For a long time, it has been customary for tutorials to be a part of the First Time User Experience (FTUE). Usually, this meant that the journey would start from installing the game, followed by a rundown of the UI, adjusting preliminary settings, and being thrown into a tutorial. For newer games, logging into platforms and collecting player permission was adjusted somewhere in that flow.
As games get longer and longer and accommodate increasingly more complex mechanics with increasing hours of game time, it has become evident that teaching everything at the start and calling it a day is no longer sufficient as a tutorial. The concept of “taught when required” has made sure that multiple tutorial sections are present in a game’s journey from start to finish. Tutorials have long been divorced from the FTUE and their positioning and their appearances are now a close function of the pacing of the rest of the game.
While allowing to skip tutorials is a minimum requirement in today’s world, skipping a tutorial due to frustration may lead to a bad experience for the rest of the game. So let’s define a good, frustration-free tutorial and look at a few key decisions that will define exactly how much your players will want to skip the tutorial and what you can do about it.