text and boring tasks.

The game that truly made me realize how damaging tutorials have become to video games is Twighlight Princess.  I personally needed the better part of a day just to get out into the Hyrule field proper.  I lent the game to two different people on two occassions and both had game saves that ended after about 15 minute.  Why?  They were bored!  These guys were both Legend of Zelda fans at one point in the past, so the tutorial is actually driving these guys away from a product they want to like.

Someone's going to say, "oh but you need tutorials in today's complicated games to make them playable!"  If the game is actually that hard to figure out, maybe it's time to rethink your design - or at least rethink your tutorial!  The number one rule for tutorials is: The player should never have to wait for the "good stuff".  Nobody's buying the game to play the tutorial, they're buying it for the good stuff, and you're turning players away with the boring tutorial.

Before I quit, let me give some props for two games that did some smart things with tutorials:

First off, in an Iwata Asks, Nintendo's Satoru Iwata noted that the first level of Super Mario Bros. is designed so that the player always gets the first Mushroom (short of purposely trying not to get it).  The player must hit the question block in order to avoid the Goomba, and the mushroom slides along the top and rebounds off the pipe before the player can jump over it.  This is a great tutorial design because the player never even knows that he or she is doing a tutorial.  The player gets to squash a Goomba and is rewarded with a Mushroom: these are the good parts of Super Mario Bros!

Secondly, Star Wars: Rogue Leader on GameCube has a full tutorial level that I didn't even know about until I was about halfway through the game.  It actually probably should have been a little easier to find, but props to the developers for not forcing everyone play the full tutorial level.  Assaulting the Death Star is a 100% better way to start that game than flying around Tatooine learning "the ropes".

What do you think? Anybody else have some favourite or least-favourite game tutorials?

IDK, the tutorial for SC 1 was long, but I think it was worth it, since it's a pretty unique experience, with a bit of a different control scheme.

After the first one, the tutorials were very short, or even non-existent.

I almost trew my Sonic Unleashed copy out of the window because of the tutorial. "Press X to jump!" DUH >:(

Rule Number One of good game design: the player must be able to do something interesting within five minutes of pressing START to begin the game. If this is not possible in your game, then either your mechanics are too complex or your opening cutscene is too long.

Millennium said: Rule Number One of good game design: the player must be able to do something interesting within five minutes of pressing START to begin the game. If this is not possible in your game, then either your mechanics are too complex or your opening cutscene is too long.

Why can't they give the same advice for games as they do with books: read or in this case, play through the beginning part before judging the game.

Fine, make them optional. However, would people here rather games force people to read manuals in order to know how to play? Personally, I don't mind tutorials, so long as their are somewhat entertaining.

some games really deman tutorials, currently playing Ashes Cricket 2009, even though I know the sport quite well and I've played Criket games by Codemasters before (psOne and 2) this game wasn't a pick up and play. The first 1hr was very frustrating as not everything was clear (no idea why, the game decided to turn off on-screen button display.)
Point is as Kylie said, it's all about the complexity of the game, I don't expect someone without any knowledge of Cricket to pick up and play this straight away.
Whilst to the well versed gamer tutorials seem pointless, to the uninnitiated, it's needed.
The simplest solution is to have tutorials be optional instead of enforced.

Riachu said: Millennium said: Rule Number One of good game design: the player must be able to do something interesting within five minutes of pressing START to begin the game. If this is not possible in your game, then either your mechanics are too complex or your opening cutscene is too long. Why can't they give the same advice for games as they do with books: read or in this case, play through the beginning part before judging the game.

That's frankly bad advice for books too. If something can't grab your interest very quickly, then that's a serious flaw in the way it was created. This is not necessarily an issue with content; it's an issue with structure. One of the first things a game, book, movie, or really any form of entertainment needs to do is make you actually want to keep going. If you can't stand to do what's necessary to get to the good part, you'll stop before you ever reach it, and that's OK. Judging a book by its cover is not a Good Thing, but early content is important. This is also not to say that tutorial levels don't have their place, or that a game's mechanics should never be anything more than what can be learned in five minutes. It only means that tutorials need to involve doing interesting things, and that the player should be able to figure out enough of the mechanics to do interesting things very, very early on.

So Gears of War style tutorials?

Huzzah! No more teaching people how to play a game if they're new! I'd play a new Steel Battalion without a tutorial!